Epilogue

So I did find a job. (And good thing I didn't post while hunting because it was not pretty!)

And I did return to IM. (Corporate work, what was I thinking? 6 weeks at a well funded "start-up" put things in perspective.)

And I love Seattle! (It's my people out here.)

So I do have unfortunately early hours but I get paid nicely to sit around and think on the top floor of a downtown skyscraper with a view of the sound. Not bad. I'll take it.

And I do think Booth helped me come into my own as an old school fundamental investor. I do see a difference from pre-MBA. So the regrets are subsiding.

The kids are awesome ... absolute joy of my life.

I hope you all are well ... if anyone's checking.

To bed with me. Happy Friday.

So what did I want?

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others ... -W.E.B. Du Bois

During my time at Booth, in person and on this blog, I talked about the need for more resources and support for female student parents which sounds more burdensome than warranted. Really what I wanted and what I think many women in business want is normalization, which is simultaneously very simple and very challenging.

I unfortunately got off to a very bad start with the school because of my need to accommodate my newborn during LOE and as a result my first 48 hours at the school left me feeling unwanted, distrustful and not at all "normal". I did receive an apology but my sense of abnormality mounted as the school year progressed and the distaste for the childed among some classmates and staff became more apparent. (Consider my interview for a leadership position with CWiB in which I was asked whether I could handle the role given the fact that I had a child … oh, the irony.) Some students were lovely, others were oddly clueless (consider the first-year who asked me how long pregnancy lasted - 6 months, he ventured. I wish! I laughed. Then he went on to tell me about his 11 month old son … errr …) and some were downright mean. The worst came during my second year when I was pregnant. The incessant, often scathing comments about my girth were exhausting. On the one hand, it would have been strange to have no one comment on the fact that I was pregnant, on the other hand, that my entire existence revolved around my uterus was depressing. I just wanted to blend in.

Toward the end of my second year it occurred to me that this matter was not just about my experience as a student but also the experience of the future colleagues and employees of my more clueless or mean classmates. Why should a significant portion of the world's "future leaders" be so ignorant/disdainful of one of life's most fundamental experiences? And furthermore, as an employer itself, why wasn't Booth modelling better human resource practices? (That the school did not think to include a lactation room or provide childcare resources is understandable given the low number of female students with children but then I realized there were plenty of employees with children!)

It is a man's world. I say this without ill will - it has historically made sense to be so. But making it a human being's world requires more than just adding women to the mix and expecting men and childless women to understand the practical reality of birthing and bearing babies.

As I've said before, the only important difference between men and women is babies. All the other alleged differences are trivial. The baby factor affects all women, even if they never have children, as it weeds women out of the public realm. Accommodating women and their wayward uteruses (uteri?) is not about entering a new touchy feely world or lowering the bar, it's about finding clever ways to overcome the inescapable physical burden of motherhood. My pet theory is that women are more risk adverse than men because to possess a uterus is to live in a world of tremendous uncertainty. You have no idea when or if you will become pregnant, how the pregnancy will fare or how long it will last. You have no idea when labor will strike and how it will progress. Will breastfeeding come easily or become a nightmare? How will post-partum recovery evolve? How will your newborn take to the world? And god forbid you become pregnant unintentionally. Taking big career or financial risks is far more dangerous with these realities looming over your head.

I happened to run into a woman who had graduated from law school at BYU (yes, Mormons) and was in Chicago while her husband finished law school at the UoC. Consider these radical measures that BYU took to accommodate their female students. Women could bring a sleeping baby to class. They could request in advance videotapes of any class that would be missed or an audiotape of a class after the fact. If needed, they could come to campus and watch class live in a special family room while nursing or playing with their baby. These family rooms were study rooms with priority given to students (male or female) with children. Let's say you were in class with a sleeping baby which suddenly woke? Just leave class and head to the nearest family room and watch the class on t.v. Compare those attitudes to the experience of a female Booth student who received a lot of snide comments after her baby cried in the Winter Garden.

So what can/should business schools do?

1. Drop the excuses - telling female students that you've never had to deal with the child thing before insulting and irrelevant. Well, now you are.
   
2. Get real feedback. Don't just listen to the women who tell you everything is going great and groovy. Find the women who are pissed.
3. Be radical! Be creative. Tell recruiters who give a pregnant student a hard time to go to hell. (Not, oh that's none of our business.) Tell staff who trivialize a new mom's needs to shape up or ship out. Tell women's groups who over politicize motherhood that they're no longer needed. Let women hear from all the women out there doing baby + work. Reassure women that their physical needs come before recruiters' needs or professors' needs or classmates needs'. Set up a proper mother's room already. Include families!! Help figure out childcare. Provide recordings of missed classes. Etcetera! (Do some brainstorming already.)
   
