When in doubt, empty your magazine.
The weather finally picked up. I am finally vindicated after catching no end of grief for showing up in — god forbid — shorts! What do you think this is, Singapore? I can’t help but wish that the legions of suits who swarmed campus during consulting recruitment season had benefited from the already-scorching afternoons that bring out beery dancing and lounging about on the lawn after classes. It would have been fun to see either the recruiters’ reactions to shorts and miniskirts, or to watch all the eager candidates sweltering in suits and ties.
Last week was a spectacularly hedonistic attempt to withdraw from the stark realities of looking for work, at least in the evenings. I realized that I function equally well with a murderous hangover as when I’ve had more than 2 hours of sleep. INSEAD truly has been a learning bonanza.
I have embarked on a project to scan all of my INSEAD documents, to the mirth of several classmates. While I stand by my original plan to see whether the colossal stack of papers I walked away from P1/P2 with would stop a .45 bullet, at least given the context of my misery during that time, maybe it’s a good thing that I hung on to my notes, handouts, cases and assorted paperwork. I’m regretting not having been able to read a lot of the material in P3/P4 due to overwork, and especially feel bad about leaving a stack of reading in Singapore. Thanks to Horacio Falcao, our stellar negotiations professor, as well as a number of other faculty, I’ve been able to recover a fair amount of the stuff. And thanks to the sometimes-operational volume scanners, it’s not proving to be nearly as much of a nightmare as I’d initially envisioned when glancing at my single-sheet flatbed scanner in fits of (justifiable, given the obnoxious volume of material) procrastination.
Several arguments about what is and is not acceptable professional menswear have led me to abandon all respect for any institutional dress codes. According to one of my colleagues who is supposedly versed in the sartorial ways of the financial world, you are immediately and automatically blackballed should you dare walk into an interview wearing a shirt with a pocket. How nice to know that, in the midst of a global financial fuckup of unanticipated proportions, banks and financial services firms are selecting the brave people who will pull their carts out of the steaming piles of manure they’ve inflicted on the rest of the economy…by whether or not their shirts have pockets.
On the topic of recruiting…it’s turning increasingly random by the day. Those who have offers from consulting companies are settling into the easy routine of students who were sponsored by their employers, most people who were sponsored seem to have tiredly accepted the simplicity of returning to their old shops instead of striking out for new horizons, and the rest of us labor on in frustrated resignation. After a certain number of rejections, every additional shoot-down starts taking on comical dimensions, and the idea of doing something, anything entrepreneurial begins to look increasingly attractive.
I had a phone conversation with a gentleman (alumnus) from a high-end beverage company today. Note that the concept of “business development” varies pretty strongly across firms, so when I tell people that this is the sort of thing I’d like to go into (having thrown hotels to the wind as, frankly, not paying squat and not being willing to hire the likes of me anyway) I have to intentionally remain fuzzy about the sort of responsibilities I’d like to face. Having spent the past years of my long and diverse career as a sort of freelance henchman, fixer, licensed troubleshooter and whatnot, my uptake of corporate roles is fairly fuzzy in any case. I like to be handed a problem and told “figure it out, come back in a month.” That doesn’t seem to fit well with a lot of corporate types.
Anyway, he laughed at me. He fucking laughed at me. And told me he has no clue what I am looking for. Not enough that I barely get any replies to emails, or that I’m trying to do a switch in both country and industry at 34, and that searching for jobs purely through networking is proving to be a frustratingly elusive and diffuse affair, but being laughed at takes the cake.
OK, I admit to thinking that I’m pretty damn good at everything I’ve done before now professionally — I just get sick of the constant implied message that we’re not good enough or smart enough or experienced enough, and have decided to flip a virtual bird to every besuited snot who dares to have an attitude about the fact that he has a job and I don’t. If slaving for 10 years (and, without exception, getting awesome reviews from all of my clients) followed by surviving this miserable abusive discouraging bank-breaking hell doesn’t prove that I have at least _something_ going for me, then I might as well start considering careers in alcoholism under a bridge in Paris somewhere. Screw you, economy, screw you. I will make it, I will succeed, all the while giggling manically in the face of adversity, and when I do, when I’m finally emperor of the free world, won’t you all be sorry you didn’t offer me a job, recession be damned. Hah, that made me feel better.
The fun part is that a number of colleagues have expressed interest in embarking on entrepreneurial projects (i.e. “do something cool”) after school. As I keep telling people, I’m game for pretty much anything as long as it’ll let me have a decent standard of living (in Paris, natch) and pay off my accursed student loans. That, alas, does not seem to be a very practicable goal. As the career triangle says:
Choose 2
At least this period promises some fascinating project work. A lot of it. A whole lot of it. One of the cases I’m about to start slaving on is with a telco/mobile company I’d really like to work with (and with which I had a fairly surreal interview experience — in not so many words, they asked me, “so, why exactly are you here?” — welcome to my world.) Interestingly enough, one of my colleagues from the following class contacted the same gentleman from said company for whom I’m now doing this project; he pointed her in my direction as someone who apparently knows all there is to know about them. Good thing too, now I may even have help completing the beast.
Honestly though, I think this may turn out worse than 2002, when something like 70% of the graduating class didn’t have a job within 6 months of finishing up. Or, let me qualify that statement: it may turn out worse for those of us who are still flailing about in career limbo. I might as well invest some time in enjoying my courses and the social life for as long as it lasts.
