Some Observations on Goldman Sachs from a finance applicant's perspective

My weekend reading yielded some interesting titbit pieces of info that could be of interest to mba applicants as well as mba students interested in finance. The titbits however are not encouraging if you are thinking of I-banks/Wall street careers.

Background: What I will talk about is the so called derivative space in I/commercial banking, a particular member of this derivative space : credit default swaps (CDS) is now being accused of being the villain that brought down the financial sector.

The CDS for the layman is essentially an insurance against something (usually company bonds/debt etc). An underwriter (AIG) like your local auto insurer charges the insuree a monthly payment (coupon) determined by the CDS rate and if something bad happens to the insuree's holdings the underwriter ponies up the insured money just like an auto insurer pays for your wrecked car in case of accidents. Of course when all these CDSes started defaulting simultaneously (primarily because they were junk grade to start with, for example a pizza delivery boy in orange county,CA ,offered a 350k house loan on zero down, underwritten by AIG, packaged as CDS instrument by Lehmann... u get the picture), the insurer (AIG) was called upon by a myriad of insurees for the lumpsump payments causing the meltdown.

Now the derivative space has some more members besides the CDS notably :

1. interest rate
2. foreign echange
3. equities
4. commodities
5. CDS
   

Brief history tutorial for the layman: During the boom period in Wall street (1998 to 2007) , leading to the meltdown, the entire derivative space ballooned from $33 trillion to about $200 trillion, while CDS grew from about $150 billion to $5 trillion.

However another silent player in this dreaded derivatives basket seems to have risen in a more alarming fashion. It is the interest rate (1, in the list above, specifically swaps but also futures and forwards) that has grown from $24.8 trillion to $164.4 trillion!

In simple terms an interest rate swap (IRS) are merely contracts exchanging a stream of interest payments for another party's stream of cash flows, the underlying interest rate is often the Fed rate. Now associated with the IRS and derivatives is something called Total Credit exposure (TCE) which is essentially a metric that measures a bank's risky credit/risk eposure. Higher the number worse the bank.

Now for the bad news:
The Office of the comptroller of currency released a chart last week for the top 5 banks and the percentage of their total credit in relation to the potential toxic risky credits/derivatives arising from interest rate swaps (item 1 in the derivative basket above).


Table reproduced for better visibility:
Total credit exposure to risk based capital (%)
JPmorgan: 400(Q4 03), 384 (Q4 08)
Bank of America: 178(Q03,08), 179 (Q4 08)
Citi 260: (Q3), 278(Q4)
Goldman: 4(Q3), 1056(Q4)
HSBC : 664 (Q3), 550(Q4)

And drum-rolls please we have a winner. IT IS OUR OLD I-BANK PAL GOLDMAN SACHS WITH A STAGGERING 1056% % ratio of their total credit in terms of interest rate swaps.

The ramifications of this I leave to the readers, but just for fun imagine GS defaulting on these, ah wouldnt that make the AIG collapse look like peanuts. For those getting ready to join Goldman Sachs be sure to ask your bosses about these charts, Id love to have an explanation for their immense love of interest rate swaps. Also those in the class rooms do me a favor ask your fin-profs about these numbers, either way I'd love to know whats going on with this epic GS and IRS love saga. And a true love saga always needs a tragic ending, right ;-)

Charts Source :
http://www.occ.treas.gov/ftp/release/2009-34a.pdf:zerohedge :Office of comptroller of currency's quarterly report for bank trading and derivative activies

I am back --- with a whimper

• 8-6 has got boring, although I am still in research, our whole group has had a recent focus/image makeover, making us almost completely service- rendering bitches for our clients (internal and external).
• I don't like the projects I am supposed to work in 09-10.
• With oil and the economy in free-fall our lofty bonuses (announced Dec08 for 09) are going to be severely trimmed.
• I am feeling immensely strait-jacketed in terms of my career road-map.

Sum total of this bullet-based rant: I WANT AN MBA, again.

