Day 25 – Planning Ahead!

The days are slowly becoming more and more routine, except that there is definitely no time to get bored! The morning started with a Business Economics lecture, during which we focused on costs. First we picked up on the Monday’s lecture and talked about users’ costs. The example given was about house prices and triggered a long discussion on this topic – apparently this is a sensitive subject for everyone! Then we moved on to a different aspect of costs and looked at the cost of labour and law of diminishing marginal returns. This was actually very funnily illustrated: the professor gave one of our classmates (who was sitting next to me) a pile of A4 paper sheets and a stapler and asked her to staple the edges of each sheet, processing as many sheets as possible in 20 seconds. She managed to do four. Then he asked me to join her and we had to work together, using one stapler only, so she was folding the sheets and I was stapling them. We did seven in 20 seconds. And finally one more classmate joined us, and we still had only one stapler, so the end result was 9.

During the lunchbreak we were supposed to have a session on Refworks, which is a bibliographical software for reference management. Our syndicate team had to skip it, because we had to organise the upcoming assignments, so hopefully we will be able to catch up on this. Talking about the upcoming assignments, one of our team members put together a little spreadsheet, listing all the deadlines we have and the grade weights given to each assignment. Having looked at it, I personally am gradually switching into panic mode – October looks pretty bad, especially the week commencing 16^th of October, when we have a few big ones. There is an Accounting report counting for 40% of the course and also the Decision Analytics group case study, which also counts for 40%.

So we used the lunch break to look at those cases and try to do some preparatory work. Hopefully, with effective planning we will be able to finish everything on time without any rush.  For the accounting report, each of us will need to analyse the annual report of one company within the same industry, and we already picked our companies, distributed them and planned to look at their reports and take notes over the weekend, so that we can discuss on Monday. For Decision Analytics we have a case with data to analyse, and as I mentioned in one of the previous posts, we don’t yet know whether our team will have to defend the analysis or challenge it. Shortly speaking, life is not easy at the moment, even though I am still in the positive mood and still enjoying the course!

The second lecture of the day was Decision Analytics and its topic was hypothesis testing. Thank goodness that I have taken two levels of CFA, because that is when I first got to study these quantitative methods. If it hadn’t been for that, I imagine, I’d now be seriously struggling with all those concepts of confidence intervals, t tests, null and alternative hypotheses etc. I did struggle back then, and that was in a much more relaxed atmosphere! We got our results for the Monday’s quiz, and my score was 14 out of 15.

After that a small group of us had an informational interview with an Imperial MBA alumnus, who kindly agreed to come and meet us on the campus. He is Michael Windmill and he used to work as a Principal Consultant for Atkins until September, when he moved to a smaller consulting company, Alchemmy. At the same time he is a co-founder and partner of Sawa Partners, which is a small company providing business consultancy services for different companies and start-ups. I found the conversation very useful, definitely more useful than meeting some company representatives in a very formal setting, and Michael was very open and honest about his experience.

Day 23 – Studying and Networking

It’s getting tougher and tougher… Not that I am already completely overwhelmed, at least I am still positive and enjoying, but there just seems to be too much going on at the same time! I also find it harder to find time to go to the gym, but I’m still sticking to it every day – today I had to go at 7am. I was really in doubts about whether I would be able to wake up at 6am for that, but then very conveniently the fire alarm at our building went off at 5.45 because of a neighbour who was cooking something (at this time!!!)

The morning started with the Organisational Behaviour lecture, during which we discussed networks in general and started with the article on the so-called ‘weak ties’ that we had to pre-read. As it is obvious from the name, weak ties are pretty much synonymous to superficial ties, i.e. connections that don’t involve a lot of time spent together and lack intimacy and emotional closeness. The author argues that weak ties tend to be more useful in terms of information transmission and new connections forming, as opposed to strong ties, because in the case of the latter everything kind of stays withing a closed group.

Then we got a group simulation exercise, which is due this Thursday. The exercise is the Everest case that has to be online and is done in groups of five people (which are different from our syndicate groups), each of which is assigned a certain role: leader, marathon runner, environmentalist, physician or photographer. This group of people has to climb the mount Everest (virtually!) as a team, but each team member has their personal goals as well. So the simulation is about balancing the team goal with personal goals, at the same time taking into account things like the weather, the health condition of the participants etc. We have started doing the simulation today, but couldn’t finish because of other things, so are aiming to do this tomorrow. I personally wasn’t quite happy with the fact that we were given just two days for something that has to be done by 5 people simultaneously and requires at least 1-1.5 hours of time. It’s very hard to find a time slot, given that people are busy with other assignments… Otherwise, it’s a very interesting exercise, I just wish we had more time before the deadline, because given the current workload and also the fact that it only counts for 3-4% of the grade, there isn’t really much incentive to spend a lot of time and effort on it.

