Hi from the admissions office! It’s been quite a while since I last posted — I’m hoping to correct that this year by posting much more frequently. This summer has been very busy so far — I’ve been on the road at conferences much of the time, including down in Dallas for the Consortium Orientation Program representing SOM as the newest member of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management; in Chicago for the Graduate Management Admissions Council Annual Industry Conference, for which I was on the advisory committee; and in New York for the Forte Foundation Annual Meeting, for which I sat on a panel. Now that I’m back in New Haven and have a chance to catch my breath, I wanted to take a moment to announce the essay questions for the upcoming application season. We’ve had a number of people ask about the questions, so we thought it would be helpful to post them for you here. The application itself should be live in early August, but for those of you who want to get a jump on the essays, here are the questions:

1: Why a Yale MBA?

What is the impact that you wish to have on the world? How will your previous experiences and a Yale MBA enhance your ability, in the short-term and long-term, to pursue a career that will allow you to achieve this impact? (500 words maximum)

2: Leadership Example

Describe a professional accomplishment that exhibits your leadership style. The accomplishment should include evidence of your leadership skills, a description of the actions you took, as well as the impact you had on your organization. (500 words maximum)

3: Personal Statement 1

Choose one (1) of the following topics and answer it in essay form. Please indicate the topic number at the beginning of your essay. (500 words maximum)

(1) A central premise of our teaching about leadership at the Yale School of Management is that true leadership – leadership that helps to address a significant problem in a new way – is necessarily personal. It is only when personal passion aligns with meaningful aspirations that individuals are able to inspire others to act in support of an important goal or cause. What are you most passionate about, and how have you demonstrated a commitment to this passion?

(2) What personal achievement are you most proud of and why?

(3) Describe a situation in which your values were challenged. How did you respond to the situation and what did you learn from it?

(4) A phrase often heard among SOM graduates is that they aspire to lead a life that is an “SOM Story” – that of a broadly engaged, values-based leader who owns and solves hard problems that matter. How will you create your own SOM Story? Describe a situation in which you devised and implemented a creative or innovative solution to a difficult problem. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?

(5) The Yale School of Management is a community of individuals with diverse backgrounds and interests. What unique attributes would you bring to the Class of 2011?

(6) What is the most difficult feedback you have received and how did you address it? Looking forward, what skills are you most eager to build or improve upon in business school?

(7) Required for reapplicants: What steps have you taken to improve your candidacy since your last application?

4: Personal Statement 2

Choose one (1) of the other topics listed in Personal Statement 1, or create a topic of your own about a subject that is meaningful to you, and answer it in essay form. Please indicate the topic number (or state the topic if it is not one of the ones listed) at the beginning of your essay. (500 words maximum)

Optional Essay

If any aspect of your candidacy needs further explanation, please provide any additional information that you would like the Admissions Committee to consider. (250 words maximum)

I hope having these questions is helpful. We have also just announced our application deadlines for the upcoming year. You can find the deadlines on our website.

Once we have additional information to share — such as our fall recruiting schedule and to tell you when the application goes live — I will be sure to post that information as well. I also plan to keep in touch throughout the year to let people know what’s happening here in the admissions office. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the essay questions!

Bruce

One of the joys about being back in grad school is the two-year respite, minus the summer internship, we MBAs get from the rat race. Granted, the rigor of the SOM program isn’t always a picnic in the park with Podolny, but the constant intellectual stimulation and flood of extracurricular activities make life a little bit more engaging. No day feels like the one before—there’s something new to learn or do or drink each day.

Groan as we may about all the little annoyances of our SOM experiences (whoever thought those chair-swivel-desk-thingees in the HOM were a good idea…and why is it next to impossible to stealthily slip into a middle seat in A51 or A53 when you’re late for class!), it is nice to be free from an office and all the peculiarities associated with the Working Girl world.

Which brings us back to “doh!” As week seven of my so-called corporate life commences, I thought it would be fun to list some “office-isms” I’ve experienced and I know many of you will be familiar with.

The coffee station/communal trough
It’s not just for java. It’s the office “pantry,” complete with fridge, sink and plenty of counter space on which to leave behind cupcakes, caramel corn and other leftover junk food from internal company meetings. Anything you leave there will immediately disappear, though goodness knows who the perpetrators are. Office workers are like raccoons—you never actually catch them in the act of rummaging through the scraps, but you sure see the mess the next morning.