So after being out of the game for just about a quarter, I am back, back to play my part in that indy-500 of rat races aka Mba-admissions (drummrolls please) and that too at an unprecedented time.

My mood is sour and am feeling especially bitchy, so lets continue on the path of dourness and take a sneak peek into the current economic scene from an mba aspirant's perspective:

1. Sales and Trading : S&T was the reason I started looking into mbas. I wanted to be in a hedge fund running money like theres no tomorrow. Sadly investment research reveal total AUM for hedge funds have fallen to $965 billion in Jan from just about $1.9 trillion in May 08, an astounding 50%+ drop in just about 3 quarters. In may of 08 there were about 10,000 operational hedge funds, today that number is less than 6000, steamrolling towards the 5k mark, of course as hedge funds go belly-up hiring freezes, newly hired traders go over to cnbc and some audition for stripper jobs. Since I am feeling especially pissy here is the story of a hedge fund manager netting 750k anually who now works as a pizza boy at $7.95/hr,but he does deliver your pizzas in his leased Merc, soon to be repoed though.
   
   Former Morgan-Stanley junior banker/trader now working as a full-time NYC stripper netting 100k+.
   
   
2. I-banking : Sell side finance to start with (sell side is for the dummies btw), where you are essentially a middleman (akin to a pimp, pimping for money in expensive $2200 black suits and gelled hair, instead of the bing and glean that your average pimp puts on) putting together exotic products for your clients and often mixing in super-toxic little understood instruments into those product pools. But hey you still make decent dough, well you used to, if I was graduating today from a B-school I wouldnt touch an I-bank with a barge pole.
   
   
3. REITS (Real estate): I said I wouldn't touch I-banks with a barge pole if was graduating today, in that case I need to make a will forbidding my offsprings to use the phrase REITs in any source or form ever. A few charts for the pain that has now been re-christened Real Estate investment:
   
   
   What the first chart basically shows is the massive debt maturities that most REITs are now facing through to 2011. The problem is that REITs need to get financing/refinancing or some structural revolving credit line with their existing as well as new creditors to deal with these. Now those into Real estate will know that earlier this month Simon property group, perhaps the biggest player in this space (also the one with the best credit ratings on moodys and S&P), announced it was raising $500 million in bonds to take care of its debt at an astounding 10.15%!!! Pain anyone.
   

Now that my finance options are out of the way and the post is lit up in red, I'll retreat into my corner and sulk some more.

edit: I finished some catch up reading on mba related stuff and realized that there seems to be a shift in career focus towards clean energy, biofuels and stuff like that at most major B-schools. That is pretty surprising primarily because if you are rejecting Wall street based on your risk-averseness, then moving towards clean energy is almost surely suicidal. It is a sector that survives solely on subsidies and realistically has little chance to be a major/significant player anytime soon. The name though sounds chic and cool "Clean tech".

Sign ahead: Crossroad

Oh yes I am alive !!!!

In a slight dilemma right now regarding the road ahead. So I'll spend this post outlining my current thought process (muddled obviously) and hoping that readers (if any are left) will come up with some constructive comments.

Right now I am stuck between deciding whether to pursue an MBA or pursue poker as my longtime career goal (MBA blogs maintain MBA parlance !!).

Each have their own pros and cons, but they aren't mutually compatible. Doing an MBA and getting into a long-work-hour job would essentially mean that between work and family (did i mention im tying the knot in Jan 09) time for poker would be extremely restricted if not completely non-existent. At the same time an MBA is a much much safer option than a high risk venture like poker.

When it comes to taking up poker full-time, heres the kind of timeline based framework I have in mind. My girlfriend finishes her PhD sometimes in 2011-2012, my green-card application wont come through till maybe 2013ish. Thus the earliest I can quit work and start playing pro would be in the 2013-2014 range (remember without a green-card I cant quit work as I'd be booted out of the US in seconds). Also to rake in any kind of decent dough from poker, I would need a poker-bankroll in the 50-60k range, maybe even higher, possibly 75ksih is a good number. My current poker accounts have about 15kish in them, so I have about a 5 year time-frame to get to 50kish. Certainly doable if I dont keep taking my wiinings out and go on binge spending.

