The Weekly Sitrep: My Post MBA Career in Detail and What I Would Have Done Differently

Part 2: 1st Year of the MBA program and Investment Bank Recruiting

Happy Sunday Morning Sitreps Team! I am very excited to continue diving into my post military career. In this action packed post, I will cover the following events in my life.

1. Finding a Place to live in Pittsburgh

2. The 1st Year of the MBA

3. Investment Bank Internship Recruiting and the path to an offer

4. Lessons learned and what I would have done differently

I was going to include the actual internship in this post, but it’s simply too meaty. I will cover it next week. That being said, we have a lot to cover! Let’s get started

Finding a Place to Live in Pittsburgh

It is now May of 2016 and I have out processed Fort Hood. My household goods have been packed up and put in storage. Immediately after outprocessing I got on a plane at the Austin airport and flew to Panama City Beach airport where my wife and child were vacationing with her family in Seaside, Florida.

During my internship at Goldman Sachs, I decided to do two things. The first was that I was going to stay in the reserves and the second thing I was going to do was not take the 20K bonus that the reserve recruiter offered for 3 years of commitment to the reserves. I decided on staying in the reserves because I was offered six months of free Tricare and then cheap reserve Tricare and would also get a monthly paycheck while in the MBA. The healthcare was great because it would cover my family during the 3 month period before I started my MBA and the ~800 dollars a month drilling at least provided a small income. 

I decided against taking the sign on bonus because I did not want to be in a situation where I would be graduating from my MBA and could be mobilized or called up.  The contract that I signed for the reserves explicitly stated that for two years I could not be mobilized. 

While I was interning in NYC at Goldman, my wife had flown to Pittsburgh and found us a place to live. We settled on living in a family friendly neighborhood near campus known as Squirrel Hill. The other area that most of the students lived in was a Greenwich village type area called Shadyside with a ton of bars and restaurants. While that area would have been nicer to live in, it was also vastly more expensive than Squirrel Hill. I wanted to stay within our GI Bill Monthly Housing Allowance (MHA) range given the limited income. Something else that was interesting about Squirrel Hill is that it is a heavily Jewish area. With all the students living there the neighborhood was incredibly diverse and interesting. It may not have had all the same bars and restaurants as Shadyside, but it was still an incredible neighborhood to live in and I do miss it. 

We ended up renting a 2 bed 1 bath in an older building without AC. The unit did not even have a washer and dryer hookup in it (the building had a shared pay per use washer and dryer in the basement). It was, however, in a good neighborhood at the right price, had an indoor parking garage and also next to a playground which was great for our daughter. 

Something else I took into consideration was the fact that the GI Bill only provides you with MHA during the days that you are in school. For example, if your fall semester is 4 ½ months, you are only going to get MHA for that period of time prorated across the number of days that the semester runs. This means that in certain months you may not get your full BAH (despite the fact that you still have to pay rent). 

After we completed our trip to Europe, we packed up our car and began the drive to Pittsburgh. I believe we stopped in Ohio somewhere, and were fascinated by the number of people running around playing Pokemon Go (remember this was the late summer of 2016). I had called the Fort Hood Transportation Office a week earlier and had requested that my HHG be taken out of storage and shipped up to Pittsburgh. We actually timed the arrival of the HHG pretty well. They arrived a day or two after we got into our apartment. With our apartment set up, it was time to start school.

A note on your final move in the military. You are still entitled to a bunch of normal PCS move type things when you leave the military and they ship all your stuff to your Home of Record (or wherever you tell them to ship it). Make sure to check with the transportation office and file appropriately.

Starting the 1st Semester of the MBA

My wife went about the process of getting our daughter into a pre-school at the Jewish Community Center (we are not Jewish but think of this like the YMCA for the area) and we started integrating ourselves into the community. 

Meeting my MBA classmates for the first time was a lot of fun. It was the mix of folks you would expect in a top 20 MBA program. This included former consultants, finance folks, accountants, family business people, recovering lawyers, non-profit folks, military officers, and interestingly enough some folks who had helped run steel mills. This being Pittsburgh, I’m not sure why I was surprised.

The first thing that any top 20 MBA program does for its new students is have an orientation week. This is similar to what you do in the military when you in-process to a new unit or base, but it's much friendlier and a lot more fun. The orientation week usually consists of the following activities.