(I think my favorite morning was the cantaloupe and jalapeno cheese platter morning. Boy oh boy do people love their jalapeno cheese at 8:30 a.m.)

Of course, the absolute worst are the office nibblers. They’re usually female, usually on Weight Watchers, and will usually tear little bits off of muffins or cookies and leave the rest behind rather than just eating the whole darn thing. Unfortunately, they’ll repeat this about nine times throughout the course of the day…

Blinders on
The larger an office population is, the colder it seems to get in terms of interpersonal interaction. Even if you know someone (i.e. worked with them on a project) and even if you haven’t yet said hello to them that morning, it’s perfectly acceptable to walk past them without saying hello if you avoid eye contact, look straight ahead at point in the distance, and walk with a purposeful gait. It’s really easy to pick up on and then commit against others who would distract you with stories of their dog/baby/sugar glider. Of course, it feels real crummy when no one says “hello” or “how are you” or “have a good night” to you.

The cult of the wheelie briefcase
Call it a symptom of the suburban office park (or at least this particular office park), but even though the distance from the car to the office entrance is about, oh, a 30-second to minute-walk, depending on the parking spot you snag, everyone owns one of those pullable briefcases on wheels. As if the long and painful commute—most of which took place in a car in which your suitcase sat in the backseat—were just so unbearable that you lacked the energy to carry that bag over your shoulder. I lived in NYC for five years, where everyone walks and is forced to physically shuttle their possessions around on their person. And yet I rarely, if ever, saw these wheelies. Hmm….

Sweet tooth?
Candy bowls. M&Ms, Peppermint Patties, Jelly Bellies, candy everywhere! Be on the lookout for the candy pushers. Often they’re under-worked administrative assistants. Troll dolls, porcelain figurines and other such tsatskes are often the markers of their territories. They sometimes leave out money jars to solicit funds for the upkeep of their sugar dealing. Avoid donating at all costs. Swallow that guilt. If they run out of capital, their little candy cartel is history and our thighs are spared!

Como se llama?!
You’re new, you get that whirlwind office tour, you see lots of faces, hear lots of names…and then can’t remember a single one of them 15 minutes later. Then you have that one co-worker who you always run into, who always makes small talk with you, who’s always saying “Hi Art” or “What are you working on Art” or “Nice shirt, Art” and the best you can muster is “Hey, you….” Or “Nothing, you….” Or “Thanks for the compliment, you…” and at this point in your relationship it’s too late to ask her name and she doesn’t have a nameplate. Sometimes, you can’t even remember whether you did in fact meet this person or whether she’s just overly chatty with everyone in the office.

And sometimes, you just give up and see what’s there to eat in the pantry….oh lovely, half an éclair and fruit salad in heavy syrup.

Interning with an HR consultancy this summer, I have been inundated with articles, white papers and presentations trumpeting the rise of the “Millenial” in today’s workforce. No, we (yes, I’m a Millenial) are not some offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. In the U.S., Millenials are teens and twenty-somes who have been shaped by the dynamic forces of reality over the past two to three decades: the digital revolution, the rise of India and China, 9/11, global warming, AIDS, Enron, Iraq, globalization and an overall decline of the U.S. stature in the worldview.

Living in a world of death, destruction and increased competition, Millenials, as it goes, are all about enjoying life to the max. We’re socially and environmentally conscious, and very pragmatic, especially when it comes to our work responsibilities. We don’t stay around in one company for 35 years, climbing that corporate ladder, waiting for that glorious pension in the sky as a reward for a lifetime of hard work and loyalty. For starters, our job and benefits prospects are not so certain anymore. Many of us instead place family, friends and our community ahead of our jobs as a way to define our life.

Moreover, we’re the ADD generation. We need constant stimulation, challenge and change in our day-to-day work life as well as our overall careers. When we get bored or dissatisfied with one employer, we know we can just pick up and leave without being stigmatized for our job-hopping. Call us irreverent, but we’ve had enough of the old corporate 9-5 paradigms. We view our jobs as transactional, and we’re all about the Results Only Workplace Environment. Why be forced to sit in an office at 33% productivity (seriously, how often does the average office worker spend on e-mail per day)? Our Crackberries and laptops keep us connected and productive wherever we are, and we can deliver impressive results on time while being given the freedom to structure our schedules as we like. Being raised in the digital era, we know that physical presence does not equate with work productivity or efficiency.