Also of great importance is the fact that if I do go fulltime in poker, it gives me the independence of settling down in any city I want, basically in the same place where my girlfriend/wife goes to work. Not to mention the enormous freedom/independence it brings in terms of flexi work-hours.

Just to put things into perspective in terms of numbers, heres this year's numbers:

• 9-5 job : 115kish
• poker: YTD tournament profits: 50k
• poker: cash game profits: havent worked it out yet, should be in 10-15kish range.
• poker: some other significant profits in the 30ksih range
  

I havent done the math regarding how an MBA degree will stack up in terms of ROI versus full-time poker, but might be close, especially if I factor in the feel-good feeling of doing something I love and the flexi-hours and the opportunity of settling down wherever I want. I know of atleast one person (Rizen, see blog on left) who left an accountant job to get into poker fulltime.

Sigh, I hate decisions. Comments welcome

United Sovereign Socialist States of America and $700 B

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency”

Yes this is one of the lines in the current 700 billion USD bailout-bill that the Treasury Sec of the United Sovereign Socialist States of America, formerly known as USA, Henry Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) has sent to the Congress for immediate approval. Please re-read the sentence and try for a second to grasp its ramifications.

What this means is that once the bill is passed putting 700B of the taxpayer's money at super-risk,neither the secretary, nor the financials institutes who would be bailed out, are in anyway accountable to the people for either their past actions (no judicial hearings, no congressional hearings on their shady dealings) or for their future actions (meaning we will have no idea where/how/whether the 700 B will be used).

Now for those who are still unclear of what some of these so-called "shady" dealings that the big financial instituions have been practising for so long (out of pure greed) heres a primer (for all you mba applicants/students/alumni/b-school adcoms/faculty, remember while reading , that business ethics is something that the mba machinery has preached like for-ever, to me at this point it looks like eye candy at best, at the end of the day what matters to the mba machinery is $$$$ and nothing else):

• Sub-prime : This is something we all know, but the real problem arose when Lehman and its clique developed financial instruments via which they started trading these mortages as equities.
• Credit Swap: AIG owns a piece of a $500 million sub prime paper (packaged and sold by Lehman), but it aint sure whether the mortagee can pay him back. They go to a $100 million Hedge fund and ask him to cover/insure this mortgage they are holding. Now the insurer (the hedge fund here) has to provide some collateral, usually of the same value as the object being insured (500 mill). But the hedge funds get greedy, AIG hopes no one will notice, and a 100 mill hedge funds acts as an insurer for a 500 mill package. This is credit-swap. Currently the credit-swap market is worth 45.5 trillion dollars (twice the enitre worth of the whole US stock market).
  
• Leveraging : A typical Hedge fund takes 2% of Asset under management (AUM) as management fees and 20% of all profit as benefits packet. For a 100 mill break-even hedge fund that means that 2mill is what the fund-runners get. But hey, thats monopoly money on Wall street. Sheeeeshh. Hold on, suppose we leverage 10:1, so now instead of 100 mill AUM, our books will show we have 1000 mill AUM. What about our management fees, oh yea they went up 10 fold too. Lehman. Goldman, Merryl and the whole brotherhood was leveraged upto 30:1.
  
• Coming soon to a Wall street near you: ARMs (adjustable rate mortages), credit defaults, retail non-housing loan defaults etc etc.
  

But unfortuntaley the near Armageddon that these financial executives have brought in has not yet ended. With the govt sponsored free money (a mere 700 billion) that will soon be in Wall street heres how the bankers are reacting to it (via NYT)

• Wall Street is lining up at the trough for a piece of the action, lobbying to run some of the $700 billion fund — and take huge fees — for their own mess.
• And then there is the jockeying among the banks so they can sell their absolute worst stuff to the government — even loans that have nothing to do with mortgages — and change the rules in the process. The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents big financial services companies, wrote an e-mail message to members on Sunday suggesting, laughably, that “the government bid for the assets should not count as a mark-to-market value for accounting purposes.”

