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June 14th, 2007
06:12 pm - Life after Wharton
Меня часто спрашивают, что для меня изменилось после MBA. Это слишком личный вопрос, но на одноклассников интересно посмотреть. Моя программа (executive MBA) рекламировалась работодателям - посылайте подающих надежды, мы их обучим, они у вас засияют. Что мы имеем? Подавляющее большинство моего класса (точных данных нет, их усиленно скрывают), поменяло работу и где-то четверть из них - индустрию, процентов десять начали новые компании, зачастую с бывшими одноклассниками. Индустрию меняли по стандартной траектории - технари в финансисты, почти без вариантов, только один мой однокурсник из менеджера в Оракле пошел в МакКинзи, где сейчас процветает (тоже, правда, в финансовой вертикали). При этом те, кто остались, таки да получили существенные повышения, но это уже само-выбранная группа.
Это просто мы вчера с моими Бостонскими одногруппниками встречались, обменивались впечатлениями. Очень было приятно всех повидать, все ж таки интересный был процесс, хоть и не простой.
Заметка для себя - не пытаться ужиная на Ньюбери в вечер домашней игры Red Sox, из 5 человек четверо водителей опоздали на более получаса, ища парковку.
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January 18th, 2006
08:42 am - Wharton: помощь зала
Если у вас когда-либо были какие-либо финансовые теории и их хотелось бы проверить на данных, но не было времени/умения/данных/теорий, то только сейчас, только сегодня (ну и завтра) - ваш шанс! Победитель сможет получить полный текст исследования в конце семестра.
Мне надо придумать тему для independent study in Investment Management. Есть доступ к тучке финансовой информации - базы данных:
* ежедневные цена всех американских акций, а также акций всего мира
* чуть хуже с более сложными инструментами (опции, futures, etc.)
* mutual funds - цены и прирост до и после комиссионных
* данные о характеристиках компаний (P/E ratios, etc., etc.)
* event studies - сравнения изменения цены вокруг купли/продажи компаний, IPO
* ... и многое, многое другое
Требуется - придумать тему для исследования, причем есть ровно одно, но жесткое условие - придумать до этой пятницы. На данный момент думается о приложении всяких изученных в прошлом семестре моделей к иностранным рынкам, в особенности к рынкам развивающихся странах, и еще конкретнее - к Китаю и/или южно-восточной Азии. Но возможны варианты.
Подручные средства: голова, Excel, Matlab, литература (в умеренных количествах). Времени нет, но есть желание.
( Полный список баз данных )
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December 20th, 2005
October 16th, 2005
11:44 am - Wharton
В этом семестре беру замечательный класс - International Corporate Finance. Некоторым интересно разбирать всякую технику, чтобы понять, как же она работает. А я за время учебы выяснила, что мне наиболее интересно узнавать, как же вот наш повседневный мирок устроен. Не в смысле физики-биологии, а в смысле бизнеса. Особенно занимательны гео-политические вопросы, типа, как работает международный валютный рынок и почему, несмотря на все нобелевские премии, до сих пор постоянно случаются кризисы, стоящие миллионам людей жизненных накоплений. ( Read more... )
( В 1944-ом году были проведены международные переговоры, the Bretton Woods Conference )
( А теперь, внимание, вопрос, почему надо было проводить переговоры в таком живописном, но все же отдаленном от цивилизации месте? )
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August 31st, 2005
09:49 am - Как я провела лето
This has been a test of your body's emergency response system. Had this been a real emergency...
Кончается лето (и не говорите мне, что 31ое августа не конец лета), кончился четвертый семестр, ровно 3 месяца на новой работе, через 3 дня - Китай. Время перемен - переезд, костюмы, полюбила рыбу, оценила коньяк. Это новое - во многом хорошо забытое старое. По той же модели решила отрастить длинные волосы, чтобы они опять были черными и прямыми.
Семестр был суров. Кажется, закончила не хуже, чем обычно. Тема семестра - окружающая среда (законы, международные отношения, индустриальные связи) имеет большое влияние на бизнес, и поэтому эту среду надо хорошо понимать, и, зачастую, ее можно направлять, если уж не управлять.
* * *
В голове опять метель, и значит я - живу.
Наверное, я все еще ищу бурь, и только в них вижу покой.
Все реже смотрю в глаза друзей, все больше эти встречи ценю.
Все меняются вокруг. А я? Я просто пытаюсь остаться собой.