During the lunch break we had a pretty short one-hour session with someone from the library where she explained how and where to find business information for assignments on the library website – apparently there is plenty of information available, including various company and industry profiles, which is very useful indeed.

The Accounting lecture was dedicated to financial ratios and their analysis, measuring return on capital employed versus weighted average cost of capital etc. We also looked at various cases and short scenarios and answered questions.

The next 40-45 minutes after the lecture was pretty much the only time where we could squeeze working on our Everest case. Because after that some of our cohort had to head off to the LinkedIn office for the Consulting Employer Panel event with representatives of Accenture, Bain and BCG. Apparently, LinkedIn has this MBA Arena initiative, holding monthly (I  think) employer panel events, where students from various business schools can meet business and HR leaders.

It started with a speech (or should I rather say a dialogue?) of two LinkedIn representatives, one of them being Sandy Khan, the founder of the MBA arena. They spoke about recruitment in general, LinkedIn profiles etc.

Then they invited the panel members (these were Julia Reichert-Wack, Principal at BCG; Eduardo Roma, Partner at Bain and Diana Barea, Managing Director at Accenture) on the stage. The format of the discussion was Q&A – Sandy was asking general questions about their experience, their company culture, what they enjoyed about their companies etc. Then it was time for the audience’s questions – and those were asked online via www.sli.do – apparently this is a relatively new tool that is becoming quite popular, as I’ve been seeing it a lot lately.

So these are all people who have spent at least 10 years working in consulting and, according to their own words, are highly enjoying the experience. One of the things Diana mentioned, for example, was that the good thing about consultancy career is that it allows you to shape it for yourself, however you want it to be. Another points she mentioned were that, contrary to beliefs that consulting employees have to travel Monday to Thursday, she only travels a couple of days a year when she wants to, and at all other times she is based in London and just uses Telepresence/Lync/Skype to connect with people in other countries. For the very same reason there is actually no pressure for physical presence in the office. According to Julia, it is quite similar in BCG, where more and more people prefer to leave work at 6 to spend time with their families and then go online from home and finish what they need to do.

The panel discussion ended with recruiters from each company talking about their recruitment process. Then there was a networking session where we got a chance to meet the company representatives, but also students from other Business Schools. There was quite a large group of people from Cass, one of which is actually my ex-colleague from Baku, quite a surprising and unexpected encounter 🙂 It turns out that the Cass cohort is only slightly bigger than ours, also very diverse in terms of nationalities and backgrounds (I was surprised about the latter, as I had the impression, that Cass students would be more finance-oriented), and their programme structure is largely similar to ours.

I also met one of the volunteering organisers of the event, an Imperial graduate who has his own start-up and is actually about to launch something very interesting: new technology for the real estate market, which will essentially allow to do property viewings through virtual reality, rather than physical visits.

 

Day 12 – More Induction

Even though our lectures started yesterday, there weren’t any today, so I guess I could characterise today as the last day of induction.

First thing in the morning we had the MBA Market Presentation by Mark Davies, who is the Corporate Relations Manager at the Career & Professional Development Service team. He started with two important things to bear in mind:

1. Recruiters value previous work experience more than the MBA degree;
2. It’s quite difficult to do a ‘triple jump’ – i.e. change location, sector and role in one go, so prioritisation is needed here.

But of course there are serious reasons why recruiters want to hire MBA’s, and in our particular case, those from Imperial – such as the academic knowledge, interpersonal skills, interests, business development and consulting skills, entrepreneurial way of thinking, language skills and international experience, motivation, and, after all, the ‘Imperial brand’.

The most effective techniques for MBA recruitment vary in different regions. In the UK and Europe, for example, the top three are 1) MBA projects/internships; 2) employee referrals and 3) job postings on company websites. In the US, however, the three most effective techniques are: 1) on-campus recruitment; 2) university partnerships and 3) MBA projects/internships.

