Searching for a job

*started writing this during my winter break..now it's almost spring break & still in the hunt!

As it is really obvious from how the economy has performed over the past year, it has been tough time job-hunting. And the problem becomes more confounded when you are an international student with limited pre-MBA work experience(although with diverse exposure to the skils required). I have been targeting jobs across supply chain management, operations and technology consulting. There are still six months to go for graduation and surely some opportunities on campus to follow up with but the clock is ticking!!

Well, looking at the economic indicators and the need for vast scale retrenchement, I would assume there would be a decent need for people trained in lean six sigma, cost cutting, process re-engineering and supply chain optimization(a glance of my resume would exactly throw those attributes) but then comes the issue of visa. This is best illustrated by my experience interviewing with one leading retailer where everything was in place but when it came to sponsorship, it was a strict no from the company based on its HR policy. And there is the strange things of companies which used to sponsor visas backing out suddenly besides cutting jobs dramatically.

At Fisher, there surely has been a dearth of companies especially in its core strength of areas of Ops & SCM. Surprisingly, Marketing has been the best of the lot and so is with corporate finance. It is by and large known for now that on campus recruiting is not the best avenue and that I need to reach out, do this 'networking', attend external career fairs, job boards and so on.. Obviously, other alternatives would include looking outside of US and reaching out to employers particularly in the middle-east and APAC regions. It is quite a difficult process unless you personally get in touch with the hiring managers in these regions or get some contact info as the trivial method of "applying online" would probably not work anyway. And it's not like the US has gone under a blanket of recession and the other nations are rejoicing. This is globally a grim scenario and the ones who get recruited/keep their jobs should find much greener pastures once this nasty recession ends.

* blogged recently

Well, at least for this post, I started this a long time back, hoping to finish rambling but then somehow did not find the time/motivation to complete this post. 4 months after I started this post and yet no luck with the job search. Not to say that I am alone in this process, but to see the staggering numbers of job losses everyday on the face of WSJ, CNN etc. just keeps tugging away at even the strongest of hopes to find a job in the US. Things are bad globally, especially back in India and I think that there is some time to focus all efforts in getting a job back home. Right now, the focus is to get some break before graduation, which is 3 months away, just because of the OPT & visa related issues. It has almost come to a stage where I am exhausting all available options in terms of reaching out to employers/job opportunities.

What happened with all the effort so far? Well, its not like a zero, I have been able to establish excellent contacts with people at some companies here, but nothing to go forward coz' such companies are either on a hiring freeze or are laying off. My resumes have been distributed across multiple companies, job boards, linkedin, 3rd party recruiters, whatever someone can come up with and at this point, I myself do not have an idea of where my resume is lying out there :). I got a couple of leads but they were for immediate openings and hence could not be pursued any further. And the best part is, whenever I go for my job consultation at my b-school career services, they seem pretty impressed with the work that I have done so far and just ask me to be persistent..that's all. At this point, I guess they have also run out of their options. Nowadays, companies don't even bother to send reject mails..they just don't have the need/time to respond.

Job search was almost killing me this past quarter. I had just stacked up on a bunch of courses this winter mainly to get rid of most of my required credits for MBA. This way, I will be left with only 4 credits to complete in spring quarter, which would give me lot of time for job search eventually. That was good planning for spring, at least as of now, but it was really bad for this quarter. I am so glad that I will be done with this quarter by tomorrow. And then yeah, continue with my job hunt with lots of hopes on writing something positive in the near future.

RS

Vagaries of the midwest

I might have mentioned this maybe an year ago but the weather here at Columbus and generally over the Midwest region has been particularly strange over this past season. For one, this was a really cold autumn, temperatures a few notches lower than last time around. And the vagaries cannot be better explained by what happened over the last week. Winter set in and it was getting colder and touched -30c(with wind chill factored into) last Sunday night. It was terribly cold obviously but there was no snowfall!! It was all ice and frosty out there and it was pretty visible on Sunday morning itself as I took the car out and it was all covered with ice. Now, although more messy, from a ease of cleaning & tolerance perspective, snow is always better than ice.