4. And don't trivialize this - it's not a Mommy MBA already.
5. Women have babies - it's normal. Now act like it is.

My perfect MBA

I'm having a lot of trouble summoning any interest to say anything about the MBA, which is just as well since my time is up. But for the sake of completion let's try the following thought experiment. What if anything would I change about my experience? What would make the "perfect MBA" for me?

Much of the Booth experience would remain. The flexible curriculum is non-negotiable for me. Emphasis on academics is important. Sharp student body a must. Gorgeous facilities would be sorely missed. But in addition

• Primary emphasis on teaching. I wish every professor made those 3 hours in the classroom really count and held their responsibility as a teacher above all else.
• Required well-taught class on ethics. Not in the hopes of reforming or deflecting the up and coming Skillings or Madoffs but because there is a lot of great emperically-based stuff out there to help us explore our responsibilities and rights and future "business leaders". It's not a side topic, it should be front and center of our education and can be approached through data and hard analysis rather than just a soft, feel-good conversation.
• Requirement waivers. The curriculum would allow one to waive subjects in which a basic competency could be demonstrated through an exam (such as stats, econ, accounting). Yes, I am asking that the world's most flexible curriculum become even more flexible but a lady can dream!
  
• Can't we all just be friends?? ;) It would have just been less competitive. My classmates behaved admirably but I felt like the system sort of ended up pitting us against one another, for employment, for grades, for scholarships, for recognition. It just felt tiring and unnecessary. It's amazing we all remained as supportive and kind to one another as we did given the circumstances.
  
• Let's enjoy life! It just would have been more fun, more creative, more exploratory, more tasteful. In all honesty, it was a bit spirit crushing. Not too crushing but less uplifting than I was expecting.

And that would make a more perfect MBA for me.

What I Would Have Done Differently

Blogging on here feels so odd now that I am definitely no longer "Maybe"MBA. But it's taking me longer than expected to wrap up my last MBA thoughts. Life!

I've pondered this post for some time as my answer changes day to day. For some time this spring I felt that I should have applied to more programs, especially some on the west coast. However, now that I find myself gravitating back toward my original career plan, that seems less important. At moments I have felt that I should never applied to an MBA program at all! But those moments are quite rare these days. So, with that, what would I have done differently for an MBA at Booth?

Academics:

• Taken only 1 finance and 1 accounting class. I foolishly ended up with a concentration in finance and accounting, for various reasons including course availability. Given my background, this was not a particularly good way to spend my money. I would have taken Weiss's Taxes course and Pastor's Portfolio Management course and maybe Rajan's Int'l Corp Fin class and skipped all the others (30116, 30117, 30130, 35100, 35200). (Although I would have considered 30117 with Sapra.)
• Steered clear of Commercializing Innovation and taken PE Finance with Kaplan or Morse.
• Taken basic Stats or Regression instead of Time Series. Back when I was young and foolish and took "challenge everything" seriously I thought it would be silly to repeat what I already knew. I should have just gone for the easy A.
• Econ requirement. For those of you with good Econ backgrounds there really is no good solution to the Micro requirement. I went with 33501 as a substitute which was definitely an easy A but left me feeling a little hollow.
  
• Taken Negotiations and maybe Eply's Managerial class (forgot official name and too lazy to look it up, one of those 38001 courses or something) and more "soft" courses.
• Taken Competitive Strategy with Bertrand.

Career:

Job-wise, at one point I thought I perhaps should have skipped the IM internship altogether but I'm currently very glad that I didn't. (See, too fickle am I.) And it has crossed my mind that I wish I had just recruited for a corporate finance job last fall but I think I would be quite depressed at this point had I made that compromise. I do wish that I had been a little more mentally and intellectually prepared for recruiting in my first year. With the pregnancy and the career detour while I figured out my life and applied to bschool pre-MBA, I was pretty scattered and unprepared for internship recruiting. I am damn lucky I got a position. And then with the second pregnancy etc I wasn't in much better shape for full-time. I do wish I had never bothered to pitch a stock just for the sake of having one to pitch and that I had not been pregnant in my second year.*

Personal:

It would have been much better for my husband if he had stayed in Seattle and I had relocated with Baby Y but that would have been hell on all of us, so I'm not sure whether I would have done that differently. I would not have changed being pretty selective about my socializing and putting my family first but I do occasionally wish I had had more freedom on that front while I was here.

So for what it's worth, that's that.

*Only because I didn't have a job offer, otherwise, it would have been perfect. In fact I really wish I had applied to bschool a couple years earlier than I did and had my first baby in my 2nd year with a job offer in hand. Not that you can really plan these things, of course!