Next time some Bschool reps start preaching about their new course on the ethical business, be prepared for some chosen profanities coming your way. Oh and in the meantime, for those of you still writing your essays, please dont forget to leverage your lies 30:1 or more. I know I'll be doing it. After all its an excellent prep for the business world, especially the finances.

Fit fitter fittest

Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fittest of them all

Reading this post about business school selection and a gazillion more posts of this kind, in which people fret and fret and fret yet again about finding their "fits" for a B-school, I decided to make a small post to highlight my thoughts on this issue.

Warning : this post does not not apply to anyone who is going for a very narrow particular focus, that only a tiny handful of schools might offer, but for the rest of you read on. Note: binge drinking, bar-hopping across Europe, social treks to somalia, mount everest expeditions dont interest me, so all that would be left out of of the fit equation as well.


To begin with I am fairly simple person with fairly simple needs when it comes to a MBA program. First and foremost it needs to be a top 10 program, a top 15 at worst, there would be no justification for me to leave my current job (which I like, not love as most of us mortals have a hard time finding jobs that we are doe-eyedly in love with) if its not a top 15 program atleast.

Now as soon as you set up this filter what happens is that most of everything else that you want from a MBA program (salary, strong alum network, good courses, plenty of diverse opportunities), kind of fall straight into your lap.

After all a top 15 MBA program will NOT in God's worst day have a dismal placement record, it will almost always have a decent balance between grads it sends out to consulting and finance (2 of the most commonly sought after post-mba professions), it will have a strong alum network, courses offered by them will be more or less on an even keel in the ball-park sense, yes some may be more strong in a p'lar field, and some in another, but that is again way over-exaggerated. Believe me a couple of course in a p'lar subject/concentration/field is not going to make you an expert in that. Having specialized in a particular field myself take it from me that specalization in any field comes from research work and not course-taking, courses give you an idea (note that it is just an idea not even an in-depth grasp) of the fundamentals, and an expert then builds on those fundamentals through independent research. And anyway an MBA is not designed to make you a specialist, go for fin PhD for that.

So why the all the hulaboo about finding schools that "fit" you or as it is more popular to say "Finding my fit in schools" ??? Barring the most miniscule of subtleties, what the effing difference does a MC wannabe MBA applicant care if he is going to Wharton/Kellogg?? If you have a festish for the Kellogg campus, well and good, good for you (I btw have negative fetish for HBS, in the sense that I absolutely loathe them), but apart from that, from a holistic big-picture MBA point of view it doesnt make an iota of difference whether you land up in either of the two.

A much better, more practical question and more realistic question is the following:
"Given my interests, background, my so called profile etc etc, in which school do I have a realistic chance of getting in".
Once you've identified schools based on the above filter, you can then go about in a logical fashion trying to decipher the school's other vital stats of interest, which, again, if its a top 10 school, the subtleties with be 19-20 at best. And I guess in a way many applicants mix and mash and muddle up the question of their chances of getting in with the "fit" factor.

In other OMG news: I have gone through Montauk !! Maybe I 'll review that bible sometime down the line, reviewing bibles though are oft considered to be the work of heretics !!!

Till next time, cheerio baby.

Assessment

Acads:
strength: top ug school (7.2/10), top grad school in discipline (3.8), widely published in leading journals lending credibility to acads (UG gpa maybe low, but i can manage that, especially with my publications, anybody have any comment on the relevance of publications in leading journals to academic strength)
weakness: dropped out of THE top phd program (have story)

Serious XC: sport: poker.. stellar 3 year performance track record, winner of numerous big field-large prizepool tournaments all over the place including important world poker tour circuit events, stories aplenty
community service: computer teacher for underprivileged kids (4 hours/week) with salvation army
weakness: no leadership exp in XC (impossible really with an individual sport like poker and a teaching volunteering activity)

Career: strength: good progress, developed several leading cutting edge technology with direct and very visible impact on company's bottom line , related to this worked on atleast 2 of the company's most important projects in the past 1 year, atleast one HUGE project obtained by company on the merit of technology developed
weakness: no traditional leadership exp, could be typecasted as tech (and no not software/IT)


MBA essay underlying theme: Career changer.

