Korner Talk

Part 2 is about the ASW event. I typed part 2 up while I was on the plane coming home.

A few familiar faces. A lot of new faces. And a lot of good info. The AWS event was jam packed so rather than a rundown of the day, below are the highlights, and lowlights of the day.

Highlights

- I’ll lead off my highlights with my victory in the ice breaker game again (I won the ice breaker game the first time I visited Smith). The staff people remembered and joked with me about it. My prize was Terpopoly, the college edition of Monopoly. Lucky me! Terpopoly was a great conversation piece, although  my wrist got really sore towards the end of the day from carrying the game around. Hopefully I’ll be good at other things in bschool other than winning ice breaker games.

- For what it’s worth, Smith is ranked #3 in intellectual capital for MBA schools, meaning Smith has, as Dr. Bob said, a “scary smart” faculty team. A high ranking is nice, but hearing the current students talk positively about the professors was a better indicator of the quality of the faculty. The students I talked to had nothing but good things to say about the professors @ Smith. I even got a chance to talk to the students after the AWS event to get the “real” scoop.

- I’m really excited about the opportunities to travel abroad. China, India, and Brazil are the three mainstay trips and there are opportunities to go elsewhere depending on interest. Maybe I’ll propose a trip or two while I’m there. We are allowed to go on a maximum of two trips during our two years. The trips are kind of expensive at ~$6k a pop but they sound like a lot of fun. The case competition trip to China even sounds educational

- The Dingman Center for Entreprenuership is going to provide a lot of  entreprenuership experience that I’m looking for. The center is more than just a guidance center for people who want to start their own business. For people like me who want to get involved in commercializing technologies and helping startups, The Dingman center has a lot of opportunities to get my hands dirty with local entreprenuers and with researchers at UMD’s school of engineering who want to bring their research to market.

One of the exciting things I’ve got in my sights is the Israel Technology Summer Fellowship. Israel is probably the world’s most entreprenureal countries in the world, spending more per capita on entreprenuership than any other country. Smith has a program that takes a couple of students to Israel to study at the Technion University and to consult for technology start ups for 10 weeks.

- Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour (UA), one of my favorite brands, graduated from the Smith school (undergraduate). I talked to a member of the marketing club and asked her about UA’s relationship with the school. She said that UA does recruit from Smith and they look for someone specific They look for someone who understands their business, can relate to their product, and is part of their target market. I’m definitely shelving that for future reference.

- One of my fellow prospectives that I got to know over the weekend, Chris, and I talked to the Dean for a while during the reception. I asked the Dean a really strong question that he later referenced in his reception address about what changes are in store for the next two years @ Smith.

The first change is that for the class of 2012, the school wants to matriculate about 160 students, an increase of about 30 students when compared to the class of 2011. The reason is  to grow the network of full time students. The second change, in response to the first change, is the expansion of the OCS. They’ll be adding additional office space through new construction in Van Munching Hall and increasing the staff size. Lastly, the Dean wants to get the faculty out in front of the decision makers in DC. As the Dean puts it, being so close to our nations capital, the “thought leaders” from not just the Smith school, but from the other schools on campus, need to have a bigger presence on capitol hill to help influence and guide Washington to make more responsible, ethical, and sustainable decisions. All of these changes, the Dean hopes, will enhance Smith’s growth, visibility and reputation.

- I think I was the only person out of the 70 or so prospectives who did not stay with a friend or family, or lives within driving distance of UMD. As such, I had nothing to do after ASW so I hung out at Cornerstone bar, the other local bar, with a couple of current and prospective students. At the end of the night, I was the only prospective left standing. I ended up hanging out with a group of first years on what I call the unofficial tour of “Life as a Smith Student”. We ate at Five Guys, a burger place (we have one in Carson), drove around DC looking for parking and beer, and crashed a Canadian themed party thrown by some second years. It was interesting to see life outside the confines of CP and the business school. More thoughts on this in a separate post.

- I saved the best highlight for last. For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to find the right fleece workout jacket. I’ve searched high and low, from Patagonia to Nike, and I couldn’t find one that was just right. I could spend a couple of paragraphs describing what the right jacket would be but then that would only reveal that I’ve become a shopaholic, a disease that I’ve contracted from having dated TL for three years.

Long story short, I lugged the oversized Smith fleece that I won at the last Smith event in hopes of exchanging it for a smaller one. Not  only did I get a better fitting fleece, the fleece is made by UA! When I tried the jacket on, I was giddier than a school girl who just got a Hannah Montana backpack. At least the staff member who helped me out with the exchange shared in my enthusiasim for the jacket and didn’t think I was crazy.

I might have lost some of my manliness with this highlight, but at least my body temperature is being perfectly regulated as I’m wearing my awesome Smith jacket.

Lowlights

- For the OCS session, we broke out into 3-4 people groups to practice behavioral interviews. None of us were thrilled with this exercise since we just got through a barrage of MBA interviews. The OCS folks thought that the mock interviews would give us an idea on one of the services that OCS provides. Fail.