Motherhood: The bane of thoughtful women?

In college, I never expected to get married, let alone have children.* As it happened, I got married about a year after graduating and, on my 27th birthday, became bent on having children ... IMMEDIATELY.

I am not what one would call a "kid person". That is, I harbor no special love for human beings based on their having lived a relatively short time on earth. I prefer people with an opinion on the trade deficit, an appreciation of artisan breads and the ability to sit quietly through the full duration of the most recent Coen brother movie. If you meet this criteria and are under 12. Fine. I have never once babysat and had never held an infant until Baby Y was placed in my arms.

Pre-baby I was put off by the way in which female parenthood seemed to obscure all else from a woman's identity to those around her and perhaps even to herself.

One thought (realized post-baby) is that it is partly due to the way that biological parenthood engulfs women. From the moment of conception, willingly or not, I was at my body's mercy. Pregnancy, birth, post-partum - nothing in my life has been so mammalian. So physical. So utterly devoid of intellect.

The other thought is that it is partly due to the insipid, cutsification that women cast upon the mother role. The endless pink (in moderation, a perfectly fine color) and other mild shades. The obsession with little beyond the minutia of familial life. The insistence that life as you knew it will cease to exist once children make their appearance. I was determined to avoid such a fate. (And think I have.)

And as I penned posts for this blog and talked to other women about my experience, I swung between two ideas.

The first being that this whole thing, babies + life-as-usual, was eminently doable. Piece. Of. Cake. Nevermind that I spent my first year on the verge of a nervous breakdown and year two chronically depressed. I was determined to tear on as though life had not changed a bit.

The second being that I had just erected a permanent hurdle to professional success. Competing as a childless woman was hard enough, throw in life encompassing experience of baby making = doom. Never mind that I did just fine in most of my classes and got a great internship. (Though I am currently unemployed ... hmmm)

Point being, I am very sympathetic to childless women who are not very inspired by the realities of the child making route. It's not easy. It does change you. For me, old age without grandchildren (Baby Y and X, are you listening??) was not palatable. But if it were,and I thought it might be for a long time, it would have been much easier.

Honestly yours,
M

*Though, paradoxically, I expected that if I did have children that I would be a stay at home parent until they went to kindergarten. Ha.

So. Is it worth it?

Unfortunately for the empirically minded there is no satisfactory answer to this. There is no parallel me running around without an MBA to make a comparison against.

As the twelve months of gloom lifted and finals came and went and I enjoyed graduation, I was increasingly inclined to say that it was unequivocally worthwhile. However, I was also past the point of return. There was no point in regretting anything.

The friends I've made at Booth are phenomenal. I feel glad I have Chicago Booth at the top of my resume during this terrible job hunt. It's relieving to have alumni to reach out to and career services to hold my hand when needed. I did have some fantastic professors. And I even learned something in my worst classes. And most of the learning in MBA land really happens outside of the classroom I now believe.

However, the worth of something cannot be judged properly without considering the price paid. And this will vary dramatically across applicants - both the tangible price such as tuition and the intangibles such as living away from family. As you listen to graduates hold forth on the value of their MBA, keep this in mind. We all pay different prices and obtain different rewards.Having now finished, I see how naive it was to assume that someone else's MBA story would be my own. (And the irony is that anyone who is going to get into a top MBA program is probably going to do pretty well on their own. )

But in all honesty, I think it would be quite short sighted of me to say that I regretted it.

Full-time vs. Part-time MBA

Here's an easy MBA post in response to a question I got from a reader last week, written mainly from the Booth perspective.

If I had lived in or near to a city with a top program I probably would have done a part-time program. I also considered executive programs. But it definitely is a very different experience from a full-time program and I have to say I am glad that I went full-time.

At Booth, there is no academic difference between the part-time and full-time programs. It's the exact same faculty and you can take class at either campus (with some restrictions). Both programs also have a considerable amount of flexibility in how quickly or slowly they complete their studies. Both programs participate in the same graduation ceremony and get to participate in on campus recruiting. (Ask career services for the fine print on part-time participation though.) (I think they have a different admissions team?? Anyone know this for sure?)

The big difference comes in the way of the student experience. There is definitely a different feel in the Gleacher classes. Virtually all part-time students are working jobs which gives them much less time to devote to study groups and social events. (The guy who hired me for my internship came out of the part-time program and called us full-timers a bunch of slackers ... and he's right :) They are real adults with, you know, jobs and families. The part-time program has a separate set of student groups. (Some cross-registration is allowed but mostly the two programs stick to themselves on this one.) And to the extent that networking and social stuff is a huge piece of the MBA value - then it seems like they miss out. One only has so many hours in the day.