And that is that... in a nutshell, comments, critiques, observations welcome.

Are star fund managers and traders MBAs?

Are they MBAs or do they have a much more solid background in finance or econ or maths (PhDs). My belief is that star managers (and star traders) working with small teams (eg Ken Hebner of the CGM fund group and the infamous Bryan Hunter, probably the greatest trader the Wall Street has ever seen, who was the energy desk chief of the now bankrupt Amaranth Advisors Hedge Fund) have to have a much more stronger foundation in finance/econ/maths than what the MBA courses usually offer.

I am not at all convinced as to whether MBA fin courses gives the correct/desired training for such careers. For starters they tend to be the over-simplified or the broad-overview kind. When I was at Stanford a bunch of my friends were in a Masters in management program and they had these required cross core-courses from the MBA program like corporate finance, DA, accounting and so on. And frankly, having a math heavy background I found those courses naive at best, due to the simplicity in the actual maths involved. Accounting is of course jargon heavy and once you get that straight, the rest is a walk in the park. DA which was probably the most feared course is also in reality a pretty simple one. One peculiar thing about DA though, is sometimes it doesn't exactly follow the probability laws (especially Bayes' Theorem) !!

And now I see my girlfriend doing her PhD in finance and the mathematics is extremely involved. A pretty decent grasp of real and complex analysis is almost mandatory. Theories developed on Mutual funds, ETFs and the varied kind of investing methodologies (value, growth, momentum) are very very math intensive. For example the starting point in the Stock market for fin/econ grads, the Black-Scholes model for option pricing, is stochastic to start with. It needs random walk kind of solutions (something like a Monte Carlo simulation for example) as it cannot be solved in a closed form deterministic manner. That makes me wonder whether MBAs going for their fin specialization actually have the expertise to deal with such sophisticated maths or do they stay more in the overview plane. If they do stay in the overview ball park, then how the heck do they perform their corporate jobs ?? Wouldn't an econ/fin PhD be a much superior analyst/trader simply because they have a much more thorough grasp of the subject matter.

And then I also hear of the numerous models that I-bank newbies/interns need to run on a daily basis. And curiously most of these models that they run are done with Excel. Now I have always believed (instilled by my co-advisor at Pennstate) that Excel is the stupidest black box that Bill Gates has ever designed (it is dumber that Windows, if you know what I mean). So what models do these I-bank whizzes run??? No sophisticated heavy duty modelling (especially stock price modeling which is a highly non-linear problem and notoriously unstable to solve) can be run on a single node PC on excel. All known computational and computing laws would be severely violated. I have exactly one friend in I-banking so I dont know the answer to these modeling thingy that they keep talking about. But I have some friends over at motley fool who are analysts for motley fool in their stock picking business, and they shared a model-running exercise of theirs.

I'll walk you through it since I presume that these are the typical Excel models that I keep on hearing about. The thing here is that one of their top equity holdings X has taken a severe beating, and they want to analyse whether buying more of this X at today's prices would yield a S&P 500 beating profitable return in the next 3-5 year time frame. So heres what they model in essence ( I highlight in red my comments from some feedback):