Why is this a big deal? The talent war rages as the U.S. economy slowly—but surely—shifts to more service-based industries that require more human capital. And with a whole generation of Baby Boomers on the verge of retirement (well, maybe, if they can afford it), there are going to be lots of gaps to fill. Millenials, though, won’t be satisfied with waiting their turn to take on greater roles within their companies. Younger generations these days come through the door more restless than ever. We want to be valued, rewarded, put to (meaningful) work and affirmed all along the way. Blame our parents, the Baby Boomers (did I also mention Millenials supposedly have a naturally close connection with Boomer bosses, who view their relationships with the youngins on par with their own children…).

All these factors put tremendous pressure on employers to create the type of work environments that will attract and keep today’s rising stars. Jobs, careers and benefits must feel “designer” and “custom-tailored.” Fixed-benefits plans will be unable to withstand the demands of a generation used to picking and choosing their song mixes via iTunes rather than having to buy the whole darn album to listen to one or two songs. It’s no longer just about health, wealth and paid time off. Millenials want credits for buying a hybrid car, mini-sabbaticals every six months, or paid time-off for community service twice a month.

Likewise, work should be more project-based to fit with Millenial restlessness. We want to be able to choose who we work with, across geographies, functions and companies (clients). Millenials want employers to break jobs up into pieces that can easily be arranged into and accomplished within a non-traditional work schedule.

And of course, we want to be recognized for the good work that we do! We want to be told how we’re performing at any given point in time, not just at annual review time. Markers of achievement—attainable short-term goals and milestones as well as small but frequent promotions—also help keep Millenials engaged over the longer-term horizon (anything over a year for me is considered long-term). Obviously, being mentored and coached is invaluable to setting us on the right path to success, but we want the freedom to decide how to do our work and to own our projects, without directives from above.

Call me spoiled, lazy, ungrateful, even mollycoddled (love that word), but the Millenial argument does have merit. In order to stay innovative and entrepreneurial in this competitive global landscape, people must be free to operate “outside the box,” to have more freedom in their work and careers. We work very hard (and have worked hard since pre-school) to fulfill our ambitions and life goals and dreams. We’re not slackers, obviously.  We’re the Internet generation, and we know that if we’re kept back with too many rules and limitations, someone else will beat us to that next new product or service. There is a cyber galaxy of information floating out there these days, and if we aren’t quick enough to process it into a new idea, someone else will.

 Or maybe I’m just mollycoddled after all.

It has been almost two months since I left SOM for the summer. I spent the first month+ being lazy in Bulgaria – sleeping late, traveling, partying, good stuff.

I was probably one of the last few of my class to start an internship – just last week. I will spend the summer in London and since I came here it has been 90% sunny days, contrary to expectations. Being in a new city is a lot of fun – except the fact that everybody drives on the wrong side. The fact that people know to which game the term “football” rightfully refers is quite refreshing.

Spending ten weeks in the UK fits nicely with the international experience that I am getting at SOM – after I am done I will go back to Bulgaria for 2-3 weeks, then take a 2,500km-long drive to Barcelona where I will spend my fall semester at IESE on study-abroad. The US – Costa Rica – the UK – Spain – these are the countries that I will have been to as part of my MBA education. I could not have asked for more.

On my way to Spain I plan to visit Croatia’s Adriatic coast and some of Italy – the drive should take between 5 and 7 days. The tent in my car’s trunk should give me all the flexibility I need so no firm plan for the trip will be prepared. I plan to basically drive my car and stop at different places that seem interesting.

Cheers!

Please describe your short and long term goals and how your previous experience and an MBA will help you to achieve these goals. (500 words maximum.)

In 2004, sixty-five percent of Yale MBA graduates accepted full-time offers in finance, manufacturing, or consulting. Seven percent accepted jobs in a category labeled “non-profit/public”. My long-term career plan is to be part of this public interest category.