Then we went through different recruitment processes for MBA’s – there are companies, which have special MBA programmes, such as L’Oreal, Amazon, BP or GE. There are also those who do MBA internships – American Express, Ebay, Shell, Novartis, Expedia. Some companies, like Uber, Visa, Unilever, don’t have special programmes, but still require or prefer people with MBA degrees for their postings. And there are also companies, which don’t explicitly state such a requirement, but are just MBA friendly.

Then we had an introduction to the Imperial and London entrepreneurial ecosystem. I haven’t taken any photos, because my phone was charging, but I did take notes. We were told about the opportunities that Imperial provides for start-ups, such as facilities/labs for lean hardware and prototyping and also other resources for different kinds of start-ups, such as social, climate-impact, digital and biotech/medtech ones.

We also discussed the differences between entrepreneurial initiatives. For example, accelerators tend to be of really short duration (3-6 months) with intense support and mentorship and with a wide range of exit criteria (completion of fixed term, IPO, failure, acquisition). Incubators are more property-based, have longer durations (1-5 years), provide more ad-hoc support and minimal mentorship and have purely physical exit criteria based on growth. And finally, the characteristics of angel investors would be variable duration, no education support, little mentorship and financial exit criteria – follow on investment, acquisition, IPO or failure.

Generally, some of the examples of things, being created at Imperial, are simply amazing – such as endoscopic drones, which can be used for detecting colorectal cancer, or a device detecting funghi in the soil. My Turkish classmate mentioned that if it weren’t for the visa issues, she would totally be tempted to dedicate herself to that – and I fully second that!

And finally, after a networking lunch, we had optional company visits. One group visited Innovate Finance at Level 39 (which is Europe’s largest technology accelerator for finance, retail, cyber-security and future cities technology companies). Now I really wish I had selected that option, as the feedback from my classmates is that this was something really fascinating. And by the way, they also seem to sponsor Tier 2 visas! The other group, including myself, visited PWC Consulting.

First we heard their company presentation – they provide solutions for companies to reduce costs, improve efficiency, remove complexity, transform digitally, manage risk, create insight, grow revenues and operate globally. Their definition of a ‘good strategy’ is one that:

• Makes real changes/trade-offs
• Focuses on competitive advantage that cannot be easily matched
• Links choices to how enterprises make money over time
• Ensure consistency across the business
• Drive management decisions and actions.

Quite frankly, I found this presentation too generalistic – basically something we could have easily read ourselves on the Internet.

Then we were given an opportunity to practice a case study. We were given four newspaper articles on Kodak and Fujifilm and how they adjusted to the digitalisation era and, after being split into teams, representing either Kodak or Fuji, were asked to imagine that we were the Board of the company and discuss our performance and strategy, answering a few questions. Generally, it would have been a useful and good exercise, if they hadn’t rushed through it.

The visit ended with PWC representatives answering our questions on their working culture, recruitment process and working process in general.

Day 11 – First Lectures

The fun has officially ended – let’s get down to business now! Today we had our first actual lectures. But before that out course director Katja Ahoniemi came to tell us more about the MBA programme structure. So right now we are going to have four of our core courses (Accounting, Decision Analytics, Business Economics, Organisational Behaviour and Strategic Problem Solving), followed by more core courses (Corporate Finance, Strategy, Marketing and Innovation & Entrepreneurship). There will be five exams in December. Then, in January we start the new term with our trip to Brussels and more core modules (Design Thinking & Innovative Problem Solving, Investments & Risk Management, Operations and Macroeconomics) with exams in March. What will also happen in spring is the Global Experience Week in China (we will visit Shanghai and Hangzhou) and the Innovation Challenge. And finally in summer we will choose 6 elective modules, a group project (either a Group Consulting Project or Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Design Project) and an individual project (out of doing an internship or a consulting project or a business plan or writing an academic report). I am so confused at this stage, having no idea about what I might choose to do!

The first lecture we had today was the Decision Analytics one. Everyone keeps saying that the professor is extremely tough, however after today’s lecture everyone seemed to like him. He talked about models in general and different kinds of models, on the example of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and some others. I really thought that his explanations were very careful, thorough and easy to follow – hopefully I will still have the same impression when we get to more difficult things! Then we looked at something that was already partially covered during the Excel Workshop – optimisation and linear programming and did an exercise. So far so good!

Just before the lunch break we had a brief introduction to business information at Imperial – i.e. which libraries we have, how to use them to get physical books or journals and also to access online materials, etc.