Coming to the story, well over the next two days the temperatures lower down to about -5c with a bright and sunny Wednesday out of nowhere. As it started to get warmer, yesterday, we had severe thunderstorms in the afternoon and rains almost caused big time flooding. By the night, temperatures went to +5c, but there was fog and it was as dense as anything to make visibility near impossible(would not even have managed a local drive, let alone the freeways). Then,the best part and one that lifted my spirits exponentially. Today, it felt like mid-spring with temperatures hitting +20c. Here I was, roaming around the campus in tees and shorts at the end of December in Columbus, Ohio. It was absolutely awesome to get out of the gloom and depressing mood of the icy winter and enjoy the day, seeing people jogging on the roads and taking their dogs for a walk. Talk about mood swings...it all swings with the weather.

-30 to +20 in a week and a glimpse of most that can happen with the weather, that was one helluva week.

RS

Yet another quarter goes by..

*words in 'italic quotes' are bijiness buzz words

It's actually been a couple of weeks since the quarter closed down and this post has been in edit mode since then,well, finally seeing the light now. This was without doubt the busiest course of study over the past 4 quarters and I am pretty confident that it will remain so, mainly because I'm done with most of the MBA workload and just need to get a few more credits in the kitty to graduate come June( a job is most welcome!!). So what did I do last fall; obviously loads of coursework, then student clubs, TA'ing for statistics, job hunt, swimming classes! and well those damned team meetings which have now increasingly become time-gobblers. Team work is entirely different from the first year experience where you had one core team, all of them inevitably took the same courses and had the same team projects to complete and so 'resource allocation' was quite manageable. Then it all changed to five different courses, five different teams and crazy schedule conflicts that ensured that setting up the meeting would be more difficult than working on the project. At the risk of whining too much, I should also say that this was the most satisfying quarter.

Before the start of the second year, I always had the feeling that I was not extracting much value out of the time here at Fisher and thought that I needed to ramp up to work an equation like more work = more engagement = more satisfaction that you have done something really valuable. Take this one; I was working as a TA to the stats prof. for the 1st year MBA course and apart from the fact that I'd to grade 140 papers over 3 exams, it gave me the best chance to feel like a second-year :), clarifying doubts(and sometimes even teaching concepts) to students who were at an average of 4-5 years older than me and having bulk loads of professional experience. It is this kind of work that can really boost your confidence when you know that you have managed stuff which would mimic the corporate setting.

As for the coursework, Fisher offers six sigma training towards a green-belt certification. 'Six sigma' is a play field for someone who loves stats and data crunching and so it turned out to be one of the best learning courses. This course actually followed on a 'lean' management training module over last spring and now what these things have done is that, I end up looking at things that happen in daily life as a process and how best to improve that a.k.a 'Process centered management' . The other ops & supply chain courses touched upon concepts across demand & capacity planning, pretty much staple stuff for any Ops major at an MBA program. OLMA, the student run Ops association at Fisher got off to a good start, what with membership increasing to almost 50. This is one activity where innovating is such a difficult task as you have to go down the already trodden path of bringing in guest speakers, organizing simulation games, field trips etc. although we are still working to bring out something unique for this year.
RS

3 down, 2 to go..

Reference to the continuing turmoil of the US brokerage firms: First it was Bear Sterns which was sold out to JPM for a pittance, then the latest twin strike - Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy and Merill Lynch sold to BoA. The only ones that have escaped thus far : Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. God knows how much more of mortgage debt will be written off. At the time of applying to B-school i.e. in 2006, to get a job in these companies was the dream of most applicants venturing to major in finance, investment management et al. It was really tough, mighty competitive but what can one do when the company that you target for your dream job is down in the gutters!!

It'll be interesting to see the impact of these developments in IT & ITES industry here in India. I worked with TCS at their Banking and Financial Services(BFS) solution center @ Sholinganallur, Chennai and true to its name, the building housed multitudes of (newly renovated!!) cubicles & delivery platforms for almost the entire US banking fraternity. BFS along with insurance forms the crux of clientele for the top IT services exporters and already there have been reports of Satyam planning to lay off almost 5000 employees and many unconfirmed news sources of such stuff at the other firms. Hiring freeze, pink slips and the US slowdown will be a major blow to the boom that these companies offered to the Indian economy. Tough times ahead..