- A couple of weeks ago, I read on ESPN that College Park is considered the worst college bball town in the ACC. To quote the article, College Park is a “dump”. I really didn’t notice that the last time I visited, but on this trip, I did notice that outside of this small strip of Highway 1, there really isn’t a whole lot of stuff going on in CP. It’s of little surprise then that most Smith students live outside of CP. Finding a place to live is going to require some major planning…

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent last weekend visiting the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Since there’s a lot of things I want to share and remember, I’m going to split the event into a couple of posts.

On Friday morning, I took a red eye out to DC, this time flying into Reagan National (DCA) instead of Dulles. The advantage of flying into DCA is that the metros goes directly to College Park. No fuss and cheap. From the CP-UMD metro stop, I took the campus shuttle (free) to the student union (The Stamp) which is in the middle of campus. I stopped by the technology building to scope out the laptop prices and bought Chick Fil A at the food court. From there I walked to the the Mariott which was about a 10 minute walk.

My first official AWS event was a 1 on 1 meeting with a financial aid staff member. We (Dustin and I) basically went through the odds and ends of financing an MBA. After the financial aid session, I walked back to The Stamp to buy some Terp schwag. I ended up buying a turkey sandwich instead from the hippy co-op store and carried it back half exposed to my hotel room.

Later that night, I went to HH where I met about 6~7 of the prospective students and a couple of first and second year students. We caravanned down to Route 1, the main strip in CP, to RJ Bentleys. This was pretty much the start of the whole get to meet new people phase of things. Where are you from? Have you decided? What do you want to do? Where do you live? Etc, etc. To my suprise, I thought I would have gotten tired from meeting so many new people but I was genuinely interested in all the people that I met. If I’m going to go to school with these people, I better get to know them learn what they’re all about.

The prospective Smith students I met that day also gave me a glimpse into the diverse set of backgrounds that I’ll be part of. A guy from Arkansas who works in Honduras. A strong safety from Duke. A guy who works in Japan but grew up in CP. All this diversity should make for good times in the classroom.

Besides meeting the other prospective students, we also drowned the current students with every question we could ask. What are the good places to eat? Where are the cool places to live? How’s the commute? How do you like school? What did you do during snowmageddon? It was very informative and informal. If anyone is looking into a school, get in touch with a student because they are the ones that are most likely going to give you the most shpielish answer.

After HH concluded, I went back to my hotel room and decided to eat dinner down @ the bar/lounge. Long story short, I waited for 45 minutes without getting my food and ended up walking 15 minutes down this cold and lonely road to some hole in the wall restaurant. The day could have ended better, but the positive tones I got from mypotential future classmates and the current students let me go to sleep in peace.

Oh, and I got my decision from Vandy. In.

I’m off to DC and College Park this weekend for Admitted Student Weekend @ Smith. Hopefully all the rioting basketball fans and crazy lone gun men have gone home by the time I get there.

Full report when I’m back.

When I went fishing, it seemed like I always caught a fish when I least expected to. Today, I landed a couple of big ones and I’m smiling ear to ear.

Coming back to my desk after checking out a piece of equipment at work, the last thing I was thinking about was my admission decision from Smith. When my Storm alerted me about a new email, I thought that I might have received another junk email from Patagonia telling me about the Winterfest sale. When I saw that it was from UMD, my mind went blank for a second. My excitement mounted with every sentence that I read until I got to the part that said, “Your’e in”.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic. The first thing that I did was email my gf about the news. The second thing that I did was ponder whether I should send a thank you letter to the admin folks and follow it up with a question about graduate assistantship. My attention returned to work however because I had to leave work earlier to take my sister to the airport.

When my Storm went off again, I was once again surprised that the email was from Smith. This time, the email was about an offer for graduate assistantship. At that moment, I got out of my chair and did some fist pumps.

So what now. I’m still waiting for the Owen and Broad decisions to roll in and I want to see what the offer is before I make a final decision. Meanwhile, I’m going to be making plans to attend the Admitted Student Weekend event @ Smith which is scheduled for March 5-6th. And with one admit on the books, I’m going to start looking into an exit plan for work and a plan for how to spend my time after leaving work.

Today was a good day. Things lined up just perfectly. Hell, I even scored a pair of shoes that was 50% off at Patagonia. Score!

The admission decision date for Smith R2 is this coming Monday, but my interviewer told me that I might hear back from them as soon as this Friday. With all the snow that has dropped in MD and the mid-Atlantic area this past week though, it was of little surprise to find out on Twitter that Smith was closed this entire week, dashing any hope that I would hear something today.

The decision has been gnawing at me all week but I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping my anxiety in check. Every message that I received on my BB today made my heart skip a little. As it got closer to COB EST, I had almost forgotten about it all until 1:30 when I got an email from UMD.

Time stood still for split second as I read the email. Long story short, I’ve been recommended for admission to Smith BUT my app has to be reviewed and approved first by the Graduate School (the dept that oversees all graduate programs) because my undergraduate GPA isn’t so hot.

So what does this mean? It means that I get to wait a couple of more weeks as I await a formal decision. All signals are a go and I’m just waiting for a clearance. At least I know I’m in the pipeline which is better than being waitlisted and 100X better than getting a ding.