One week ago today, I was settling into my plane seat for the start of a 12-hr trip return trip from an international vacation.  I’ve only been in Boston seven days now, but it seems like a lifetime!  Reflecting back over the week, it doesn’t seem like there was all that much to do… after all, classes didn’t start until Wednesday.  Even so, I feel like this has been one of the most exhausting weeks of the year.

Here’s a preview of what’s been on my mind lately.  I’ll probably hit each of these in more detailed posts over the next few weeks.

1. Apartments.  I hit a better slot in the HRES lottery this year (#5 instead of #11) and took the opportunity to “upgrade” to the on-campus apartments.  For the next year, I’ll be living in One Western Ave… not a penthouse suite by any means, but a lot more spacious than my tiny dorm room.  I’m excited about the chance to try something new, but it’s ridiculously expensive and time consuming to move into a new apartment, furnish it, and try to fit all of my old stuff (that was sitting in a storage unit) into this new, small space.
2. Classes. My class schedule for this semester is so-so.  I sat in on “Real Property” (a real estate course) on Thursday and Friday… absolutely fascinating course that I really, really wanted to take.  Unfortunately, the add/drop process didn’t work out for me, and I wasn’t able to make it in… pretty disappointed, particularly since I think I could’ve added it fairly easily if I had put more time into thinking through the schedule during sign-up last semester.  The rest of my classes are all popular standbys… they’ll be interesting enough, but can’t say I’m thrilled about any of them.
3. Comments. I was fortunate enough to receive “First Year Honors” this semester (top 10-15%)… and I’m actually on-track for a potential “Baker Scholar” designation (top 5%).  While I’m excited about it (ego affirming – particularly since I’m one of the few without an Ivy League undergrad), I’m feeling a lot more pressure this semester.  Last year seemed pretty easy – I spent 30min-1hr per case and felt like I could contribute without extensive study.  This year… well, it’s been three days and I haven’t commented yet!  The courses are more specialized, and I’m struggling to keep up… not even close to being in a position where I’m a step ahead to make the “1” comments.
4. People.  In between moving in, reading cases, rearranging my class schedule, and spending time with the girlfriend – I’ve almost completely neglected this critical piece of returning to school.  It’s really a shame… I want to reconnect with everyone beyond the simple 5 minute “how was your summer?” back-and-forth in the halls, but it has dropped off the bottom of my priority list lately.  On top of that, the benefit (?) of switching classes every hour to sit with a new group of people is that it really emphasizes how HUGE this graduate program is.  My weekly interactions have expanded from 89 other people to 445 people (89 x 5 classes)!  There’s some overlap, but it’s still a huge shift.  It helps me appreciate the first year more… the stable section experience makes HBS feel so much more comfortable and manageable.
5. Clubs. I’m co-President of a club this year and have ZERO desire to do anything with it.  Not sure why I agreed to this… the return per hour invested is just so low on the list that I’m going to have to work hard to keep this top-of-mind (and avoid overloading the other President).
6. Jobs. One undercurrent is the whole job situation.  I had a great summer and received a full-time offer, but I’m not 100% sure it’s the direction I want to head with my career.  I have to decide how I’m going to handle this… the recruiting season for ECs is just around the corner, and my offer expires in a couple months.  Is it worth going through the whole networking / application / interviewing hassle again?  Such a time-sink…  I’ve been tossing around the idea of trying something in finance, but is that even realistic?  Or has my summer in consulting locked-me-in to that career path?

… and with that, the first week draws to a close.

HBS actually makes it quite easy to apply with strict rules for recruiters and a very polished “job bank” containing all of the descriptions for on-campus recruiting.  Keeping in mind that there are 900 first-year students, the general stats are: 370 Jobs Total, 170 Finance (46%), 200 Non-Finance (54%).  In the non-finance category, the breakdown looks something like this:

Non-Finance Jobs

First, a quick disclaimer:  even though there are only 370 total job listings, a number of them do hire multiple people.  Some of the bigger firms even end up taking 10+ people from HBS (in good years at least).  That said, two surprising things to note here:

1. Even within a downturn, finance internships still make up almost 50% of the opportunities! For all that they say about HBS being “general management”, it looks like finance still dominates.
2. There are actually 10 jobs categorized as “manufacturing”.  Who would’ve guessed this category still existed in the US?

As someone who doesn’t particularly like crowded, cold places, I was also particularly interested in the location distribution among the job opportunities:

Locations of Jobs

Not surprisingly, almost half of the single-location jobs are located in Boston & NYC.  It was good to see a fairly strong showing from the West Coast… On the other hand, I was disappointed to find that among the 60-some International jobs, only a few of those were appropriate for US citizens.

After much deliberation, I ended up applying to 20-or-so jobs.  Giving priority to the large consulting firms, then choosing a few general management / strategic planning roles at firms within attractive industries in attractive locations (ie, not the Northeast).  Part of me felt like this was a ridiculous number of jobs to apply for, but it’s extremely difficult to tell what my marketability will be like in this tough economic environment.  We’ll see how it goes!  Depending on the outcome of the next few months, I might end up kicking myself for not conducting a more thorough “networked” jobs search!

This is a great time for business schools.  Applications skyrocket, ivory-tower professors are looked upon once again for advice, and “expert” panels are formed left and right to diagnose the problem.  In recruiting news, BusinessWeek had an article recently about the shift of MBAs from investment banking to consulting.  I’m a bit dissapointed in this… while I’ve tossed around the idea of doing some sort of financial engineering for a hedge fund, I think I had set my sights on a consulting job with McKinsey (at least for the summer).  There’s still the possibility, but the market just got way more competitive.  Here are the career stats for the top four job functions for the class of 2008:

• 45% – Finance
• 22% – Consulting
• 11% – General Management
• 7% – Marketing

Those 45% of HBS grads have to go somewhere.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the breakdown is for this upcoming year…  (As a side note, this may be one of the “good” outcomes of the whole financial mess… talent will reallocate from being highly concentrated in finance to more productive uses throughout the economy.)