Unlike most of my peers with an investment banking background, upon completing an MBA I intend to exit the finance field completely. Two years of investment banking experience has provided me with a foundation in finance, modeling, and valuation. Now I feel ready to pursue an MBA with a particular emphasis on my true interests - nonprofit management and corporate social responsibility. - (Written in September, 2005)

These were the opening paragraphs of my Yale SOM application essays. I started writing my essays shortly after taking the GMAT in the summer of 2005, nearly 3 years ago. I didn’t really know what I was talking about when I tackled the classic “Why an MBA, Why Yale, why Now?” kind of question, but I remember very clearly that Yale SOM stood out as a rather unconventional business school.

I remember reading about the school’s mission - educating leaders for business and society - and noting Yale’s career statistics in more traditional MBA fields (banking, consulting), while also reading about alumni that have done some neat work with organizations in community development, microfinance, and other nonprofit ventures. I remember reading about GSE, an international probono consulting experience run entirely by students. I remember discovering the school’s small class size, and being excited about the opportunity to get to know my classmates, instead of being just another number. And I remember that day in January 2006, when I received an email from SOM’s admissions committee informing me that I had indeed been accepted to the Yale School of Management, class of 2008.

Its certainly been a long journey - secretly prepping for the GMATs in the summer of 2005, to working on my application essays at home after a late night at the office, to finally leaving the investment banking industry after letting my bosses know that I had decided to matriculate at Yale SOM. But as everybody says, the experience went by way too quickly.

The highlights of my 2 years at Yale are undoubtedly the friendships that I’ve formed here. Of particular note is my study group, a weird, eclectic, group of people. On the career front we have little in common - after graduating from Yale we will be working across sectors - marketing, technology, corporate finance, sales and trading, and nonprofit consulting. I’m not entirely sure what it was that brought us together, but for better or worse we managed to grow very close throughout the 2 years. Not too many study groups last the entire MBA experience but I’ve been blessed with a group of people that really have been my 2nd family here in New Haven. Of course, outside of the study group are also a group of people whom I’ve formed what I suspect will be lifelong friendships. They are, what I like to call my “sticky friends”, and truly an unexpected feature of coming back to grad school. Indeed, without these wonderful and fantastic people, I believe my MBA experience would have been a little less fulfilling, a little less interesting, and a lot less fun.

On the career side, Yale SOM has been everything that I needed it to be. As a relative newbie in the nonprofit world I was fortunate to be surrounded by like-minded people who took the school’s mission seriously, weaving the nonprofit world into the everyday fabric of my MBA experience. From my trip to Brazil last year for GSE, to working on the internship fund and spending the summer in Washington DC with the United Way of America, to ultimately landing a full time position in nonprofit consulting with CCS Fundraising, Yale is a community that encouraged me to pursue my interests and take on a relatively unusual career path for a former investment banker.

To those thinking about an MBA or about to enroll in an MBA program, my advice to you is simple - do not make the experience merely about obtaining the “letters”. The MBA experience is truly enriching, a chance to explore your passions, meet interesting people, see the world, and have a lot of fun. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and I’m so sad that its over.

As for this blog, I have a feeling that this may well be my final entry. If it is, I truly hope that you’ve been entertained by my account of time at Yale SOM. I’ve enjoyed keeping a log of my shenanigans, and I’m sure years from now when I re-read these entries and review the pictures I’ll have a good laugh. As always, pictures from the graduation ceremony are in collage form below.

Goodbye Yale. It was fun.

I’m here in my apartment sorting through all the stuff that has accumulated over the two years I’ve been here.  The worst part of this exercise is going through the “pile” of random things that invariably grows.  Right now I’m sorting through that pile, and I’m finding some interesting things.

The most interesting curiousities are in the Welcome Weekend stuff that I still have for some reason.  Yup…  Welcome Weekend 2006, where this journey began.  Included is a list of all the people that were at Welcome Weekend two years ago, which upon closer examination has quite a few c/o 2009 students on it.   (And just so Bruce and Linda don’t have a heart attack, let me also point out that no, we don’t allow deferrals.)  It was also interesting seeing the names that I ticked off as people that I met that I thought were good people.  Some were wrong, but included were the names of Patrick Ma and Mamoun Elbashir, two of my study group counterparts that I’ve spent a ton of time with over the past two years.

