Gosh darnit, they like you!

On Jan 21st I was part of a team of finalists representing Ross
business school in the Kellogg biotech and healthcare case competition. One week prior we had been given a dilemma
surrounding the issue of infant HIV diagnosis in a poor African nation. We had to come up with a pilot program for a new point-of-care testing method and justify our strategy. There were thirty-six entrants, of which 11 finalists were chosen. Each finalist team had 1/2 hour to present their solution.

We won. Felt awesome.

If you can believe it, I did power calculations and threshold sensitivity analysis. I used formulas in excel. I could feel the rust falling off the mental gears I used 10 years ago in my undergrad business degree. It felt really good to be doing something a little different than the past 3.5 years.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I am pursuing the idea of doing a three month project with one of the professors in the Ross business school as an interdisciplinary elective. I'll know more next week on how feasible that is.

Hear me roar

Fortune has an article in it's current issue describing the entrance of Gen-Y into the post-collegiate working world. Apparently we are the most demanding, least loyal, most connected, least apologetic generation to date. That sounds about right.

I am a prototypical Gen-Yer. I left my cushy banking job for exactly the reasons this article outlines: I did not have a sense my career was moving anywhere. I did not feel like I was doing any meaningful work. I had no real responsibility. In fact, I had more responsibility running the job fair for my university than I had at work; why would anyone stay at a job that feels like a demotion?

We did have international training exercises, which were a good idea: we networked with other young hires at the bank and got a sense of the global business. Our mentors on these exercises were upper management (again, good idea). But there was no follow-through. We would perform well, get fantastic feedback, and go back to 60 hour weeks pushing F10 and occasionally F12.

I was willing and ready to work 80 hour weeks and solve real problems. Hard work and little work-life balance were fine with me if I had a sense I was invested in my job, if I felt like I was needed and making a contribution. I wrote a strategy paper on how to make our entire North American derivatives business client focused and the comment I received back was: it's 200 words too long. In true Gen-Y style I cut 203 words from one section and replaced them with "see Appendix C". Then I quit.

If I'm going to "do my time" I'm at least going to do it somewhere I can make a difference. I am training to become a physician and during my internship and residency, my "slog", I will at least be making a contribution to the health of the people I meet. It may be a smaller scale than global finance, but it's also a more meaningful one.

I expect great things of myself. Call it hubris, but I find it insulting if you expect less of me than I do. I do not accept that I should work at less than my full capacity because I am young. Age should not determine responsibility; ability should. I am superwoman.

And apparently there are 79.8 million of me.

Back...ish

Unlike many of the more considerate bloggers out there, I simply disappeared rather than formally announcing a break. And it was a month long. Oops. Ah, but now we're heading into finals, which can mean only one thing: procrastination! And what better way to procrastinate than to write things and assume you have nothing better to do than read them?

I did my first alumni interview for my alma mater today and the student whom I was interviewing is also applying to my current institution. This worked out well for her since I was able to offer perspective on two of her choices, but now I have no formal way to notify my current school that while she's probably quite smart, she lacks that pizazz that I associate with the people I matriculated with.

In fact, she is planning on going to business school. She is the second person in the past few days that has expressed this future plan and in both cases I have proven to be a huge hippocrite. I have a business degree. I chose to get that degree. I switched out of a science degree to earn it. But I counseled both these young ones to get something else. Economics maybe, but not business. The unfortunate thing about a business degree is that is qualifies you exclusively for business jobs and you're actually still fairly likely to lose the spot to an engineer or an economist. Quant is in, so if you have the brains you are better served getting a more quantitative degree and taking the spot from a business major. I'm not saying you can't get a job with a business degree, but you better be a business kid with a whole lot of real math (not watered down business math). Well, at least in finance.

You know what the frustrating thing is? I was a business kid with a whole lot of math and do you know what I actually used when I got to my oh-so-coveted finance job? Differential equations (not required by business curriculum), writing (something employers ought to be looking at), statistics, databases, and programming. The last two also landed me my current job. It's a very good thing I got my business degree from the institution I did.

Business degrees prepare you for a job managing people, which is a job you won't actually hold in business for quite some time. Your first years are spent doing a lot of scutwork and the way you differentiate yourself is to teach computers to do the scutwork for you. That, and be able to form coherent, articulate sentences and say them without five "ums" and a "you know?". You spend four years learning how to effectively give orders and then graduate to 10 years of taking them.

There should be a new class added to the curriculum to supplement the strategy lessons: Interpersonal Politics. It should cover:
- How to get people to do what you want when you have no leverage
- How to differentiate the people you want as your allies
- How to recognise the ones trying to take you down
- How to maintain network contacts without looking like an idiot
- How to get around people in your way
- How to work with people that annoy the hell out of you
- How to deal with a boss that's dumber than you
- How to read between the lines

Actually, adding a class in No Limit Texas Hold'em wouldn't be a bad idea for the finance concentration. Poker is the Wall st. golf.