The truth can be painful.

As you know, I have been spending a lot of time searching for jobs, going to informational sessions on campus, putting together applications, practicing for interviews, etc. I used to make fun of my buddy Mike, wondering what he did all day and why it was taking him months to get a job. It's actually a fair amount of work. (Especially if you're always sitting around in your underwear watching "Cops", as he did.)

Today was the career fair at Columbia University. It was mostly for undergrads, but some of the employers there also recruited graduate students. I spoke to all of the employers that I was planning on applying to, and others that I had never heard of but saw that they were consulting firms. Many of these firms do hire graduate students, but don't have any training for them. This translates to: we don't hire people without business backgrounds.

That's always frustrating to hear. Especially when you are convinced that you can do just about any job in the world, perhaps after a week or two to familiarize yourself with everything. I believe that even though my degree is not directly applicable to virtually every job on the market, I have valuable skills that I can carry over and apply to an entirely different job. I don't believe that spending 8 years in graduate school earning a PhD in the biological sciences is a dead end.

So when I got home this afternoon I went online to Columbia's Center for Career Education website and registered on the application/interview website that they've set up in conjunction with Monster.com. There are a number of basic questions, and in some ways it is similar to one of the many online forms I have already filled out for job applications.

Once you are finished you can view your profile to make sure that there were no errors. On that same page are links to various parts of the website (job search, tips on resumes, etc) and some other content. At the very bottom was a section called "Featured Opportunity" that hopefully wasn't tailored to the information in my profile.

Are you familiar with GoogleAds? If you enter search terms into Google, along the right-hand side of the page will be links to advertisers websites that have content related to what your search terms are. This way, Google makes money because it directs its users to appropriate ad content. Well, regardless of how accurate or useful it is, that's the basic idea.

Anyway, as I said, I hope this "Featured Opportunity wasn't directed toward me based on the content of my profile. Why? Well, I took a screenshot and cropped it down for you to see:

Perhaps Bart was right. (WARNING! Video link, which may or may not be a problem at your workplace.)

The Job Hunt

For the past two weeks I have been applying for jobs. This translates into writing a resume, writing a curriculum vitae, writing cover letters, writing essays, requesting transcripts, remembering what the heck I got on my GREs and SATs (yes!), and in some cases requesting references. Additionally, I have been studying/practicing for interviews (more on this later). I have had little time to actually work on my thesis.

So far I have fully submitted applications for positions at 5 companies. One application is in the works, and two others are due this weekend. All but 1 of the positions are within management consulting firms. I know, you are asking "What the heck is a management consulting firm?" I didn't know the answer until a few months ago.

Imagine you are a CEO of Interglobal Megacorp, a Fortune 500 company. Your father went to Harvard. His father went to Harvard. So, naturally, you went to Harvard, and had no trouble being accepted as a legacy. You didn't study much and got drunk often. Through your father and his friends you were able to secure a summer internship at a prestigious company. After graduation you were able to secure an offer. You worked for a few years and then went to one of the Ivy League business schools. There you not only drank a lot but also studied very little. However, you made plenty of connections. You "earned" your MBA and secured another lucrative job at another prestigious company. Eventually you work your way up to the CEO of Interglobal Megacorp, earning millions of dollars per year.

One night you wake up in a cold sweat and realize that you don't know jack, don't know how you got to where you are, and have no clue how to stop the decline of profits at Interglobal Megacorp. So what do you do? You pay a management consulting firm $1.5M to send in a team of 4-6 people who solve your business problems in 1-3 months, allowing you to sleep peacefully at night in your Park Avenue mansion.

Apparently this happens all of the time in real life. More than one consultant from more than one company has said during recruiting sessions "You'd be surprised how often this happens at the top companies." So in comes the role of the management consultant.

What is the role of a management consultant? From what I gather, management consultants are one part Winston Wolfe (from Pulp Fiction) and one part James Bond (from James Bond). If people with lots of money have problems, they call you in. You are calm, cool, and solve their problems in a timely manner. (That's the Winston Wolfe part.) Your work has impact on some of the largest and most influential organizations of the world (sometimes non-profits or governments are clients as well), which tends to make front page news on The New York Times, The Financial Times, or The Wall Street Journal. Your company isn't named in the articles, and you personally receive no credit publicly. However, you know you made that happen. (That's the James Bond part; he knows when he reads the newspaper that the headlines about a "Foiled terrorist plot!" or the "Fighter jet dogfight through downtown London!" are his doing, even if he and MI6 are not named.)

