Some Gradschool Greats and Gripes

Last final tomorrow afternoon - time for a breakdown.

Great things about Gradschool
The people. It sounds cliche, but gradschool is a further tightening of the social spectrum one relates to, and it's always fun to hang out with people who are like minded. When you think about it's probably the pinnacle of optimal social settings till the retirement home.

Think about it this way; you start life in grade school. The school is filled with people from all sorts of different persuasions; as put in Ferris Bueller's Day Off you have "The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, [and] dickheads". Plus while you are co-mingling with the masses you also are constrained by your history. If you did something memorable in grade 9 (either good or bad), that has bearing on your identity for the next three years. I'm not saying I had a bad high school experience, but there are benefits of going to university. When you go to your undergrad, you are amongst the masses - able to reinvent yourself - and as you focus in on your major your circle of friends become even more like minded. By the time I finished my undergrad, I probably had 15 close like minded friends; when you go to a grad school which you were on the edge to get into, you find nearly everyone in the program is "your people". As we move into careers the age spectrum will jump out at us, and depending on the business it might be hard to find 100 friends with a passing glance around a room.

The pace. Everything pre-gradschool moves so slowly. Actually most other grad school experiences (engineering, math, history, etc) are equally slow, b-school really is an exception. I'd rather be busy than bored, and balancing 4 quarters of classes, a job search, professional designation exams, and a social life, makes time fly by.

The facility. Coming from a middle class upbringing, and a public university that fed heavily on in-city students, I'm still a bit star struck by the grandeur involved in private universities in America. As an international student, I was going to be paying upwards of ~50,000 no matter where I went , and so it made sense to go to a school where every student ponied up the same amount (instead of state schools which are subsidized for domestics). The result is me spending my days in rooms that resemble Hogwarts. It also has an impact on the undergraduate student body. Graduate students are all driven individuals but undergrads can be... less so. Although there is a lot more 'valley girl' presence in the halls here, generally the students conduct themselves with a bit more class then I am used to, and it's oddly motivating. If all the undergrads are quietly holed up in the library, then I surely am meant to be working.

The material. I'm not taking a Ph.D. developing masters. If I were I'd be eye deep in math and worrying about "quals". Instead I'm learning the why's and how's of industry practiced finance. My undergrad brought me halfway there, but there still was an emphasis on the academic delivery and testing of the material. Now I'm not doing my work by hand, I'm doing it on excel. When I'm doing stats exams I have a laptop in front of me, all of the work involves real world data and situations, and the solution is delivered as a memo, not a proof.

The Gripes
THE DOORS. Oh my goodness, it gets to me every day. For some reason this school loves closed doors. Doors, in its' halls, tunnels, some vestibule doors, doors just there to be doors. On my walk to from my locker to the library I open 8 doors. It's a 2 minute journey! Locker to squash court is 16 doors. The student body has adapted by constantly slapping the handicap buttons to force the doors open for 10 seconds at a time, but I have a much simpler solution. Every interior hall/tunnel door is affixed open by an electromagnet. If a fire alarm is pulled the power is cut to the magnets and all the doors shut. Problem solved. (Ahh real motivation for post appeased)

America. I really like the people I interact with on a day to day basis, but this country can bring a man down a bit. Money in and out is a hassle. Air travel is a hassle. AT&T is a hassle. F1 visa is a hassle. Having to think about 'saftey' is a hassle. Being separated from my CAD licensed car is a hassle. Domestic politics and it's influence on the world is depressing. H1B sponsorship is nearly impossible. And seeing the wealth and race divide is sad.

At my previous university the student body was composed of students from a middle to lower class background. Although this added to the 'riff-raff', it also meant that the people working the cafeteria, washing the floors, and staffing Tim Horton's, were all peers who were just doing some part time work. Here the only establishments that seems to employ students are Starbucks and the libraries, everything else is employed by primarily Black or Hispanic middle aged men and women who show the cultural characteristics of being on the wrong side of the wealth divide. This said I am acutely aware "great" paragraph 4 is in part a direct pairing with this gripe, and I can't have my cake and eat it too.

And those are the big ones. Next post from Canada, where health care is free, strangers high-five, nobody thinks my dance moves are "elaborate", airport security is just a slip and slide, and roads are paved with candy frogs and internet memes.

B-School Bell Curve

Although curving grades is nothing new to most university students, there is something special about how the curve works in most graduate business schools. For starters every class is curved, the guaranteed average for any class is a B+, and in my school 8% of the students will be in the C range. Considering a B average is needed to graduate this seems a little harsh. But the law of probabilities works its magic and most b-school have retention rates above 90%.

For students not used to curving it takes a little getting used to. For instance I knew my intro to finance course in the summer would be just short of a cake walk and to top it off, it had a take home midterm. So with some mild studying the day before and a 8pm to 1am writing period I was feeling confident of an A+ test. And that's I got - on paper. On the curve my low 90 was curved to a B+; it looked like I was in the big leagues now (never fear, the final went swimmingly).Of course there was rumors of "team writing", and I did get a crucial fixed income question wrong, but the fact remained, if I was going to be grabbing the grades I wanted, I needed perfection.

But perfection is hard, so lets put our stats hats on and think about strategy!