In sum, if you want the full student experience and aren't up for the work/school/life grind, I would do the full-time program. If your employer will foot the bill for a part-time program only/you can't bear to part with your paycheck/you are worried you might graduate unemployed in the worst recession in recent history/you just want the degree and some classes, then I would do the part-time program. But, at least at Booth, the line between the programs is a bit blurry, so keep that in mind.

That's my two cents.

Hot damn, it's hot around these parts. Chicago was not meant to be lived in sans A/C. By the way, just discovered the best bagels ever ... in Hyde Park! Wish I could take them with.

Life these days

Was about to pen one of my uber serious posts but don't have the brain power (lucky for you). Really, I should definitely be sleeping.

I am now a "single mom" (when my mom isn't here, that is). The good news is that Y has a job (with a real pay check and a not crazy boss). The bad news is that he doesn't live in Chicago any more.

Happy Father's Day!!

I am very much looking for a job. But also trying to enjoy the kids and summer. And the last month of Hyde Park. But really, it has become really impossible to imagine that I will ever be employed again. Sigh.

Baby Y's bday is upcoming and I just made a gorgeous double chocolate layer cake that I am planning on bedecking with June strawberries tomorrow morning. That and some delicious crustless quiches, one with and one without mushrooms, fresh fruit salad and bagels etcetera will be make for a lovely Monday. Can you believe he's almost two years old?? He's as old as my MBA ;)

Baby X is the most amazing sleeper ever but I think we deserve a good sleeper after what we went through with the first!

Happy Summer Solstice!!

Yeah. It was worth it.

More on that later.

(And no, I don't have a job yet.)

Congratulations Class of 2009

Graduation was on Sunday. I'm very glad my mom asked me to walk - I had a great time and it was a nice way to end things. I will really really miss a number of amazing people I had the good fortune to spend the last 2 years with. :(

Women are people too

Obviously. But maybe not.

I think of myself as a human being who happens to be a woman. One would think that this is rather obvious but our every day language suggests otherwise.

If women (especially women with children) are just people then why do we not have daddy bloggers or dadpreneurs or daddy MBAs? Why is there no 50 Most Powerful Men in Business or the Gentlemen's Professional Golf Association or "men's issues"?*

Ok - so these are rhetorical question - I understand why but the fact that we are so used to this language pattern is very meaningful.

There are two reactions to this state of affairs. The first (and more common among my childless peers) reaction is to avoid any special labels or preferential treatment by gender. This would include eschewing women's organizations, decrying gender based merit scholarships, and doing everything to reiterate the idea that men and women have few meaningful differences.

I am highly sympathetic to this approach but there are two problems. First, is that it verges on reinforcing the idea that male = normal and non-male = aberration. This would be the panelist at a women's conference who exclaimed "Men don't sit around discussing 'work-life balance'!" (Who cares! I'm discussing it! And btw men like to have lives outside of work too. But again, who cares what "men" are allegedly not discussing???) This woman then went on to encourage us to read Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office (or was it Play Like a Woman, Win Like a Man ... or similar obnoxious title?) Perhaps these books have a more interesting and nuanced message inside but I can not get past the loaded titles. This would also be the fellow female student who in a round table discussion on the meaning of CWiB (our student women's group here at Booth) declared somewhat randomly "I'm not on the mommy track!" (Am I on the "mommy track". What the hell is the "mommy track" anyway?)

But there is a second more important problem with this approach: sans babies gender is a completely useless distinction.** But when it comes to babies gender is makes a huge difference and trying to pretend that you are just like everyone else as a woman with children is a great way to drive yourself to despair. (As I have slowly realized.)

Last year I attended a talk by a very well-known woman (former executive at now collapsing enormo-bank) who responded to a question about family/career issues by first saying "Men cover your ears" and then went on to imply that men would not be interested in this side conversation.

But these are not "women's issues". These are "human issues". Motherhood is a fundamental human experience. I think you can simultaneously stand up for the idea that men and women are mostly similar but also incredibly different without undermining social progress.

This was all a preface to say that I'm finally going to post a series of thoughts on gender and babies over the next week or so that have been rattling around in my head for 2+ years. But don't for a moment think that they are a side conversation! If you are a women, have known a woman (or have never known a woman ;) They are for you.


*A search for "daddy blogger" returns about 4 million hits compared to 20.6 million for "mommy blogger", similar story for the other terms.
**I take the somewhat radical position that there is just as much intra-gender as there is inter-gender variation therefore one cannot make meaningful predictions about intelligence, behavior and career prospects based on gender alone. Do men and women have real biological differences that impact behavior? Yes. But in a civilized society where intelligence is more critical than brute force for professional success, I'm not convinced that it matters.