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July 29th, 2005
July 13th, 2005
10:37 pm - Wharton | July 13
Back to school, back to enjoying it (finally, I was getting worried there, like when I literally had to make myself write the damn strategy paper the morning it was due because I just could not muster the energy to do it beforehand...)
Two new classes started this weekend - Geopolitics & Global Strategy. Both are fascinating, especially to an ignoramus like me. After two classes I have to admit that my knowledge of history is rather limited to Europe and North America, while contemporary politics, especially in the emerging markets of Asia and South America are only familiar through the prism of The Economist. Well, I got a whirlwind tour today - from Peruvian power plant riots, through Argentinian electricity riots, the South-East Asian utility protected power agreements, to the fake Indonesian gold mine scandals, all of which occurred in the last decade. And for the dessert - the "world domination through the centuries" story (prof's hypothesis: Spain, Netherlands, France, Britain, US, China???).
The final and fitting piece of the puzzle was the arrival of 30 Chinese students from Shanghai's Exec MBA program. We had dinner together and they joined our class for the evening lecture. My first interaction with "real" chinese, and they totally blended in with our class - they spoke English no worse than our asian students, dressed the same, and had similar roles within their companies. I am now much more intrigued about our future trip to China. Talking to the Chinese students we discovered how truly similar our programs and lives are, except, like most other Chinese things, their program costs 1/3 as much as ours and they are restricted by the "one child" policy, which has the unintended effect of allowing more women to have careers.
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July 6th, 2005
12:34 pm - Anniversary
Having celebrated a strange anniversary - more time spent in the US than in Russia - I rather suddenly realized that I am "inostranka" ("foreigner") no more, neither literally nor figuratively (the Dovlatov allusion). The cultural divide now seems bigger on the other side - the endless role of women debates, gay rights, cheating, piracy, interest in Russian vs. US politics, even music and books, where I constantly feel easier to connect with my peers on the US side than having to convince "my own" of my "non-Russian" views.
The last drop? Last weekend we had a case about the Russian Ice-Cream industry (Ice-Fili, the maker of Lakomka, in particular), and everyone expected me to weigh in with real first-hand knowledge. I rose to the occasion and blabbered something, but felt very uncomfortable about it - I knew nothing about Ice-Fili and suddenly did not even feel justified speaking as a former Russian/Soviet native.
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May 24th, 2005
02:27 pm - Wharton | May 20-21
School vacation is over, another year is beginning, and I am still in love with school. This weekend we had 3 Law classes, 2 Strategy classes, and 1 Entrepreneurship class. My favorite, amazingly enough, was Law.
Everyone knows the three reasons to get an MBA: connections, connections, and connections. OK, maybe, connections, diploma and [misplaced, according to the non-MBAs] self-confidence.
( For me, the interesting overall themes have been )
( Law classes )
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April 18th, 2005
03:00 pm - Wharton | 4/14-15
Internet shopping - do you think people comparison shop? Apparently, people on average check out 1.2 sites before making a purchase... And, contrary to popular belief, margins are actually higher for online retailer (due to lower expenses).
Just one more weekend to go before the end of the first year. What have I learned?
First year's takeaways
( Read more... )
3rd semester's takeaways from classes
( Marketing, Finance, Operations, Communications )
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April 12th, 2005
11:37 am - Wharton 4/1-2
Belated notes from last weekend - Marketing and Finance.
Marketing
Discussed the role of being a pioneer in the marketplace. Turns out, the average leader's advantage does exist but is not that large - the second entrant into the market ends up getting 70% of the pioneer's market share (i.e., if the pioneer has 40% of the total market, the second entrant has 28%). The later entrants gain even less, relative to the leader, but the size of the market tends to increase for successful products, compensating. Still, this is only "on average" and in many cases the leader falls by the wayside. Even having the product become known by your brand's name might not help all that much (Aspirin is Bayer's trademark, not Tylenol or Advil); Hoover, Xerox, Rollerblades are all not doing so great, despite the householding of the names.
Sidenote: Wharton, as I learnt during that class, was the first business school in the world, with money donated by the Philadelphia financier Joseph Wharton in the late 1880s.