I also found some notes that I wrote down about people that I met.  Yes, I know all of you now, but I also knew that meeting 100+ people at once usually doesn’t work too well for me.  The notes were mostly accurate, which is surprising considering how much we’ve developed over the past two years.

Also included are all the club things that I picked up - artifacts of my asipirations when I was coming in.  Included are a Ski and Snowboard club flyer (done!), a YCCI flyer (sigh…  done…), info about the Global Social Enterprise trip to Madagascar (applied for, but alas went to Morocco instead), a Marketing Club flyer (done!), and a printout of career roadmaps with Business Development, General Management, International Development, Marketing, and Sustainable Finance highlighted.  Gleefully crossed out were Hedge Funds, International Development (yes…  after highlighting), and Investment Banking.  I also had some company names already listed out on a notepad in my folder.  My target companies at Welcome Weekend:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Pepsi
• P&G
• Washington Mutual
• Fidelity?
• Canon
• Adobe?
• Yahoo

So I think the mystery of when I started thinking about Microsoft still hasn’t been solved, but I’ve already clearly developed a Seattle bias (as well as a consumer-facing product bias).  Pepsi and P&G?  That was before I discovered my scorn for CPG. (-:

Also in the pile - 12 Yale nametags accumulated after various events, ranging from Admissions Visitor, career panelist, to just plain old Paul Ip ‘08.

Tomorrow I officially graduate from the Yale School of Management, armed with an MBA and about to be re-launched into the real world.

I’m sad, in denial, anxious, and in utter disbelief that this occasion has come so quickly.

Today was Yale College’s “Class Day”, continuing a Yale tradition where a major speaker addresses the graduating class the day before commencement. Here to address the class of 2008 was Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of Britain. Although Class Day is really about the undergrads at Yale College, it is open for all graduate students so a large contingent of SOM students made the trek over to Old Campus to take part in the festivities. I quite enjoyed Tony Blair’s speech, though it did not blow me away like I thought it would. He touched on issues like globalization, Yale’s place in the world, the need for graduates to see the bigger picture… he joked about how he was the first Brit to be invited to speak at Yale’s commencement ceremonies… but to me, the most poignant moment of his speech was when he talked about parents. He gave a personal anecdote about meeting his dad at the train station after his first year at Oxford, talked about how we as graduates can’t envision being as old as our parents but how our parents always remember being our age, and acknowledged that while its often “hell” from both the parents and the kids’ perspectives, ultimately parents love you (he was much more eloquent than what I’ve written of course, but it really was the highlight of the speech in my opinion).

As for tomorrow’s Yale SOM commencement, graduation, or convocation ceremony (whatever you like to call it) it is then that I will receive my degree and graduate. Its been almost 2.5 weeks since my last exam in an MBA classroom and in the interim I’ve been so busy with fun and games like the class trip to Florida, apartment hunting in New York, baseball games in Cleveland and Boston, etc. etc., that I haven’t really had time to be introspective and mentally acknowledge that this whole experience is coming to an end.

I’m still not prepared to put my final thoughts down, so for now I’ll leave this blog entry with some photos from our final class dinner, a very nice evening at the New Haven Lawn Club…(complete with photos with some key faculty). No photos from the Florida class trip will be posted because what happens in Hollywood Florida, stays in Hollywood Florida. Needless to say it was a fun trip with lots of pool, sun, beach, clubbing, and eating.

PS: To those who were wondering, YES, I have found an apartment in New York City- I’ll be living in the Hell’s Kitchen area a couple blocks south of Columbus Circle. The apartment is a good-sized studio, has a doorman, its an elevator building, there is a gym, a beautiful rooftop terrace, and its a short walk from a lot of subway lines and not too far from Central Park where I fully intend to run and explore on a regular basis. My lease agreement starts in early June and I’m super stoked.

Next time I write, I will no longer be an SOM student but a member of the Yale SOM alumni community. Stay tuned!

I think I’ve learned something after all the pain and sweat of this first year. Well, I was pretty sure that was the case. But of all things, my airport shuttle ride right after finals made it official.

