Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Career Services II

The longer I blog, the more I begin to repeat myself, so bear with me if this is old news. But I realized after my recent career services post that I left out an important component - my fellow students. Career services at Booth are very good but equally important in the job search, and addition to career advisers (the official student face of career services) are student groups and miscellaneous peers and alumni. The career oriented student groups (for me this was the investment management group) play a big role in resume feedback, interview prep, and general knowledge of employers and what to expect. The IMG assigns you with second years mentors which may or may not be helpful and gives you an opportunity to pitch stocks to the entire group (which may or may not be helpful ;). I also made extensive use of all the second years who would give me 5 minutes to talk about their experiences and often reached out to alumni.

So I just wanted to mention that as well. For those on less typical post-MBA paths, this might be less viable, simply because there won't be a big pool of peers on the same path as you to share the wisdom. But, likely for most of us, the peer network is as big an asset as anything officially offered by the school.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you shed some light on the Portfolio Management Course by Pastor. How useful is it for a career in asset management? Specifically, if you could take only one course between: Portfolio Management and Empirical Asset Pricing.

thanks

MaybeMBA said...

Had I remained on my quanty-finance track I would have taken them both. I took Port Mgmt (PM) in spring quarter of my first-year. PM homework does invole MatLab but it's not very quantitative overall. Pastor is superb but the material is pretty easy to get a handle on and, if you have prior experience, much of it will be old news. I thought it was a nice review. Pastor puts together a great survey of the current issues and presents them well. Empirical Asset Pricing (EAP) I have not taken but from what I hear it is uber Matlab/coding oriented. For fundamental analysis this is far more than needed. If you're going the quanty route, you might want it (though that's just my suspicion, you should confirm). Depending on your past experience neither may be necessary. Bottom line - your choice depends on what you know already and what you hope to do in the future. PM fit my needs better but I could have survived w/o it. But then some just enjoying taking classes like EAP for the sake of learning. Not for me! (anymore)