( Read more... )
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February 20th, 2005
12:38 pm - .Wharton | Feb 18/19
Сначала о грустном. В эти выходные обнаружила, что некоторые из наших студентиков - безработные. Это за время пути (9 месяцев). Один был Director of Project Management, другой - Shoreside Manager for Carnival Cruise Lines. Непонятно, они сами уволились или их уволили, но известно, что в обоих случаях не при теплой и дружественной обстоновке. Еще несколько человек пришли в классы в костюмах - говорят, ходили на интервью, используя местный career services office. Добавим к этому то, что процентов 40 народа ходит на всевозможные career workshops (я бы ходила, да не могу - для этого работодатель, он же спонсор, должен бумажку о не-возвражении подписать, а это равносильно заявлению об уходе, по крайней мере в моем случае). Эти в большинстве своем не безработные, но активно ищущие. К сожалению, я не знаю процент остающихся на прежнем месте работы по окончанию, но если до начал программы думала, что процентов 80, то теперь - дай Бог 20. И фантазии о том, что работодатели обязательно ценят учащихся тоже разбились в пух и прах.
( Darwin award for thieves; Professors; Marketing; Communications )
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February 17th, 2005
11:39 am - .Wharton | LiveJournal?
I used to regularly post "Wharton notes". This semester I decided that they have outlived their usefulness - I was either oversimplifying things such that they lost all meaning, or retelling stories about well-known companies, creating a sense of a pop-culture focused education. So I stopped doing it.
Well, what do you know? I've just been asked to do some blogging for Wharton. Apparently, they have a feature on their website that has selected students' diaries for other students and, more importantly, potential applicants to read. They have 12 students from the fulltime program (out of 1600) doing this, as well as 1 executive MBA student (out of 230). I have no idea what the selection criteria or process is, but somehow I was the one asked to represent the WEMBA experience. Little did they know that I am a "professional" at it ;-))
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January 12th, 2005
11:30 am - Wharton | The International Trip
Мы долго всем классом выбирали, куда же мы поедем на наш обязательный заграничный класс - неделя изучения бизнеса в какой-то другой стране. 5 команд делали презентации про разные регионы: северную Европу (до сих пор центр мирового бизнеса!); центрально-южную Европу (пиво! самый большой рост в Европе, пиво!); Индию (связи с кучей важных персон за счет наших индусов-студентов, возможность увидеть собственными глазами куда же аутсорсают американские работы); Японо-Китай (экзотично, Япония крута, а Китай растет, как на дрожжах); юго-восточная Азия (экзотично, классный отпуск, да, там еще и бизнесом занимаются). Северо-европейская команда, понимая, что шансы у них мизерные (все мы там уже были, да и вообще, Европа - это прошлое, а вот Азия - будущее), подкупали нас бельгийским шоколадом и пивом. К сожалению, и это им не помогло - по результатам голосования выиграл все равно Японо-Китай, а Индия была runner up. Кстати, я сама хотела в Японию или Китай, так что я довольна.
Дальше, путем опроса и решения администрации, был выбран именно Китай, а точнее Пекин и Шанхай. Туда мы и поедем в начали сентября. О Китае я почти ничего не знаю, но время есть. Собираюсь попытаться подучить китайский, с помощью сидюка от ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) vinnipuh, полученного на Новый Год. Кроме того, подключила мою молодую сеструху: она в школе несколько месяцев в прошлом году почему-то проходила про Китай, и я дала ей задание написать мне досье для поездки. Думаю, она еще в том возрасте (9 лет), когда ей это будет интересно, а мне действительно полезно.
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January 7th, 2005
01:28 pm - Wharton | 3rd Semester
What a difference a night makes! I am back to school, back to being in love with school, last semester's grades are in, и даже на работе приятные новости в кои-то веки (я уже по-моему всем, кому можно про работу нажаловалась - по видимости, сработало).
Just finished up our first lecture - marketing. It dovetails nicely into the L'Oreal marketing competition we are doing, with all of the different components (customer segmentation, brand positioning, channel distribution, price wars) being formalized and making sense. We did some cool cases - the ExxonMobil pricing (the official policy for them is to not match competitors on price if the difference is 1 or 2 cents; their marketing studies also seem to be responsible for the 9/10 cent pricing, which alone accounted for $3 billion in profits for the gas industry); the political campaigns (radicals win primaries, but centrists win elections - which makes it harder for the "right" dems to win). Discussed the disastrous implications of Delta's announced 50% price cuts - this is not supposed to work, unless they are working towards a government bailout! Need to read up on it - at least I should be able to benefit from the cheaper fares.
At the end the professor told us that he designed the Exec MBA pricing and marketing strategy for Columbia and proceeded to convince us why the high price is so great. Basically, EMBA is a "luxury good" - the higher the price, the more prestigious it is, the more you sell...