The second – and the last lecture for today was Accounting, which is taught by the same professor who taught me accounting 6 years ago when I did my masters! We had to pre-read some chapters from the textbook for the lecture, covering the three main financial statements. The lecture was on informational value of financial statements, where we talked about what makes companies valuable, and how to find relevant data in the corporate annual reports.

Day 10 – Group Stuff

Today we were taking class photos and individual ones for this year’s MBA profile book, so we were advised beforehand on the dress code for this. As “beforehand” literally means yesterday afternoon, I started panicking a bit when I saw that we were supposed to be dressed business casual, with a very limited choice of colours – I was planning to wear a black and white striped dress, and it turned out that even patterns like stripes weren’t allowed, and I don’t have any business casual clothing in those colours that were actually alowed. It went well at the end thanks to my classmate who lended me a jacket!

So the morning started with a group photo on the stairs outside the Royal Albert Hall. We were quite lucky that it wasn’t raining in the morning, despite the not-so-optimistic forecast (which turned out true later on though – it then rained pretty much the whole day!), so we could do an outside photo.

Then we had a lot of other activities during the day. Our syndicate group together with two others headed to the Careers Service to have our individual profile pictures taken. Meanwhile, other syndicate groups had either the CV workshop or the group coaching session.

After lunch it was our group’s turn to go to the group coaching session. The aim of the session was to come up with team goals and mission, define what it would take to make a successful team and establish some sort of ground rules to which we would stick in our teamwork. We ended up committing to working for each other; assuming a collective responsibility and avoiding blaming one another; assuming also personal responsibility; asking for help and offering help; communicating and listening to one another; being honest and constructive.

It was a good session, although I didn’t think it added too much value for our team, because we more or less did similar exercises before, but more importantly because we have really been good so far as a team in terms of discussing these things and getting to know each other better. How things would progress when the real work comes up, is a different question, and hopefully we will see more benefits of this session when it comes to practice.

The CV workshop, which we had right after, on the other hand, was extremely useful, at least for me – even despite the fact that a couple of years ago a lady I know, who had just done her MBA, helped me a lot with writing my CV, and shared with me those tips about using particular action verbs (like ‘analysed’, ‘delivered’, ‘led’, ‘produced’, ‘managed’) and also putting in a lot of numbers and making each achievement as quantifiable as possible. But still, there were lots of things that I learned about CV’s.

For example, I always thought that a standard CV should be a one-pager, until just recently someone told me that in the UK it is usually two pages, and I got totally confused. What I heard today was that it can be either, although a networking CV or one intended for financial services / consulting should usually be a one-pager. On the other hand, even when it’s two pages, the most important part should be on the first page. Generally it takes 7-10 seconds for the recruiter to decide if they want to read the CV at all, and then 30-60 seconds to actually read it – so I perfectly understand why someone would want to have the most important information on the very first page. For a dramatic career change a skills-based CV would be more appropriate than a profile-based one. Obviously, the CV should be tailored for each specific job application, in terms of what education and experience to emphasise, and also whether to make it traditional or more creative. We were then shown some examples of creative CVs, which were quite impressive!

There were a couple more interesting points worth mentioning. One was that it turns out women don’t tend to apply for jobs, where they don’t meet all of the requirement criteria – as a result they end up taking up jobs where there is no stretch for them and not much to be learned and easily become demotivated. Men, on the other hand, are happy to apply to positions where they don’t tick all the boxes, believing that they would learn and close their gaps on the job. The general rule is 70-30 – if you can meet 70% of the criteria, go for it!

Another point was on the ‘Interests’ section and how it would be useful for non-native speakers of English to ask a native speaker to check it for them – otherwise people might end up putting things like ‘soliciting clients’ or ‘making home-movies’, completely unaware of what this could potentially mean for the reader!

What we did in the end was swap our CV’s with our neighbours, read them and provide feedback, which I also found really useful.

The day ended with an Entrepreneurship event, which consisted of a guest speaker lecture on how to grow a start-up, the entrepreneurship alumni panel and a networking session. I was enormously tired, to be honest, so was a bit switched off, but the topic was very interesting and I tried my best to concentrate.

The guest speaker was Andrew Shepperd, who runs the Entrepreneurs Hub, the company that helps businesses to strengthen and also to maximise the sales value of their companies. The key point was that the three main questions to ask yourself in order to grow a start-up are:

• What don’t I know?
• Am I a 21st century leader?
• How to prioritise?