Dealing with MBA Entitlement

I was catching up a few weeks ago with the alumnus who hired me last summer. (He is still at the fund but confirms that it's still brutal in IM land.) Towards the end of the conversation we discussed the fact that a sense of MBA entitlement was counterproductive these days and yet it is awfully hard to escape.

Last autumn I wasn't ready to compromise as I saw many of my classmates doing. I wanted to keep my options open. Now, I hugely regret that stubbornness. I wish I had just taken any old corporate job and been done with it. I've been job hunting more or less for 3 years. I have no more enthusiasm for this game and no more faith in an ultimate payoff.

It's final dawned on me that the reason I was so resistant to returning to Seattle is that it felt like the ultimate admission that I had just made full circle without anything (yet?) to show for it. After all, one of my primary reasons to get an MBA was to get out of Seattle. W/o the MBA my husband and I would both be gainfully employed homeowners, enjoying our children, getting exercise, taking the occasional vacation. W/ MBA we are roughly half a million poorer (tuition, childcare and foregone earnings for both of us), hoping we can get something roughly as good as what we had before, unsure of what we can afford in rent and too busy getting our lives together behind our laptops to pay attention to our children.

Hopefully with time the value will become apparent but the point is to say that MBA entitlement arises not just because the folks who get the MBA are just schmucks (though you can't rule that out entirely ;) but when you pay such a price you really want something big in return. And while the advice to humble oneself and get to work resonates with me, (after all that's what I was doing pre MBA), having spent so much money and time already and having two little ones that I'd like to spend some time with, makes this an increasingly bitter pill to swallow. If the qualities that will make me successful post MBA are just those that I possessed pre MBA - what was I paying for?

I went into this degree with eyes wide open to the financial risks that it entailed and the potential ramifications to my family. (And the '01-'02 MBA job market was still a fresh reminder.) I thought it would be worth it as my ticket to hedge fund land. And it may never be. Which is frankly the best lesson of all. I did not sufficiently hedge my risks* and I let greed blind my inner Eeyore.

In investing and in entrepreneurship losses are to be expected, so hopefully I'm more prepared for that reality than before. And I do believe that things are more likely than not to get better for me from here. But even more than before, I concur that for a happier life, shake off your misplaced optimism. (Passed on by the alumnus just before our chat.)

*Such hedges would have been applying to a broader range of programs and choosing the lowest cost provider. Applying to programs earlier before children. Doing a part-time program. Taking my employer up on sponsoring me for an executive or part-time program. Compromising on employers for the sake of security/stability. Etc.

Regrets, Reflections and Responsible Blogging

I started this blog in 2006 essentially as a letter to myself. It was to be the blog I wished existed then. But as my fortunes became tied to the Booth brand, this became more complicated. What I have tried to resolve for myself over the past month or so is to what extent I want to speak freely about this experience and to what extent I should. What do I owe myself? What do I owe the school? And what do I owe to the younger me's out there? And what is worth saying?

I realize now that it is difficult for prospective students to get a frank view of the MBA experience because it is so difficult for insiders to speak frankly. When I was speaking officially for admissions I was completely sincere but very guarded in my comments. I never mentioned the hard parts and over the two years I began to feel guilty for portraying this experience in such a one-sided manner. Students who are not sufficiently warned about the hard parts are likely to be far more disappointed. So, for better or worse, this blog was a space for me to come clean. (And while it is true that my less flattering comments are my opinion, not fact, this is just as true of my or anyone's flattering opinions as well.)

But if competing schools don't have frank bloggers airing complaints, it's not particularly balanced. And it can be hard to discern as a blogger when to convey a strong opinion and when to let the moment pass - what is worth sharing and what should be ignored.

One reason I chose Booth was that I found the students to be very genuine. At some schools I felt like they were reading off a script. I think the views about business school in general and Booth in particular, within the Booth community are more nuanced, unexpected and diverse than an outsider might expect.

I somewhat regret starting this blog in the first place and I regret blogging specifically about Booth. Far more interesting is the discussion of the value and place of a business education, gender and babies in an MBA world, the moral complexities of the pursuit of money, etc. If you think this is interesting too, stay tuned ...

On the Job Hunt

On good days (hours) it feels like an exciting challenge and I'm glad to be going back west. On bad days (hours) I feel utterly despondent and afraid I will feel forced to make huge compromises. The biggest issue is that I am still not completely sure of what I can/want to do with myself. My skill set is very specific and in this economy there seems to be less desire to just take "smart MBAs" and assume that they'll figure it out. Recruiting in the off cycle requires a lot of leg work and applicable experience. To be successful these days, one needs to be in top shape ... and ... I'm not. And I didn't structure my MBA with the intention of career switching.