The B-School Bell Curve
Using some of the metrics that I have heard thrown around I can approximate my schools curve to something similar to below.

The mean is a B+, it is normally distributed and 8% of the students get a below a B-. There is also a top line percentage quota which I hear is flexible. Regardless because there is a firm tail quota and a fixed mean, the school must have to apply different multipliers to different students grades. In other words if the curve is a bit bi-modal and there is a cluster near the top (as it often is), the penalizer for each grade off perfect would be large to push students down the curve, while weaker scores would receive boosting multipliers. This is where the strategy comes in.

The statistics tell us the curve is going to push you towards the mean whether you are above or below it, so you will be helped in courses you're weak, and hurt in courses your strong (relative to your peers). Thinking about this logically a student who was in 4 courses and got 4 paper grades of 80% would under-perform a student who got 4 paper grades of 60%, 70%, 90%, 100%, assuming their peers performed the same in each class on paper. This is because the 60% and 70% grades are going to receive a curve boost, while all 80% grades will be penalized. The conclusion: be an outlier.

Now we need to drop the assumption that your peers will perform the same in each class, because they won't. With some observation you should still be able to employ the statistical intuition developed above; you need to kill the exams where you think you already have an edge in the class, and this examination-annihilation can occur to some extent at the expense of studying for exams in classes you think you're not top dog. 

The other interesting facet of curves is they implicitly discourage peer-to-peer help, as it is in each persons interest for their peers to bomb tests. Thankfully we are all here for jobs at the end of the day, so there is a equal incentive to help out a classmate - they just might be giving you a job in 5 years. 

Unfortunately no-where in my stats output does it say anything about the usefulness of blogging in midterm season.

The MSc for the Undergraduate Business Graduate

Sometimes a business student comes out of their undergrad and finds that all the golden doors of the private sector remain closed. As they bang their fists, and think indignantly that they have jumped through the hoops, passed the tests, and achieved the grade - why aren't the best employers hiring me?

Maybe its the economy, we are in the bottom of the trough and they aren't hiring anybody. Maybe today's BComm is yesterday's high school diploma and we all need to upgrade to masters and PhD's before the job market opens. Maybe you aren't supposed to work high finance after your undergrad but instead toil away in high tech or at a rental car desk. Perhaps although your school taught you enough to walk the talk, it failed to line up that all important recruitment meeting in your 4th year.

Regardless of what happened, top students seem to do one of 3 things. They upgrade their degree with a specialized masters degree, lower their sights and get ready to plug some time at a mid level job, or take the whole situation as a sign to enjoy their youth and go to Europe. I went to school.

The trouble with choosing to go to school is you need to make the choice in the summer between 3rd and 4th year so you can prep for the GMAT. Unfortunately I had decided to finally get a real summer job and load up on experience, and so instead of spending my days in the sun with clients I needed to plug some serious hours into an internship. Drop 2 classes of TAing on top, plus weekend work with the old employer and there's no time to chug GMAT math questions. So for 3 weeks in September I ignored my classes and plowed as much time as I could into relearning how to do high school math by hand. This hack-kneed self prep only set me up for one thing - dissapointment. So when November came along I slapped my 660 GMAT score on my applications and readied myself for top 20-30 b-schools.

I figured because I had paid attention during my undergrad I should be painfully well equipped for the material offered - these programs pull 80% of their students from non-BComm backgrounds after-all. So although getting top education is a priority, it's not the number 1 issue; I needed a school with brand.

The top tranche usually don't offer MSc degrees and they require 3+ years of work experience. So even without a 700+ GMAT score I'm not going to LSE unless I want to be a financial engineer. So after trimming down to schools that even offered degrees for students straight from undergrad I needed to look for a school that A)was known as a very strong Finance school and B)was a recruitment center for capital market analyst positions in the top firms. I need a stamp on my head that says "high quality | employable", maybe one of these schools could give me that.

BComm-Finance students don't do a Masters of Science in Finance to learn finance, they do it to get a job. And it works out perfectly. You enter this one year super accelerated program in the summer. While acing the foundation finance courses though August, you network your butt off with anyone you can pull a phone call from through your family, undergrad network, and newly established grad network. September recruitment opens up for Analysts and Associates; they usually hire Analysts first. Now you are pushing your b-school tooled up resume that says MSF instead of BCOMM to analyst jobs that typically go to the top undergrad students from the top universities. Better yet, because its September you get to drop that first quarter 3.9 GPA onto to the page. You look like a rock-star candidate; Masters student from a high quality finance school that is rocking great grades and is willing to start out as an Analyst. What they don't know is that your grades are so high because all the general arts students are learning finance for the first time, pulling down the curve, and you are answering all of their interview questions with know-how you learned in your 4th year M&A class. So early in the degree you're really the mid-level BComm grad they wouldn't look at twice disguised as Ivy caliber talent.

Not everyone approaches it this way, in fact most MS students land in the direct hire cycle in the spring. A lucky few with work experience can spin their MS like an MBA and grab associate positions, and some extend their 1 year program to 1.5 years to do an internship in the summer. But I'm convinced the best route is to tackle the market as a super-undergrad candidate. If you can land the top job the year at school refining your quant skills will be more than worth it, and you still leave the door open for an MBA later on.