RS

Unfortunate Hedging

I always get the feeling that corporate finance is at the epitome of courses standing to offer an everyday perspective of the business world. Just a while I was reading an article in the manja paper a.k.a "The Economic Times" which indicated an eternal continuation of IT companies problems in hedging against dollar rise/fall. Hedging is done to basically negate the risk of unforeseen drop in the currency that is used for a company's revenue stream. During the past year, when the rupee appreciated against the dollar; from 46 Rs/$ to almost 40 Rs/$, Infosys, TCS, Wipro et al. took a heavy beating on their Income statement for the year as most of them were having US based clients and the revenue value dropped big time. So, a bunch of these companies started expanding outside the U.S region and into the European nations, wooing clients across Europe, thereby creating a separate revenue stream in euros. Additionally, they also started hedging against the rising rupee and took forward positions with the dollar, meaning in the future, they would be able to use the higher value of dollar if the value fell below the option price.

Looks like a great idea, straight out of the finance, consulting and strategy desks of these companies. Two things happened. Fortunately, the dollar rise against rupee will bring in lots more revenues to these companies but unfortunately, the $$ appreciation against the Euro and the Pound will bring down the revenue estimates from the new European regions. In fact, it seems like the consequences out of the latter situation will be more than enough to negate the benefits of the former events. And already, this news has reflected badly on the IT stocks in Dalal Street, specifically on Infosys as shares slipped by 6%. Lots to ponder for the strategists at these companies.

For more info from the article : ET

RS

Getting Nuke'd

Ok, so most of India's population does not have any idea of the 1-2-3 agreement or the NSG waiver for the nuclear deal or whatever. But, with the distressing news that keeps trickling out of the US(first on the state department letter that somewhat restricts India from performing a Pokhran-III, then the statement from the US president indicating that the deal is not legally binding in the land of Uncle Sam), there are huge question marks all over the face of the deal, the credibility of the US and the victory claims of the Manmohan Singh led govt. To add to this chaos, more than a dozen news channels keep airing all sorts of information in the name of "Breaking News". Even a really useful debating forum like the "Letter to the Editor" in "The Hindu" has become an epitome of confusion with people swinging back and forth in support of the nuke deal. All this is primarily a result of mis-information, first at the highly political levels and then to the masses. It would be of great help if the govt. could clarify these gray areas which are a potential threat to the nation's sovereignty but such a thing looks like a distant dream in a place where vote-bank politics holds centrestage.

RS

Fading times

On the eve of vinayaga chathurthi, I went out with my mom to shop for the clay-modelled vinayaga idol and related accesories a.k.a arugam pul, maavelai & thoranam, erukkam poo maalai etc. I expected the whole thing to take hours, as it used to during all my school time days of trailing amma & paati in the crowded alleys of the mylapore flower market. Pre-festival shopping is something that I would look forward to so eagerly for a variety of reasons;

• it would usher in the festival mood and you would be able to sense the aura of the forthcoming special events in the air.
• the actual holiday would start right after you step out of the house for shopping.
• traveling as part of 4 or 5 people in the small 3 seater chennai autos and listening to vetti vambu pechu that is so typical of our community.
• Time to see colorful streets, lots of people and have some fun watching the elders haggle over poo mozhams, pazhukkadha pazhams etc.
• Also the time to nicely coax amma into having the dinner outside instead of at home. The feeling of tasting a special ghee roast after all the roaming around - heavenly :)

And lots more. Coming to the point here, well, the whole thing took us less than half an hour; partly coz' of the short time spent in selecting and haggling over the festival items and partly coz' of not pursuing the other time consuming activities. For one, Chennai traffic and crowds have increased manifold over the years, making it even more difficult for street shopping. Then, the desire to spend more time on such activities has decreased, since a lot of things occupy our schedule now. A general increase in purchasing power among middle-class families leads to decreased haggling & purchasing time. Finally, the urge to get out of this crazy fracas on the streets and get back home asap.