The WSJ has had some articles about MBAs finding themselves returning reluctantly to their pre-MBA industries. Unfortunately that's not even an option if that industry no longer exists as you knew it.

Surprisingly, I find myself still sort of mourning the fate of my old career path. And regretting that my capacity to bootstrap something has been diverted by a recent, hefty investment in human capital. And worrying than an inability to hold one's tongue does not bode well for career sans trading floor.

Oh well. Could be worse. Much worse.

Farewell.

When I was an MBA applicant, blogs had a huge impact on my decision to pursue the degree. In particular, those of female applicants. I consider myself an atypical MBA in several respects and thought it might be worth telling my story. And as my family life evolved, I thought it would be beneficial for folks to get the student parent perspective which is largely absent from MBA blog-land. And frankly, I think that attracting more skeptics and student parents would be a good thing for business schools ... and the world.

But it has come to my attention that my posts are distressing to some and upon further reflection I have decided to stop blogging about my experience. I don't know how to blog any differently than I have been and I don't have the time and energy to worry about the appropriateness of each post. My goal was not to persuade or un-persuade anyone from an MBA or from attending Booth, but simply to give a frank portrayal of an experience that is too often painted as an easy golden ticket. And I think the sort of folk that choose Booth are likely to appreciate that most of all. I have considered quitting blogging many times over the past 3 years anyway. Now is a good a time as any.

But before I go I want to set a some things straight.

1. I have a deep affection for Booth and think it's absolutely one of the best MBA programs around. It was the only program I applied to and the only program I wanted to attend. I have blogged about the silliness of the GSB stereotypes, that my biggest regret was waiting so long to apply, my love for my fellow students, a Booth MBA is worthwhile no matter what the economy is doing, career services is stellar (and here), GND is the best policy, despite the challenges there is payoff in the end, my appreciation for the school's attempts at addressing student parent concerns, why my reasons to MBA > reasons not after the first year, and why I like living in Hyde Park.
   
2. My complaints center around the academic experience and the student parent experience. I may be the only Booth student blogging about this, but I am not alone in this opinion. And I imagine any reasonable candidate would realize that these two issues alone do not rule out all of the positive things found in point #1.
   
3. The remainder of my posts have centered around the ups and downs of my MBA experience that have little to do with the institution. That is, crappy economy, tough IM recruiting, self-doubts about career path, frustration with corporatese, are not an indictment of Booth but simply musings on the world around me. Dear readers, I hope you all get that.
4. Although I blog anonymously I don't say anything on this blog that I haven't or wouldn't say to the administration, fellow students, friends, family, etc. Trust me, there is a lot I do not put in here. But I did not fully appreciate how negatively my posts would come off. And that is unfortunate.
   

The Academic Experience - class supply, professor quality, and bidding can be quite frustrating. I understand that these are big issues and that the school is probably doing the best that it can and I have said explicitly that these facts would not have changed my decision about Booth. But I think it's something incoming students should be aware of and to plan around.

The Student Parent Experience - I am not complaining that being a student parent is hard but that the school has the capacity to make it easier and seems unwilling to do so with any sense of expediency. And that only so much of the fixing should be up to students. I have worked tirelessly since the summer of 2007 to create support and resources for student moms and moms-to-be and my post last Friday comes after email after email after meeting after meeting with CWiB co-chairs from 2008 and from 2009, with student advisors, with admissions, with career services, with various deans, with UCWBG and CWiBAN, and the Partners group and the law and medical schools and NAWMBA and Forte. After organizing events and attending UoC feedback sessions and conducting a survey of nearly 300 female MBAs and combing the GMAC data and writing a 21 page paper and collecting stories from alumnae and trying to market a Google group and begging CWiB for 50 bucks for a thank you gift for a speaker and moderating a panel on work-life balance comprised of 2 ibankers with no apparent lives to speak of and making myself available to prospectives and incoming students and putting my family story in the viewbook and putting together a website and waiting 5 weeks for Interactive Media to respond to a request to update our internal website.

I get it that Booth has a lot of things to deal with and that this might not be top of the list but my frustrations arise out of the challenges of trying to enact change, not simply a lack of perfection on the institution's part. And last Friday, after reading Bertrand's study and reading a Chibus article in which a former lead facil complains about students who have the audacity to bring their kids to LPF and struggling to find any co-chairs for MaB which meant all this effort was at risk of being for naught, I just broke down. I couldn't pretend any more that all was well and progress was being made. I was out of energy and out of fresh ideas. And angry.

• On Becker: my beef comes after a conversation with him after a presentation last spring on the returns to women's education.
  