And then he expanded on those points. The alumni panel consisted of a few successful entrepreneurs who have graduated from the Imperial College Business School. These guys are doing quite impressive things – from making card cases for iPhones or collapsable suitcases to helping artisan food producers to get there products into the wider market.

Day 9 – More Excel

Today was the second part of the Excel workshop and we moved to more advanced things like modelling, optimisation and scenario analysis. Actually, I did learn quite a few new useful things!

This time it was also more practical, we were given exercises which we had to try ourselves first and then walked through them together. The first case was pure modelling, where we had to look at an incremental project (it was about renting goats for land clearing!) and calculate its incremental profits and cash flows. Not many new learnings for me here, although it’s always good to practice these kinds of exercises.

Then we were shown the Solver add-in and how it is used to solve optimisation problems, taking into account all sorts of constraints, after which we did an exercise, calculating the optimal composition of different raw materials in a steel batch.

The final part of the workshop was scenario analysis, where we went back to the goats case. This was the part I found the most interesting – first we looked at data tables (I am quite familiar with them, except that I always forget how they work!) and then we were demonstrated how to incorporate the rand() function into formulas to get various kinds of distributions of different variables (uniform, multinomial and normal) and how to run a simple simulation for the outputs.

The Excel workshop took up the whole study day, and after that we had a guest lecture from a CBRE Global Investors representative on ‘Future Challenges for Private Equity Real Estate’. The lecture was optional, and although I have never been particularly interested in real estate, I still decided to go – after all, one of my main goals for this year is expanding my professional horizons and getting exposed to other industries to see what interesting opportunities exist out there.

The guest speaker mentioned that everything impacts property values and talked about cycles (there have been 10 recessions in the past 70 years!) – every cycle is different, and this one is like to other with central banks having injected more than $7 trillion into the global economy!

The structural trends impacting the demand for real estate are globalisation, technological innovation, competition for skilled talent, demographics and urbanisation. New forces are emerging, like alternative workplace strategies, e-commerce and sharing economy (access over ownership, with the example of such companies as Airbnb or Uber). All regions grow over time and there is an enormous potential in emerging markets, as the commercial real estate is not very developed there, so the returns are very high, but so are the risks.

Some of the major trends are:

• Asia grows fastest, Latin America and Africa are catching up;
• Ageing populations in many countries mean the requirement for more retirement homes;
• Growth in middle class in emerging markets, resulting in more demand for smaller apartments;
• Modern technology requires less space, and offices become unnecessary in some cases;
• More specialists are needed for subsectors, urban economic analysis, asset value management, risk & reporting, regulations & tax.
• More local knowledge is needed to navigate local economies, government and regulations.

And one more challenge is that yields from properties are falling, while real rents are lagging behind and not keeping up with inflation.

Day 8 – Careers

I was thinking whether I should call today’s post ‘Day 6’ or ‘Day 8’, and finally decided to count the calendar days, rather than working days, otherwise it will get too confusing!

I have spent quite some time during the weekend doing the pre-reads: I am nearly done with the Naked Statistics book and have started reading Statistics for Managers (both required for the Decision Analytics course), have also read some of the Principles of Microeconomics book and a journal article for the Organisational Behaviour class.

A new week has started today, and as promised in one of last week’s posts, I am am going to talk about the MBTI Profile session, which we had first thing this morning (meanwhile, the second half of the group had their Networking workshop). The MBTI (which stands for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is essentially a questionnaire which reveals the psychological preferences for working, taking decisions and generally perceiving the world around. These preferences are grouped into four pairs: Extraversion vs Introversion (E/I), Sensing vs iNtuition (S/N), Thinking vs Feeling (T/F) and Judging vs Perceiving (J/P).

We all had to complete the questionnaires beforehand, as a prerequisite for this session, and right at the beginning each of us was handed their personalised report, describing our preferences and what implications they might have in terms of work style, communication style and problem-solving approach. My profile said that my preferences are INJF but the preference clarity index for each was below 13, meaning that I have really low clarity about my preferences.

We then went through each pair of preferences and thoroughly discussed them, doing some exercises and observing how people with different preferences behave differently. One of the exercises for the Extraversion/Introversion pair discussion was one where we were split between purely E or purely I groups and each group had to think of a perfect weekend break and draw it on a poster. The observers immediately noticed that the E tables were louder, took then pen and started drawing within 3-5 seconds and had lots and lots of fun activities on their posters, whereas the I tables were quieter, only started drawing after about 40 seconds and their posters had less activities.