1. Trailing 12 Month (TTM) Revenue = $217.9M (from balance sheet)
2. Estimate 3 yr. Revenue Growth = 11% (Different bunch of numbers are plugged in for this based on their estimate/forecast depending on a myriad of macro-economic conditions, this is their estimate and not a hard data point)
3. TTM Revenue in 3 yrs. = $217.9M * (1.11^3) = $298.0M
4. Estimate Net Profit Margin =9.5% (Again Different bunch of numbers are plugged in for this based on their estimate/forecast depending on a myriad of macro-economic conditions, this is their estimate and not a hard data point )
5. Net Income in 3 yrs = $298.0M * 0.095 = $28.31M
6. Current Shares Outstanding = 6.4M
7. Estimate Share Dilution Rate = 2% (per historic levels)
8. Shares Outstanding in 3 yrs. = 6.4M * (1.02^3) = 6.8M
9. Estimate EPS (earning per share) in 3 Yrs. = $28.31M / 6.8M = $4.16
10. Estimate P/E ratio = 12 (This is reasonable for current growth level of 11% and 25% in favorable times. The P/E ratio might be higher, but let’s stay on the reasonable side, more different values to test here.)
11. Estimated Price in 3 Yrs. = $4.16 *12 = $49.92

Once they have a price target calculated they then go for potential return calculations based on current prices, essentially to identify favorable buying points:

Let’s look at buy target prices:

Expected Return          Buy Target
---------------          ----------
      15%                  $32.82
      20%                  $28.89
      25%                  $25.56
      30%                  $22.72

And that in essence is a typical stock analysis. Not rocket-science level by any means is it, but almost wholly common-sense and logic driven. And then they add layers of complexity to this to come up with a ton of scenarios and potential outcomes/risk/profit analysis etc. I am beginning to think that this is what Excel modeling is all about. Correct me if somebody has more know-how on this.

Now hedge-fund traders though are a very different breed and I know for certain that they crank up huge computational power/time (statistically the biggest user of computational power in the US are : (1) defense (2) oil and gas industry (3) finance ) crunching sophisticated algorithms to come up with buy/sell triggers for equities/options etc. And again it is my feeling that the MBA wouldn't be a good fit here because of his over-view based background. But he might be a good interpretor of the numbers that hedge fund computers crunch out, but such interpretation skills can come from pure experience, why do an MBA for that?

While I was pretty excited about I-banking (particularly portfolio mgmt/Pvt Equity/Trading) some time ago, but I strongly feel that an MBA is not an adequate training enough to make someone a star fund manager, which is where I would have wanted to go to if I had opted for the fin route. As of now I am sticking to consulting where arm-waving has been made into an refined art.

OMG -The economics of an MBA

One important question that well settled professionals have to be think about before their MBA apps is the economics of the whole thing. Cos, barring those ludicrous few who would want to join the peace corps in Africa at minimum wage, most MBA applicants are looking for a substantial pay-hike, post MBA. So lets get some numbers going.

I will stick to the oil and gas space cos thats what I have been doing in grad school and then at work (for a combined total of 6 grand years). For this simple exercise I'll use MK as an example. MK is one of my closest buddies, we went to undergrad together, we were room-mates in the first year at undergrad, we applied to US grad schools together, and to top it all like me MK works in Houston in the oil and gas space for the past 3 years, with one of the 5 biggies. MK was contemplating an MBA last year after 2 of his office-mates got their Havard tickets. But after some fairly large amount of thinking he decided against it, from a simple economics stand point. Heres his arguement against the MBA:

(1) Cost of MBA in a top school : 120k
(2) Loss in salary for 2 years : 250k
=================================
Loss : 370k

Expected mean/median/mode salary package post MBA: 120k
Salary package at current job in 2 years if no MBA: 135k
===============================================
Salary loss at end of 2 years: 15k

=============================================
Loss in 2 years: 385k
Loss in Matching 401K @7% of salary/annum: 17k
==============================================
Loss in 2 years: 400k
===============================================
Actual Loss (amount he would have saved in those 2 years): 190k
(20% savings+120k mba cost+401k contributions)
=================================================

Assuming he continues to save post MBA, and he can save on avg 30k/annum, he will break even only after 6 years. This is a bit of an unknown part of the equation as salary projections post MBA in terms of growth rate is not something I am too familiar with, so I have just assigned 150k as an avg for the first 7 years post MBA. But for those 7 years that ~200k which he lost in his MBA would have grow to about 400k on a 10% compunded basis. If you tweak the numbers even further and put in the fact that for each of those 7 years he would be contributing an additional 25k per annum, the number stands at 660k.

