Thanksgiving rules

I am freaking tired of eating.

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. It's really relaxing, and I love pecan pie.

I am taking advantage of this little down time, because once it's over, I will be busy up until school ends. With papers, finals, projects, presentations, etc, I will be in a school coma until the 11th of December. At least it will be over after that, until January.

Tomorrow, Arkansas v LSU. One of the most anticipated football games of the year for any hog fan. I was talking to some people today about how I feel that Arkansas considers LSU a big rival, but that LSU just thinks we are just another game. Oh well, they can think whatever about us as long as we keep beating them.

Bloomberg Training- Update

Bloomberg training is over. It was surprisingly exhausting. Good news though, I am done being professional developed. For those that may not know, the Walton MBA program requires you to fulfill 48 hours of professional development in order to graduate. I have had trainings in Excel and PowerPoint (super useful), studied negotiations (super interesting) and now have been introduced to a huge list of Bloomberg functions (super useful and just regular interesting).

Choosing between going full-time for a MBA and going part-time was a decision I debated for a long time being entering the program. Eventually, I chose full-time and I believe I made a good decision considering my situation at the time. For anyone else having a rough time making a decision, you should know that if you chose to go part-time, and have to be in class all day one Saturday a month, as bad as that is, you will be well feed. Trust me. The part-timers had class today and me and some fellow full-timers went and raided some of their food spread during a Bloomberg break. They had all kinds of cookies, chips, fruit and other snacks. Ridiculous amounts of food. And coffee. And before that, they had a bunch of BBQ for lunch.

Worst thing about being in a training all day, didn't get to watch the Hog game. Oh well, at least we won.

Bloomberg Training

Just wanted to mention something really cool. We just received a bunch of new Bloomberg terminals in our trading center. When before we only had 2, now we have like 12. In addition, tomorrow and Saturday we are having all day Bloomberg training sessions. This kind of experience will really come in handy when interviewing for finance positions. The only problem is that part of the training is on Saturday. Not only am I not a fan of doing anything school related on Saturdays, but the training is also during a Hog football game. We are playing Mississppi State this weekend, and it should be a good opportunity to see the Hogs actually beat a SEC team. I am going to record it and try my best to not have the outcome spolied before I can get home and watch it, but that usually never happens.

Super ready for the holidays. So far, my professors have been very cordial with the amount of work assigned over the holidays, but we still have three days worth of classes to go, so there is ample opportunity for them to lame out turkey day.

My Dog Loves Baked Cheetos

This is my dog, Swayze. As the title of this post suggests, he loves baked Cheetos (among other foods). Why am I writing about this? For no good reason, that's why. The past couple of weeks have been terrible. Two tests, a big group project, GA work and a couple job interviews that came out of nowhere made for a hectic couple weeks. Today, I met with my mentor for the first time, and since then, I have been taking advantage of a well deserved afternoon off. It has been great. I watched some TV, did a little laundry, went to the gym, and shared some Cheetos with my dog. Tomorrow the plan is to tailgate all day before the final Razorback game in Fayetteville this year. I am thinking about trying to get ahold of some tickets. I haven't been to a game yet this year and I usually try to go to one. Anyway, the point of all this is that I am chilling out today and tomorrow before it is back to the school grind Sunday.

The semester is coming to a close which means that I am almost 66.66% done with the Walton MBA program. I wonder what I'll be doing one year from this exact point in my life? I honestly have no idea. That's pretty cool.

Mid-terms, Round 2

Last semester each class had two in-class tests, a midterm and a final, and they were all scheduled around the same time. This year, I have two rounds of midterms. One has past, it as back in mid-October, the next round is next week. I have an investments and an accounting test next week, plus I will be proctoring student evaluations for six classes. I also have a lunch meeting with my mentor that was assigned to be by the graduate school. So, I am pretty busy, but what else is new.

Last week's interview went well, and I am supposed to find out about a decision sometime this week. It's Thursday, so I assume I should be hearing fairly soon.

Big football game this weekend. Arkansas has had the year that most expected, not good, not terribly bad, just a little below some middle ground between those two. This week it's South Carolina, gotta be those guys. If we can end the year 7-5 we will be in pretty good shape for a bowl game.

Job Searching

As I believe I have mentioned before, I have hit a little pocket of increased free time as far as my school workload goes. As a result, I have been looking for jobs like crazy.

I hate looking for jobs.

There is something about trying to impress someone using only a single sheet of paper that is utterly ridiculous and demoralizing. Here is a short list of reasons why job searching can be a serious pain....

• Where are the jobs? At times, searching for job openings on a companies' website is way harder than it should be. Sometimes it seems like companies purposely make finding the actual job openings as painful and time consuming as possible. Maybe they do this to weed-out those individuals with no patience for hunting through all the gibberish. I don't know.
• Don't leave me in the dark. I hate it when companies never get back to you. If I spend the time to fill out all the information required to apply for a job, at the very least, I feel entitled to a response from the company. For the most part, this hasn't been an issue, but sometimes, they never even let you know. That's totally frustrating. To this point, yesterday I applied for a job and I was turned down within 5 minutes. Either my qualifications made it a no-brainer for them, or they are really efficient with their hiring practices. Either way, I know to move on.
• Why do I have to both submit a resume, and recant my job experience? This is probably my least favorite aspect of job searching. Sometimes companies want your actual resume, plus they want to you basically retype your resume into their predetermined format. What is the point in that?
• When applying online, making salary requirement a required field. I know this is important to a lot of companies when making hiring decisions, but how am I supposed to gauge how much I would require for performing a particular job duty if all I know about the position is from the little bit of information provided in a single job description. This seems like something that should be a required discussion much later in the hiring process.
• Feeling like you will never get a job. This is the worst. When you've applied for 50 jobs and have zero to show for it, you feel like you are destined to deliver pizzas the rest of your life.

As I said, I hate job searching, but at least this search will be way easier than any I have had before. Receiving a Walton MBA has given me the opportunity to apply for all types of jobs, that before, I would never have been qualified for. This encourages me through my search.

Plus, there is one thing I always tell others to remember about job searching, one day you don't have a job, the next you do. These things tend to happen out of no where and all of a sudden. So, even though I was just turned down for another job (literally, as I type this), I could get a call tomorrow from someone wanting to interview me.

Big Interview

With the second semester mid-terms over, we are offically halfway through the program. That's an awesome feeling, but also kind of scary considering I don't have a job lined up after school yet. The last couple of weeks I have slacked on job searching in order to study for tests, but this week and probably next week will give me a great window of opportunity to get back to the search.

While on the topic of job searching, I have a pretty big interview coming up. It's the kind of interview I have heard that MBA students can expect. The interview is with four people, the controller, assistant controller, the mangager of financial reporting and the head of audit. These are some big players in the company. The interview is scheduled to last two hours and the company head quarters are located in another state, so they are flying me to the interview. I have never been on an interview of such scale, so I am both nervous and excited about it. We'll see how it goes....

Went camping last weekend. Every year a big group of my friends have a camping trip, this year we had it on some private land so we could be as loud as possible. Pictures to come.