So, vinayaga chaturthi is not an exception to this change. It's easy to notice this happen over the shopping for kolu-bommai during pre-navarathri times, karumbu(I don't think anybody even bothers to purchase some) & related items during pongal, sweets & savories( a shift from home-made to home-delivered!!) before deepavali and so on. This is not a generalisation but is surely feeling that can be shared with many other families. One mega event that has escaped this metamorphosis is the shopping for silk sarees & gold jewellery. No way will our dear ladies & maamis allow that to be completed in the shortest time possible. In a way, it's good; at least some customs & practices will survive the fading times

RS

Back on Homeground

So after a long and quite a tiring journey from Columbus, I finally touched base at Chennai early yesterday morning. My final air-born moments produced this amazing feeling of excitement mixed with expectations, of a magnitude hardly experienced on any of my previous visits of coming back home. Exactly a year (and a week) ago, I'd left the same airport wondering if I would be making a trip back before completing my MBA. Well, today I'm writing this post from my sweet Chennai home, still slowly savoring and sinking in every moment of being the toast of the family :)

I think my Chennai sojourn started when I'd catch my connecting BA flight at London. Ok, the Heathrow Airport had for long time intrigued me, mostly coz' of its prominence during the school quizzing days books a.k.a Manorama yearbooks et al., as the busiest airport in the world. True to its word, it was really busy. I mean, there were planes waiting for take off on the pilot runways one behind the other, just like people waiting in queue. Awesome.. but the terminals & facilities did not even come close to meeting local standards. In fact, terminal 4 on that afternoon resembled more of any railway platform in India!! And, it's quite amazing as to how many desis work at the Airport, ranging from janitors to people in the customs & security check. And as I walked past all this to the boarding gate, I was welcomed by the sight of sari-clad maamis and tamil speaking maamas, a bunch of on-site returns, most of them outbound to HCL office in Chennai and various others. Then something happened that made me feel at home.. the boarding call was announced and instantly 4 queues formed up at the gate entrance, clearly a big deviation from the one queue discipline back in the U.S. One thatha came and asked as to which was the proper queue for which I promptly asked him to join whichever he feels like to. So, after all the initial chaos, things settled down and it seemed like time went past really slowly as I counted hours, then minutes to my landing. All smiles as the plane touched down and I could feel myself getting sticky and sweaty even as I came out of the arrow bridge into the airport. Pleasantly, the immigration stuff happened really fast and I was out within 30 minutes, only to wait for mom&dad to come another half hour late. Can't blame them though as we all expected the system to take more time to get me out than it did in reality.

So, after the initial hugs and the senti drama, it felt good to back home, spent most of the day yapping my way to glory. In fact, it felt like the pace of my life had dropped bigtime as I was listening to my paati speak her heart out on everything from temple bhajans and her friends to her daily sweet little tiffs with thatha. Huge break for me from the routines back in Columbus. Then, meeting most of the neighbors, lots of maamis/ paatis in the apartments, telling the same story which follows something like:

M/P: "Jayanthi payyana, eppadi irukka, eppo vantha U.S lenthu?"
Sid: " Nanna irukken, neenga eppadi irukkel. Nethakki early morning flight"
M/P: "Journey ellam comfortabla? Padippellam nanna poindrukka? U.S life eppadi irukku blah blah?
Sid: "Ellame soober.. U.S la life nanna thaan irukku aana namma aathula irukkara mathiri varumaa..(apparum oru vetti illippu)"
M/P: " Athu ennavo romba correct thaan" and then something of the order of self-glorifying chennai, culture etc. Three much!!

Anyway, super stuff and I guess more to come.

RS

20 minutes left..

as my summer internship comes to a close. It has been a rewarding summer so far, if not much in monetary terms, at least with the value addition to the company and to my resume. And to cap it all, I had the opportunity to present my project work to one of the most power packed audiences that I would have presented to so far. First nervous, then started, got confident and finished off wonderfully with the Q&A session. Just to get the results validated with everyone ranging from the company's CIO, supply chain VP's, business directors etc. was truly exhilarating.

And now, I am just a few minutes away from getting out of this "MIDlle of the nowhere LAND" city. And, I'm excited beyond recognition, first to get to Columbus, then to pack my bags for Chennai.

Sweet days ahead :))

RS

On an evening at the gym

So, as I was working my butts off the treadmill, a couple of events that cropped up,

• A short stout lady walks into the gym, takes a look at what's going on, goes to the weighing scale, weighs herself and walks out of the gym.


• A middle-aged guy comes into the gym at a frenetic pace, goes straight to the weights section, takes a pair of dumbbells, does one set of bicep curls and heads out of the gym in a flash.

So much for being weight and health conscious!!

RS