Yes you read it right thats -660k USD.

No wonder he isnt planning on doing an MBA.

PS: If you are wondering about the accuracy of the math, assign 40k in savings per annum post MBA for the first 7 years, and use a compounding rate of 10%.

Next post: Do MBAs make good analysts in the stock market in other words do they have the expertise to be a good analyst or is it more jargon bombarding and fancy verbosity of the obvious is what they do??

OMG I want a mba

Top reasons why people say that want a mba:

(1) I will be taking classes with some of the best minds in the world at " insert name like H, K, W, S, C, M, I, R " and will be taught some of the best courses in the world by some of the best professors in the world. OMG!! I cant wait to get immersed in this culture of valued learning.

(2) Two years of networking opportunity with the sharpest minds in the world, past (alumni), present (class) and future (incoming class). OMG!! What more do I want.

(3) I want to move into the decision-makers echelons of corporations, I want to bring in my newly acquired vision of greatness (learnt in my 2 month corporate ethics class) and change the way corporations work forever. From now on, corporate board meetings, will not open with the CEO's perspective on how much value has been added to the stock, but will instead open (and end) with the social work and budgeting details about that project in Congo, Africa, to feed the poor Silverback mountain gorillas. OMG!! Socially responsible corporations.

(4) I will be such a perfect "fit" for again insert name like H, K, W, S, C, M, I, R, their culture, their values, their principles, their ethics is exactly what I have been waiting to be a part of, since the day I sucked on my thumb. OMG!! I can fit in---> atlast.

(5) This is the most beautiful campus in the best city in the world. (Note name insertions should again be done for city and campus). Its almost as if the campus and the city has a life of its own. OMG!! I can now be a part of this great campus and this lively city.

(6) I will now be able to write cryptic blogs for future applicants/candidates/whatever those bulls-ready-for-slaughter are known as these days, about a MBA's life, without mentioning anything in specific, but instead concentrating on jargon bombardment. Key words to focus on : fin, strat, ethics, 1&2, mck, DA, modeling. Never mention companies you work for, or are interning for, or would give your right arm and right leg to work for. I need to be cryptic, I dont know why, but I have to be. OMG!! All this cryptic stuff makes me feel like halle berry in a James bond movie.

(7) Atlast I will be able to realize the true greatness of Bill Gates in general and MS-Excel in particular. I can stun people with my Excel modeling schemes. OMG!! I can actually be part of that group that considers adding rows and columns in Excel as sophisticated modeling.

Top reasons on why they actually want a MBA:

(1) My starting salary could be 150k+. OMG!!

(2) My sign-on bonus could be 50k tax free. OMG !!

(3) Finally I have a brand name to leverage to the hilt. OMG!!! HA-HA-HA (devilish laughter follows)

(3) I have heard most consultants are Platinum level frequent flyers. Now an annual trip to India costs me about 2k in tickets. I think I can get that through my Platinum miles, should throw in the wife and baby's tickets too. OMG!! Sweeeeet.

(4) Dont they have a quarterly-all-expense-paid- company bash at Acapulco? OMG!!

(5) I am no longer an IT-consultant from insert name like Infosys, Cognizant, TCS, Wipro with Goldman-Sachs as my client. I am GS now. I can now be that dick who calls up those stupid IT consultants, every five minutes, and asks for his passwords to be changed.

(6) My ex-boss was that stupid tech jerk. I am his boss now. Payback time.

(7) I hate my current job, I am fucking underpaid and overworked.

(8) I hate my current job, I am fucking underpaid and overworked.

(9) I hate my current job, I am fucking underpaid and overworked.

(10) I hate my current job, I am fucking underpaid and overworked.

Disclaimer: I am not an IT-consultant neither do I work for GS, but I do visit India once a year minus the wife and the baby. Oh and I do develop new modeling techniques, mostly from scratch in C/Java and publish them in journals