• On CWiB: absolutely no beef with the co-chairs. The 2009ers have done a fantastic job of reviving a neglected group. I have high hopes for the 2010ers. However, I believe CWiB would be more effective if the school took on a more active role rather than expecting 6 students to do everything. (The website for a key group should not be left out of date for years, for example.) Membership should be free and universal to all female students, subcommittees should be formed to handle various initiatives and events, leadership should be voted in not appointed for greater accountability and members, not co-chairs, should decide which initiatives they feel are worth pursuing. And yes, I've already shared these opinions with CWiB and others long ago.
• LOE, recruiting, lactation room, internships: all true stories. Improving the lactation room is on my to do list but given how challenging it was to get the thing set up in the first place and how busy I've been, I've just not gotten back to it.

I get that institutions are imperfect. I get that making change is hard. I get that one should try to effect transformation before complaining. And I expect that any person of reasonable intelligence reads this blog with a grain of salt. I represent just one woman in a sea of women with a myriad of stories to share. I would love to hear more of them. And never thought my opinions would be that controversial.

This was my story and I've shared it. As graduation draws near I am excited to embark on the next phase of my life and have no qualms about choosing to MBA in the original question.

Just wanted to clarify.
Best to all in their MBA journeys or otherwise.

The Gift of Knowledge - What's your degree doing for you?

Is it worth it?? The perennial MBA question is all the more popular in tough economic times like today. And despite all my quibbles (and I'm not done quibbling!), I say: Yes. But I'm not sure that all of my classmates would be in agreement with me. I think there are more than a few who feel more regret than I do at the moment.

And this is where it pays to double check your motivation for getting an MBA before leaping in. Although I laid out a specific trajectory in my applications, I didn't go back to school with my heart set on one industry or one employer. I'm an opportunist - I go where the money is and where the boredom is least. There's a lot of things I could do for a career and be happy.

I went back to school to get an education that would leave me a more capable business woman than when I entered. Achieving that goal is independent of the level of the Dow Jones. If you hoped to drink and golf away two years and emerge with a bigger, fatter salary or transform a career gone astray through the magic of "MBA" on your resume alone, the MBA may not be worth it these days. If you want to make the most of classes or case competitions and new friendships and everything else a great program has to offer, you'll still get those benefits even if jobs are harder to come by. In fact, I don't see how I would be any better off without the degree. I would probably be even more economically frustrated.

I majored in Economics in college because I thought it was the most interesting subject available. I took the CFA exams because it was a way for me to learn finance and accounting and try to make sense of the baffling financial markets. I'm not an economist. And it looks like I'm not going to even work in a capacity in which ", CFA" means anything. Was it worth it? Absolutely. To understand something about monetary policy and Keynesian theories and fundamental analysis (etc) is a powerful gift. (As well as avoiding future Madoffs.) And from the MBA, to have finally settled for myself why I think active management is a waste of time and money and PE/VC is not for me and to have some clue about what "lean manufacturing" means practically, among many other lessons, is worth a lot.

It's painfully cliched, but the MBA is really what you make of it. Choose your program wisely and remember, even in better times, it's no magic bullet.

Go West, Young Woman! Seattle. Fine.

So I reserved a Penske truck from Chicago to Seattle. When I left Seattle in August of 2007 (a lifetime ago) I (a) never expected to return and (b) promised my husband that we'd be moving on a fat corporate relocation package when I graduated. Ha. Wrong on both counts.

I grew up east of the Cascades and can count on one hand the number the number of times I traveled west across the mountains before college. New York City was actually the only city I knew very well. Summer vacations to my grandmother's east side apartment and Sag Harbor home stood in stark contrast to the scrubby, off-the-grid existence I experienced for the remainder of the year. I started college in the Berkshires, thrilled to finally live in "civilization". But the New England charm quickly wore off and a semester at a college on the upper west side quickly wore me down. So after a succession of unexpected events, I found myself a college dropout at the height of the dot com bubble cleaning houses for newly minted Microsoft millionaires and delivering pizzas to frat boys in the U-District. (In Seattle.)

Ironically, if it weren't for Seattle I would never have gotten an MBA. I finished college in Portland and decided I had found my home for life and had about as much education as I could handle. Unfortunately, my husband couldn't make a living in Portland and back north I went. I don't know why I dislike Seattle. It's not a proper city (Chicago, New York). It doesn't have the edgy, charm of Portland. But the scenery is fantastic. I'm perfectly fine with the weather. (In fact love the weather.) It's clean and affordable and has decent jobs (normally) and doesn't frown on ambition like Portland. And, in fact, there aren't many cities I would choose to live in over Seattle. But when we moved north, all I could think of was getting out and an MBA seemed like my ticket. Transformed from MBA hater to MBA lover, I expected to end up in New York, London or Hong Kong post-degree.

