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".

OMG an mba post

One of my undergrad juniors got into HBS, class of '10. Weeeeeeeeee !! Very nice. I havent sopken with him in length, but am planning to do so soon. He was a really really bright chap, was the topper (in the top 3 atleast) in perhaps the toughest discipline at my undergrad alma mater (Mech Engg.), an accomplished tabla player and drummer, and a very very good quizzer (though my undergrad quiz team did dish out some serious hidings to them in various inter-college competitions... ok brag time, I was a univ blue in dramatics having won the quizzing event in the 2002 edition of All India University nationals, end of brag), went onto HLL (Unilever of India) as a management trainee I beleive (the toughest job to crack in campus placements at that time), and is now all set to come into HBS. Way to go !!

I also recently discovered that another of my UG junior is in Darden right now, set to graduate next year !!!

Anyhoo as per my MBA goes, I have taken the first baby steps towards the GMAT, meaning ordered the books (whole of manhattan, OG, and ahem ahem cough cough Richard Montauk's book!!)

Now I dont have anything personal against Montauk, but these self help, self development, chicken soup for the soul/mba/life kind of books really get under my skin. Dont get me wrong, I read a lot, but I once tried to read "The world is flat" and then "The monk who sold his ferrarri" (both came highly recommended), and I was cursing in utter frustration within the first 50 pages, the plethora of cliches in those books are mind-numblingly astronomical. Hopefully Montauk lets me get past 50 pages.

But the signs are ominous, another of my friends apping for Fall 09 was all ga-ga over some Morpheus-que matrix that the book supposedly has that can allegedly lay bare your life as soon as you fill it up. Dont know about him, but I would like to believe that my life cannot be strait jacketed and matrixifed as easily as that. But it is supposed to have some adcom winning essays, so it shouldnt be all bad, though my Bullshit-quotient detector will be on high alert. Maybe I'll post a detailed review once the book comes in.

What else, o yea, a shoutout to Forrest Gump for his replies to my email queries. One of the main points of which were, whether an interest in finance (which is probably the reason for my mba quest) should be mentioned in my apps, given that there is NO supporting evidence to back that up. His line was that one can potray oneself as a career changer and thus weave stuff around it, but I am still ultra-skeptical about that. I have a strong case for SC for the energy and commodity space, and as someone pointed out (Soni??), that you should stick with things that you can tie up (Background--->Past exp--->Future goal) into one cognitive entity for the adcom. (This is beginning to sound like a cliche now, belaboring the same point over and over... GAAAHHH)

And to finish this piece off, an OMG sized howler to the Clearadmit folks, somehow my blog never features in their Friday-Frontline reporting !!! Sacrilege !! Clearadmit folks you need some Paris Hilton spice to keep your piece interesting, yea yea I know you have volumes of pages covering essays of all and any school on the planet earth and all that blaah. BUT that gets a bit boring after some-time, what with the often used phrase accompanying any and every essay analysis "Now remember to tie up your experience no.X to your School no.Y fit", "This is a modified version of the career gols essay, but with a few caveats". Guys guys, c'mon, get Paris on board and see your eyeballs double (well maybe not double but you are guaranteed one extra narcisstic eyeball from houston,texas).

Till next time, happy essaying applicants....