What surprised me personally the most was that in the Sensing/Intuition pair I came out as an N in the report, which is exactly the opposite of what I always thought of myself. The S-type people like to know the facts, take information through their five senses, collect observations and ensure that things work in practice, while N’s tend to more rely on their intuition, see the big picture, seek out ideas and ensure that things work in theory. I have always thought that I am lacking intuition and also that I can’t always see the big picture, even during the simple exercises today, where we were shown an apple and asked to describe what we see, I was the one to say “apple, red and green, shiny”, while some others saw “health”, “cider” or “Macintosh”.

The exercise which I personally found the most interesting, was the one for the Thinking/Feeling pair. We basically had two tables, consisting of T’s and F’s each, and six silent observers for each table, who, as we were told, were part of our groups. Then every table got a bag of goodies: a small teddy bear and some candy. The task was to decide how to distribute those goodies, given that there were not enough for everybody. Interestingly, our F table gave something to each of the silent observers (we had to decide for them, though, as they weren’t allowed to talk) and then distributed the rest between ourselves, while the T table did exactly the opposite: chose who wanted what among themselves and kept the rest for the observers.

Overall, it was a pretty useful session, as we got to think how to deal with people with different preferences within a group or a team. I am still not entirely convinced that my profile is fully accurate, but I rather tend to agree that I don’t have very clear preferences.

After lunch we had the Careers Induction, during which we met people from the careers department and also our own career consultants. I have scheduled a one-to-one session with my career consultant this Saturday, so now have to work on my CV to make sure it is ready by then.

We were then talked through the Careers & Personal Development Service website and also explained which career clubs we could join (quite a lot of them look rather tempting: Asia Business Clubs, Consultancy Club, Marketing & Digital Society Club, Entrepreneurship club, Private Equity & Venture Capital Club).

And the final agenda item was an alumni panel followed by a networking session with drinks and sandwiches. There were five alumni who joined us today, mostly working as consultants, and one guy everyone wanted to meet was the Oil & Gas Consultant from McKinsey. I personally did find talking to him really interesting and useful.

Day 5 – Team-Building!

The super intense week is now over and I can relax a bit. Today we had our team-building event at the Wokefield Park in Reading, conducted by Grahame Robb Associates (GRA), and it was loads of fun, but also loads of good learning. I personally enjoyed it big time, and surely everyone else did as well.

We were divided into groups of 8, which were different from our syndicate groups, and had to perform a lot of tasks together as a team. Firstly, we met our team’s instructor Rick, who supervised all our exercises and provided lots a valuable feedback. We started with a low ropes exercise, where the idea was to make our way through a series of ropes, poles and bridges, not touching the ground. We did really well, completing the course in 25 minutes, and the collaboration worked out effectively. What worked particularly well was that the team members who were following the first goers asked the latter what techniques they used to get through more difficult sections – and the key learning here is that asking those who have successfully finished the task you are now working on really helps!

The next challenge involved less physical work, but more thinking. It also involved some multitasking, as we had three tasks that we had to complete within the given time: solve a criminal case (a logical problem with five people making three statements each, two of which are true and one is false), put together a jigsaw puzzle and get through the Magic Maze. The first thing that worked well was that we split into smaller groups and put the right people to do the right tasks, so the criminal case and the puzzle were completed pretty quickly. I personally worked on the criminal case with my Chilean classmate and quite proudly can say that our logical thinking worked very well, and within minutes we were able to tell who the thief was!

Then we all struggled with the Magic Maze. The idea of this maze is  that each team member has to make their way through a grid, making one step at a time, and the instructor would indicate whether this step is authorised or not. If it is, you take the next one, if not, you are stepping out of the grid for 30 seconds, after which you start over again. The only information given is that the grid has two entrances – red and blue – with an equal number of team members having to use each entrance, and also that the technique for getting across remains the same (this last bit sounds quite puzzling, I guess – to us it did as well!). The first four of us made it through the blue entrance quite easily – we figured out that there was a certain pattern (two cells forward and one to the right), which we had to stick to, and it worked. When it came to the other four who had to use the red entrance, things started getting tough. The first of the four made it through easily and effortlessly, using the mirror image of the same pattern, but when the next person tried to step into the entrance cell, they were immediately told that this step was a ‘no’.

