Midterms are over

Midterms are finally over! And by ‘finally’ I mean that the tests are over and the results have been received. Well, the receiving part wasn’t too fun, but, at least I have finals to try to make up for it. Now I’m spending a lit of time focusing on recruiting. Since I am interested in finance in a company, it is as if the recruiting process is my oyster. Every company has some sort of finance function, so I can go to any presentation that is geared towards any function and say “I’m interested in corporate finance” to which I will be given contact information for the appropriate recruiter.

Presentations are great. I am able to learn about companies in many different industries and what products and/or services they currently offer or plan to offer in the future. Since business really interests me, I enjoy learning more about different companies and the functions they are recruiting for. One of the perks of presentations are the goodies. We get shirts and water bottles and post its among other things. American Express gave us Rubix cubes where they replaced the basic solid color squares with pictures of their products like the Gold Card and the Traveler’s Cheque card. Even though presentations are great, I am limited by the fact that there is only one of me and I don’t have enough time to go to everything. For instance, yesterday there was a corporate finance presentation for Microsoft, but I had to attend the Merrill Lynch commodities group presentation. And later that night, Lehman Brothers (a bank) had a presentation, but I RSVPed to attend a dinner sponsored by Kraft. Its all too much. Today, I am going to a presentation for the Federal Reserve Bank of NY in the morning, Mattell early evening, Sears after that, then I have to run downtown to the Blue Water Grill restaurant for a dinner with McKinsey!

In other news, my mom was in town last week. Our time together was real chill. We went to Chicago GSB’s DuSable conference on Friday night where we heard Chris Gardner, the inspiration for the new movie The Pursuit of Happyness, speak, and where my mom was able to meet a lot of my friends. The rest of the time was spent sitting on the couch and talking politics. Overall, it was a good visit.

It's been awhile

There has been a lot going on in my life the past few weeks. I was MIA for most of the latter half of October studying for exams. Please don't ask me how they went. All I can say is ”Thank goodness for the final exams”. I'll admit that I was kind of lax in studying for the first half of the quarter, but now I know that I need to get my rear end in gear and really buckle down on studying.

In addition to exams, internship recruiting started last week. Our campus was inundated with companies and banks coming to give presentations to first year students. I am very fortunate in that I am recruiting for corporate finance jobs instead of banking. For those of you who don't know, those who recruit for banking usually want to be Sales & Traders or Investment Bankers. Because the competition for those internships is fierce (or so we programmed to think) recruiting is hard core. They have recruiting events almost everyday, from lunch-n-learns to bank presentations to dinners. If there is a bank you really want to work for, you need to go to all of their recruiting events, which for most banks are about 7 or more. But most people have more than one bank in their sight, so they need to times 7 by the number of banks they are activity recruiting for. Since I removed myself from the recruiting scene, I only have a few presentations per week to attend. I don't know what I would do if I was recruiting banking. Probably attach an IV to my arm and have it drip coffee.

Outside of school things have been awesome. I have a part time job working at the Chicago Bear's home games as a dessert cart girl for the executive suites. It is the easiest job ever! We go to a suite with our dessert cart, the people in the suite file out and point to which dessert they want, and then we put it on a plate and hand it to them. Yeah, really, that's all I do! I am in at 10am and done by 3pm. Only downside is that I don't get to see the game, but I can tell what’s going on by listening to the cheers coming from the suites.

In other news, my mom is coming to visit tomorrow! She is over in PA visiting Granddaddy and made plans to stop and see me for a few days. We're going to go to the movies and get our hair done and go to the aquarium. It’s going to be a blast!!