1. Inbrief from the Dean, Academic departments, Career Center Staff

2. Corporate Recruiting Code of Conduct and rules. This is especially important because corporate recruiting is the lifeblood of the school, and students need to be briefed and trained on how to handle these delicate and important relationships

3. Information Technology Onboarding - You get your laptop set up with all the software required by the school and learn how to navigate all the different information systems at the school

4. Some sort of ice breaking team building activity. For Tepper, they take everyone out to this boy scout camp and we basically did a leaders reaction course

5. Social Mixers and Icebreakers - This involves alcohol and getting to know your classmates

6. Corporate Sponsored Events - Companies are actively competing for students pretty early on. So you end up seeing sponsored events at bars where students can network with employees and get an early start on possible companies they want to recruit for. Deloitte was one of the early sponsors for these events for my class.

Once the orientation week was over, we dove head first into the core class curriculum. This consisted of accounting, finance I, macro economics, statistics, marketing, corporate strategy, data analytics and leadership classes. This is a pretty standard core curriculum across most MBA programs (though Tepper in particular focuses quite a bit on analytics). The classes I gained the most knowledge from came from accounting, finance and economics. These classes offered powerful lessons in how markets and economies function, and how businesses look at financial performance. I would take more advanced versions of finance, econ and corporate strategy in the later semesters. 

At the same time as I was taking classes, we got into the full swing of internship recruiting. This is the far more interesting part of the 1st year of the MBA, and I will spend more time talking about this than I do the academic portion.

Investment Bank Internship Recruiting and the Path to an Offer

Out of all the experiences that a person can go through during an MBA, easily the most memorable is going to be 1st year internship recruiting. There are a couple reasons for this.

1. You are new to this whole experience

2. It starts immediately and comes at you fast and furious

3. You are suddenly talking to companies you have been dreaming about working for

4. You go through it collectively with your class

5. You get wined and dined by companies recruiting you

6. It requires a significant amount of effort and attention

7. It is an emotionally challenging experience 

One of the first things you have to do is decide on what industry you are going to pursue. This is important, because it is really hard if not impossible to recruit for two different industries at the same time. For example, trying to recruit for both Investment Banking and Consulting at the same time is really difficult. 

So for me, I needed to make a choice on what industry I was going to recruit for my summer internship. Initially when I was applying to Tepper, I said that I wanted to either pursue a career in tech or in consulting. At the time in 2016, the tech world was still heavily concentrated on the West Coast (it still is now but there are a lot more geographic options out there). However, my wife was adamantly opposed to moving to California. We had many conversations about why I should pursue this line of work, but she did not want to move that far away from her family in Alabama.

So with some hesitation, I decided that Investment Banking would be the next best option. I came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. 

1. It paid a ton of money

2. I have always been interested in finance

3. The 2nd year veterans at the school had all done an investment banking internship, liked it and were pumped to go back as full time associates

4. The work provided early exposure to high level corporate strategy experience at an early age

Now what is critical when you decide to recruit for a specific industry is that you have to join the business school student run career club that focuses on that industry. They have different names at every school, but generally are called the Finance club, the Consulting club, the tech club, the marketing club etc. These clubs are run by second year students who have interned or have full time offers in those respective industries, and they help guide the first years through the internship and recruiting process. It is absolutely critical to join these clubs in order to get the right internship. You end up listing the clubs on your resume during the recruiting process, and employees who review your resume will look to see that you are an active participant and are therefore serious about going through the interview process. They will also sometimes call the second year students and inquire about 1st year students. 2nd year students also enforce communication rules and decorum when dealing with employees or recruiters. Essentially, they help protect the employer school relationship.

Each industry has different processes that are used for recruiting. Consulting has the networking and case study process, finance has the coffee chat and technical skills tests. Because I was interested in investment banking, I had to go through the process below.

Now, for the uninitiated. Recruiting for Investment Banking internships is not for the weak hearted. It is an arduous process, even at target schools, and you need to have a thick skin. Here are the things you need to do in order to successfully land an internship.

1. Learn the technical fundamentals of Finance and Investment Banking down cold. This includes accounting, valuation methods, how the 3 financial statements link together, enterprise value vs market cap etc. You get drilled on these during informational interviews and super day interviews.

2. Begin the long process of networking. This involves having “coffee chats” with your school alumni who work at Investment Banks. In order to do this, you need to travel to NYC on Fridays