So this time it was clearly not about the pattern, but rather something else. We tried and tried and tried and nothing seemed to work. Here came another useful piece of learning which Rick shared with us – when things are persistently not working, the best course of action is to stop, take time out and think of a different course of action. He also quoted Albert Einstein on the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I can only say that we did manage to discover the correct way of getting through, and it happened accidentally, by pure luck, but I will not share here what that way was – otherwise people from GRA will hate me! As we shared the learnings from this exercise, another important one we identified is that we had needed a leader to oversee all the three activities, and also that if something works somewhere you shouldn’t make automatic assumptions that this would work in another case (like the fact that the key to making it through the blue entrance is a certain pattern does not necessarily mean that making it through the red one is about the pattern as well).

After lunch we tried a climbing wall with half of the team members climbing and the other half acting as their safety support on the ground. I only went up half way, but given my fear of height, I was happy that I at least tried.

The next challenge was a mental one again, and three teams had to do it simultaneously. We were given a picture of a certain structure, being warned that it was not to the scale, some blocks to build it with and 45 minutes of preparation time, after which we had to predict how much time would the structure take to assemble from scratch and then actually assemble it (the range being <14 seconds for ‘world class’ results and >60 seconds for average per set). The challenge was not only to find the place for each block but also to identify which way up it should be facing, given that the connecting slots were facing both ways. We did manage to figure everything out, and then the strategy we chose was that each team member would be responsible for a certain section of the construction, memorising the location and the position of the blocks.

By the end of the practicing time we learned how to assemble the structure in about 20 seconds. But when it came to actually performing the task, all three teams were quite surprised that everyone missed the part of the instruction which said that the time would be counted on the cumulative basis, for all the three teams performing the task one after another. So we completely ignored the fact that we should have been collaborating with other teams rather than trying to compete with them. We were then given another try and 10 more minutes to prepare, during which we interacted with the two other teams and picked up some pieces of advice from the one that was quicker than us. This time we all nailed it: the total time for the three teams was 38 seconds, making it less than 13 per team on average!

And finally our team did a different low ropes exercise, which had a shorter route than the first one, but the sections were now much trickier and required more strategic planning and thinking. The first decision that we had to make was which direction we would be moving and although some team members suggested splitting in two groups to move in opposite directions, somehow we all ended up going clockwise. We did get through one tricky part quite successfully, but then we got stuck at another one – the rope which we were supposed to hold on to was too loose and no one managed to get through that section. Apparently we needed someone standing at the other end of the section and tensing the rope, but the problem was – how do we get the first person to that other end? Then we applied the time-out technique which we had learned before and figured out that the initial plan to split into two groups moving in opposite directions would help us overcome this obstacle. This time it worked perfectly!

That was it for the activities, the last thing we had to do was to go back to our original syndicate teams and recap what we had learned. Just to summarise my key learnings, they were:

• When something is persistently not working, rather than continuing doing it, it might be worth stopping, taking time out, thinking what is not working and why and changing the course of action.
• Collaboration with others usually yields great results and one shouldn’t be afraid of asking for help of someone who has already done something successfully.
• Everyone should try to give an opinion and encourage others to do so – sometimes it is the most quiet introverts that have the most useful ideas.
• Need for leadership

 

Day 4 – Lots of Excel

Once again I had to go to the gym early in the morning and once again the day has been very long and intense!

At the beginning we had a very short introduction to the Hub, which is essentially a virtual learning platform for our programme.

Then we had a full day Excel workshop. It has been set up to help us prepare for the Decision Analytics course starting next week, which is overall a very good and useful thing given that quite a significant proportion of the class admitted being complete beginners to Excel. As for me personally, I was a bit bored during the first half of the workshop, as the lecturer took us through the very basics of Excel, like how to input data, how to do simple calculations and use basic functions or how to build charts.

It got a bit more interesting for me as we moved to the vlookup function and pivot tables – something that I have come across and used occasionally but wasn’t proficiently comfortable with – and especially to the Data Analysis add-in, which we used to run regressions and t-tests. Being familiar with the theory behind those, I found the add-in rather intuitive and simple to use, but it was still the first time I worked with it.

After Exceling for the whole day, we had yet another event – it was optional and had to be booked in advance due to limited number of places. The event was the company presentation of A. T. Kearney, the global management consultancy firm, who have a special recruitment programme for Imperial College students – they hire MBA’s as associates and MSc’s as business analysts. So the audience consisted of both MBA and MSc in Management students.