Friday morning, 7 a.m. Rousing myself after 2.5 hours of sleep the night before a trip to New Orleans (Professor Koppell, if you’re reading this, that was a long paper), I call a cab to take me to the airport shuttle pickup point on the New Haven Green. It’s hit or miss with the cabs in New Haven; sometimes they answer and come immediately, and other times it’s a long wait. This time, after being on hold forever, I’m promised a taxi “right away” — then wait in vain for about 10 minutes. Mildly panicked now that I’ll miss the shuttle, I call back and am put on hold again. What the heck does it take to get a 5-minute cab ride in this town? I think angrily. Then, my bleary, sleep-deprived mind whispers, unbidden: It’s a queuing problem. They probably don’t have enough servers, and the wait times are not linear. Oh my god, I have to make my flight. This is no time to be thinking about operations.

7:45 a.m. The shuttle — which I did catch, mercifully — drives past an upscale casual dining restaurant in the suburbs, called American Steakhouse. I think about American Steakhouse versus, say, Morton’s on the cost-quality spectrum. I wonder whether the American Steakhouse stratum of dining is a terrible business to be in during economic downturns. There’s some more official way of saying that, right? My mind strains, coffee-less. Oh yeah. Demand is elastic.

7:50 a.m. The undergrad who caught the shuttle with me fell asleep long ago, sprawled over his bag in the back seat. Annoyingly, I can’t seem to do the same. So I keep staring out the window.

8:15 a.m. We roll past a McDonald’s. The sign says “billions and billions served.” Didn’t it used to say the number of billions served when we were kids? I muse. Like “45 billion served.” I picture some MBA intern sitting in McDonald’s headquarters, calculating that sending all the McDonald’s in the world the little plastic letters for the words “billions and billions” would be a positive NPV project, saving all that effort of keeping count, disseminating the count to all the franchises, and having some poor guy climb a ladder to put up a new number every once in a while (and probably incurring an insurance expense). Huh. Believe me, I would not have thought that thought a year ago.

It’s like I can’t shut it off. I guess that’s why we pay the big bucks, for this new lens through which we see the world. Nothing like a ride to LaGuardia to illustrate the utility of the integrated curriculum.

• Final Strategic Across Sectors Exam (Felt like an HR case, 9 pages, 2.5 hours… DONE)
• Final Behavioral Perspectives on Management Paper (8 pages, wrote about the H1-B immigration policy and how flawed it is… DONE)
• Final Managing Organizational Politics paper (10 pages, wrote about the American Red Cross, tried to give recommendations to the new CEO, feel like the situation is pretty hopeless though… DONE)
• Trip to Boston to tour the Sam Adams brewery and catch a baseball game at Fenway Park (Enjoyed almost 2 pints of beer for free at Sam Adams, had clam chowder and hotdogs at Fenway… DONE)
• Trip to NYC to watch a live taping of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (John McCain(!) was the guest, developed a bit of a man-crush on Jon Stewart, enjoyed Korean food in K-Town in NYC after… DONE)
• An evening of bowling with the Dean of Yale SOM, one of the prizes I won at the Internship Fund this year (Feel quite proud to have narrowly defeated the Dean, … first year participant destroyed us all though with an average score over 155….. DONE)
• Weekend trip to Cleveland to catch a Jays vs Indians baseball game, eat Chinese food, and a visit to Cedar Point, a good old fashioned amusement park (Didn’t make it to the amusement park on account of the rain, Jays got completely destroyed but Cleveland was a great trip, lots of fantastic Chinese food, played frisbee, more bowling…. DONE)

Still to Come

• Serious appointments to find an apartment in New York City (tomorrow)
• Wine tasting with the marketing professors (tomorrow evening)
• Big end-of-year birthday bash for 2 of my good friends at Hula Hanks, one of my favorite cheesy but fun clubs in New Haven (evening of May 14th)
• Class trip to Hollywood Florida at the Hard Rock Cafe (May 16th - May 19th)

Graduation in exactly 2 weeks. Social calendar remains packed. I am in denial and don’t want to think too much about what the end of my MBA really means. Pictures from social activities over the past week and a half below in collage form as always.

I just realized this morning that things are about over.  After turning in two papers today, I’ll only have one paper, one exam, and one class left.  Not only that, but thinking about groceries, I counted the days that I’ll be in New Haven before graduation weekend:  five.