But there is also a sense of relief. It's an infinitely practical solution in an increasingly puzzling world. So fine. Seattle it is.

Senioritis

I assume I'm not alone in my general lack of enthusiasm for all things academic? In fact, the GSB (Booth) itself is beginning to wear a bit on me this week. (I see why we hand over student group leadership positions around this time.) I can't seem to figure out how to make classes take up less time. Every assignment, big or small, takes hours more than I budget for. I've yet to crack the art of getting by. Doing all or nothing feels much easier. But "all" is just not an option right now. I am itching to get back to "real" life where I get paid to do work rather than paying someone else so that I can do work :)

I love my vacation

What a wonderful 3 weeks. I am relaxed like never before. If only I had 3 more weeks. I was thinking back on this break last year which was a miserable cover letter, interview prep, stock pitch research experience. Ugh. Not the least bit relaxing. I was so overwhelmed and stressed and then it only got worse ... for the rest of the year (farewell 2008!).

I've said this to a couple of first year GSBers already but just for the record, it doesn't pay to worry yourself too much over the internship thing in my opinion. If only I had known:

1. It's not going to make or break your career (yes, if you don't get the inbanking gig with Goldman, odds are it may be your last chance with them. but if they don't want you - who gives a shit? you've got better things to do with your life)
2. Ultimately, you're going to find what is right for you. Just because you think XYZ employer or XYZ job will fulfill your life dreams does not mean (a) that you're right or (b) that, even if you are right, that there aren't other just as great options out there
3. There is a high probability that you're going to have to/want to go through recruiting all over again in your second year - so pace yourself
4. For you IMers - getting an IM job is the most amazingly painful, arbitrary process ever (and you thought getting into a top MBA was hard ...) so just take it for what it is and make the best of it

And, if you do find yourself in your second year of the MBA sans job in the midst of a recession, I recommend you stash all job thoughts for 3 weeks and enjoy yourself for a little while.

Somehow this fall, inspired partly by our need to be extra frugal, I have re-discovered my love of cooking after a 2+ year hiatus. Between the temporary studio apartment pre-MBA, the newborn, the cross-country move, the job search, the career-identity crisis, the temporary summer housing, general grumpiness ... my cooking brain went into deep freeze. For a couple of months now, I have been cooking almost every night and it's been a great change of pace for me. And with the whole world shut down for Xmas and New Year's the past 9 days has brought roast veg lasagna, piles of latkes, gallons of applesauce, rugalach, Mexican wedding cakes (the little cookies), pfeffernusse, candied orange peel, caramel popcorn, banana muffins, pumpkin muffins, spiced cider, fresh lemonade (I love lemonade and can't believe I haven't been making it fresh before*) and pina colada sorbet. Among other things. A good college friend who also shares the cooking love was here all week with her boyfriend. Monday was my old favorite quick dinner standby of fish tacos**. Tuesday brought the always delightful Vietnames beef noodles (which I like to do with tofu when I'm not in the mood for cow). We enjoyed an Indian feast on New Year's eve and welcomed in 2009 with a New Year's day feast of Russian fare. Nothing like a week with folk who understand the pleasures of the kitchen to top off the break. My New Year's resolution is to buy only whole spices and roast and grind all of my own spices from now on. And I bought a little window box and am going to try to grow some herbs indoors. We'll see how that goes.

So good bye 2008. I can only hope 2009 is an improvement. I hope everyone is feeling happy and relaxed as well.

*Juice two lemons into a quart of water, add sugar to taste. Beats store bought any day.

**I use pre-breaded, store bought fish fillets (the good kind ala Trader Joe's/Whole Foods), corn tortillas (wheat tortillas = yuck), refried beans, thin sliced cabbage (either fresh or you can salt and let stand for 15 minutes + a little pickle juice for extra flavor), white sauce (just mayo + fresh lime juice) and whatever condiments are on hand such as fresh tomatoes, salsas (mango is great), Cholula, avocado, cheese. Just warm and assemble.

Dear R1 Applicant ...

Hey, big congrats to all admitted in round 1 - at the GSB or elsewhere. Good job! Now the real work begins ;) ... so do a lot of relaxing between now and next August.

But to those of you with a painful ding - my heart is with you. I know all about the frustration and disappointment of rejection. Unfortunately, this application process is subjective and, at times, arbitrary. There is not always a bright line between the successful and unsuccessful bschool applicant and this ding will not make or break your career. You are certainly not the first bright, ambitious, totally bschool worthy applicant to be culled in the final cut. So don't despair!! It's not worth it. Either you'll find another great school, get into the GSB another time, or go on and do fantastic things sans MBA. You're going to do great things one way or another. So relax, reassess and don't be too hard on yourself.