The presentation was delivered by Colin Rand, the Comms Media & High Tech Principal at A. T. Kearney, and a few of his colleagues were also present to add comments and answer to questions, and we got a chance to meet and have drinks with them afterwards. Generally, I was left with a very positive impression – not only about the professional aspect of the firm itself, but also, because when the representatives talked about the pleasant and supportive working environment, you could tell that they were being quite sincere rather than saying this because they were supposed to.

There was also the Leadership in Action event, running simultaneously with this one, which was supposed to be a talk on start-ups and the commercial world, by Andy Sadler, who is the VP Sales at Artesian Solutions and which of course I didn’t attend. There was a possibility to join their networking session later, but I was just too tired for this, it has been four long days…

Day 3 – Networking and HSBC

What a great, but long and tiring day this was! For me once again it started very early, because I went to the gym before going to the College – that was pretty much the only time I could squeeze my cardio session in!

Day 3 started with two sessions running simultaneously. Half of the group went to the MBTI Profile session (I wasn’t in that half, so will talk about this session next week, when we have ours!), and the other half had a Networking workshop, during which we basically discussed – not surprisingly! – how to network effectively, and more precisely questions like:

• How to approach people at networking events?
• How to enter and exit a conversation with someone?
• How to make a perfect elevator speech?
• What is the best way to contact people for informational interviews and what questions to ask them?
• How to network online?

I found the session very useful, and the important bit is of course putting everything into practice now!

We finished a bit earlier than originally planned, which left us a whole hour to have lunch, so we checked out the H-bar (ħ) on the campus, and I personally was quite impressed – for just £5 I got a very decent sirloin steak with two sides!

The next item on the agenda was an alumni talk by Yakub Zolynski, an Imperial MBA graduate and a founder and director of a company specialising in recruitment of business school graduates for hedge funds, consultancies, etc. It is known that people do MBA programmes for three major reasons: to progress within their industry, to change the industry or to start something on their own, so Yakub brought the examples of three people from his class, who followed each of the paths (including himself starting his own business). Some key points that he mentioned:

• According to a GMAC survey, this is a good year to get an MBA degree, as the global market for MBA hires is the best in decade!
• The three greatest benefits that the Imperial MBA programme provides are: knowledge, brand and network (and network makes 70% of those!)
• Being an Imperial MBA student makes is absolutely OK to contact almost any senior person and with a proper approach it is quite easy to secure for example a coffee meeting with them (note: I would still like to figure out what exactly a proper approach would be!)

The alumni talk continued with an alumni panel discussion, where 4 of the current MBA students, who are just about to finish their programme, joined us to talk about their journeys and answered our questions. As everything today seemed to be revolving around networking, a lot of the questions were exactly on this matter, and one valuable piece of advice that I heard was that it is useful to set for yourself a weekly or monthly target on how many emails you send to people you want to contact, and that in most of the cases they would be more than happy to help you or at least refer you to someone else who could help.

Then we all headed to Canary Wharf for an HSBC visit. First we heard a presentation by Liz Martins, the UK Economist, on global and UK economy, which I found very useful and insightful. For example Liz talked about the potential exit of the UK from the EU and all the negative impacts this decision would have. Another point was that the UK currently has three persistent problems:

• Large fiscal deficit
• The current account deficit (which is not so much the result of decreasing goods export, as that one is offset by increasing services export, but rather due to net investment income collapsing, meaning that foreign investors are making more on their UK investments than UK investors are making on their investments in foreign debt and equity)
• Productivity weakness

In 1Q’16 the government is expected to raise the interest rates, which would result in the inflation rate rising to 1%, but if the US does not raise their rates this December as expected, the UK government would be quite cautious to ‘go first’, as otherwise this might have an adverse result of a currency war.

Unfortunately, Liz had to leave right after the presentation, so we didn’t get a chance to talk to her, but we had a networking session with some of the HSBC senior staff, which included the Head of Public Sector & Higher Education, Head of Emerging Talent (Europe), Head of US desk and others.

And finally, some of us attended an external startup event, organised by MassChallenge UK, where we got invited by one of our classmates. The event was basically a competition among 50 different startup companies where each company had to pitch their business ideas in just a minute. I had never been to such an event and was utterly impressed to see so many bright and creative people with great ideas ranging from medical solutions for people with various conditions to lots of useful apps for booking meeting rooms, creating short sightseeing tours for very busy people on business trips, etc, etc!