Doesn't that sound like a cool job? Of course it does.

Naturally, jobs this cool aren't easy to get. Lucky for me, the top management consulting firms realize that business skills are easy to learn, while problem-solving and analytical skills are harder to learn. Therefore, they recruit people with science PhDs and teach them the business skills in 2-3 weeks. (Honest. They teach you everything that you would have learned in a top MBA program in 2-3 weeks. Yes, it is an intense 2-3 weeks, but it goes to show you how much MBAs learned in the 1-1.5 years it took to "earn" their degree.)

The real challenge is in the interviews. In the application and the interview they look for "outstanding written and oral communication", "interpersonal skills", blah blah blah... So does every company. Management consulting firms use one little trick to separate the wheat from the chaff: the case interview.

A case interview question can be as simple as "How many cows did it take to provide the leather for all of the baseballs manufactured last year?" or "What is the market size for headphones?" Those are estimation cases, just to show that you can make logical assumptions and carry out simple calculations. The tough questions are more in line with what the job is actually like.

For instance, your client, GagCo Inc, is a manufacturer of rubber chickens. GagCo Inc's profits have declined sharply in the past two years. Why? What can GagCo do to reverse this trend?

Perhaps that example was a bit silly, but the idea is there. In order to answer this question you need a basic working knowledge of business. By basic, I mean "the most basic ever". (Trust me, I know very little, yet enough to address questions like this.) You also need to know the right questions to ask in order to solve this problem. You need to be able to look the interviewer in the eye, never say "uh" or "um", be enthusiastic, tell the interviewer your strategy for determining the cause of the problem (how you set up your questions), walk the interviewer through any mathematical calculations, and summarize your findings at the end.

Imagine what this is like actually doing. Now you see why practice is necessary. They say that there is no "right answer", which is only partially true. You have to identify the problem. Your suggestions for solving the problem could be anything, as long as you can logically support your conclusions. (Telling GagCo that they "should target restaurants as a new market" better have some damn fine logic backing it up.)

So wish me luck on not only finishing writing my thesis ASAP, but also in the job hunt!

Your computer can kill you

That is the conclusion I came to after reading this article from Reuters.

In summary, a Chinese man died after a three-day internet gaming session. Let me repeat that: he died. The cause of death is currently being treated as "exhaustion" by the police. Suicide was ruled out, and considering he was in an internet cafe, I am not sure why it was ever considered a possibility.

In light of this new information concerning the danger of computers, I am thankful that I am not as devoted to thesis writing as he was to internet gaming (~12 hours/day for me vs. 24 hours/day for him). Also, it is clear that I am not pushing the envelope with my "lax" schedule. For instance, my eyes get tired from staring at a monitor all day, and I my brain slows a little and I feel mentally tired, but I have never even come remotely close to "exhaustion". In fact, I often feel the need to stand up and walk around for a few minutes every now and then.

I have a theory. My thesis writing is mentally laborious, and perhaps incurs a different type of tiredness, while his gaming must have been physically laborious due to complete lack of sleep. Perhaps a consistent adrenaline rush from killing other players (or who knows what, since the name of the game was not released) was able to stave off sleep long enough for him to reach physical exhaustion.

Regardless, I think that we should now view computers in a different light: not as nice little plastic and metal boxes that increase productivity, act as gateways for entertainment, and allow fast and easy communication, but as machines programmed to kill us.

You have been warned.

O Fortuna!

November 16th.

Friday, November 16th.

11/16/07.

That will be the glorious and historic day of my thesis defense. Finally, my committee was able to agree on a date, and that date is Nov 16! I mention it in passing, in case you'd like to attend the defense. ;)

Update

Just writing to tell everyone that I am still alive. Currently I am in a state of blogging paradox: a number of things have happened that are blog-worthy, yet the sheer mass of nonblog-worthy noise has hidden that signal. Besides, it is difficult to blog about events long-past.

As of now I have written drafts of more than half the chapters of my thesis. I anticipate the last few chapters to go very quickly, due to their nature. A rough estimate of length puts my thesis at a mere 240 pages. However, I may have to 'expand' various sections, at the behest of my advisor or my committee. Conversely, I may have to 'contract' other sections. So my money is on 240 pages right now.