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December 7th, 2004
11:08 am - Wharton | November 19/20
Leadership
It took my going to Wharton to realize that the MIT cheer "we are, we are, we are the engineers" applies to me. At times I feel like a fraud in the analytical classes (statistics, optimization, etc.) - it's obvious that this stuff is too easy for me; it's as if I went to a high-school algebra class. I try to balance it out by being helpful to the others who are struggling. Later, it turns out that quite a few people feel that some of these classes are too easy, our common trait being the engineering background. At other times I feel like a fraud in the "softer" management/leadership classes - I clearly don't have the experience all these folks do, can't speak as eloquently without preparation, can't come up with interesting and relevant examples from my own work, my career is nowhere near theirs - should I even be here with them? Am I adding anything to these classes? I try to balance it out by taking notes and hoping to learn from them. And yet, more than ever before, I realize that I am an engineer from head to toe, in the broad sense of the word, and that it might not be that bad, after all.
( Macro, Greenspan's term and salary, Cost accounting & Wal-Mart )
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November 9th, 2004
01:17 pm - Wharton | October 29/30
I forgot to post last weekend's Wharton notes. Partially it was due to the weekend being quite uneventful - we had a final and a mid-term, plus 2 Macro lectures, which I have officially declared totally and utterly boring, if not completely useless. So boring, in fact, that after struggling to stay awake during the Saturday afternoon lecture I actually left class an hour early to go to NYC to hang out with my s/o. That was a first (and, I hope, the last). On the train I met 3 other classmates that have similarly decided to escape unnoticed.
As expected, the only highlight of the weekend was the Leadership class. Some choice quotes:
- Perfect is the enemy of the good and the timely.
- Great leaders blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will.
- In nature, only two phenomena go faster uphill than downhill: grizzly bears and fires.
- Panic - the level of anxiety when one reverts to last learned behavior.
( Making Fast and Good Decisions; Wharton - the home game; Humility and Leadership )
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October 30th, 2004
12:45 am - Another Wharton weekend
Friday night, I am sitting in my lonely room at the Ritz, listening to russian radio on my laptop, wearing the Ritz bathrobe, getting ready to tomorrow's Stats exam intermixed with LJ-browsing. My first time staying at what is probably the most famous hotel chain in the US (fortunately, I am not very familiar with the posh hotel scene - a luxury once sampled becomes a necessity). If I had a choice, I would've much rather stayed at our regular Wharton conference center, but, alas, it is parents' weekend, and we got transferred to better hotels to accomodate. What can I say - pretty impressive. A grand lobby, with bars, lounges, live music, restaurants, and - my favorite - an a la carte desert bar. Flowers, draperies, superb service (politely requesting a constant stream of tips), a myriad of different toiletries, from mouth rinse to shoe-shine, embroidered towels and bathrobes. Looks like a grand place to stay at for a romantic weekend, to sweep the other half off their feet; a nice lounge for wooing important clients. Personally, though, I am not that impressed, or, rather, this is not (yet?) the kind of service and quality I can appreciate.
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October 18th, 2004
04:46 pm - Wharton | October 15/16
Some interesting (to me, at least) nuggets from the different analytical classes:
- (Stats) Election results polling is more inaccurate than usual this year. The pollsters never call work or cell phone numbers, while about 5% of Americans, myself included, do not have land lines. Moreover, there is likely to be a reasonably high correlation between not having a landline and voting democratic. I am slightly more optimistic about Nov 2nd now.
- (Stats) Proved the famous "past performance does not guarantee future results" with data from 1500 mutual funds from 1987 to 1993. If anything, prior year's or years' performance was negatively correlated with current year's.
( Read more... )
The most fun class, as always, was Leadership. This time we had a group called ImprovEdge giving us improvisational acting lessons and finishing up with an improv comedy bit. They were basically playing charades, acting out, for example, such gems as "sumu wresting with a toupee instead of the "diaper" and Calista Flockhart (of Alley McBeal fame) as the opponent." We were all ROFL.
The improv "lessons", done in small groups, we were much more insightful, even if a bit less entertaining.
( Read more... )
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October 4th, 2004
02:30 pm - Wharton | 10/1 and 10/2
Analytical courses only on both day - decision making and uncertainty, statistics and the-put-to-sleep-er macroeconomics. Second year we have almost entirely electives, and I'll be sure to pick as few analytical courses as possible, going for management (strategic and people), policy (business and social), and communications, instead. Quite the opposite of the MIT days, when any "soft" subject was looked at with scorn...
Optimization
"If you can't make it, fake it" - the optimization professor explaining the rationale for Monte Carlo simulations.
( Read more... )
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