Preparing for the interview…

Me and my interviewers seem to have agreed on the appointments, I have done my due diligence aka stalking and more or less know what to expect from them. This blog should go quiet, again, for a couple of weeks now, after that do expect interview reports, as detailed as possible without blowing my cover. Unless of course something MBA-related gets me angry, excited or both and I feel the urge to rant about it.

Meanwhile, I just had a quick chat with a current student in Fontainebleau. Some random observations:

- Recruiting is a complete and total disaster, less than half of the usual number of companies showed up at the latest job fair on campus, very very few actual opportunities.

- There are finance jobs to be found outside banks, but again – very few.

- Getting a UK work permit is nearly hopeless, if you’re not from the correct part of the world.

- The school is trying to make changes to the curriculum in response to the crisis. For the moment this means that there is some risk management course among the electives. Finance and economics professors are also offering their views on current events. The core courses remain largely untouched because they just give the basics.

- It is possible to skip classes in order to visit a potential employer, but it will hurt your grades (25% is formed by class participation or something).

- Anglo-American culture dominates INSEAD, in spite of all the talk about diversity.

- Rent in Fonty and the surroundings is not going down, in spite of all the talk about deflation. In fact, there seems to be just barely enough supply to satisfy demand.

- Studying is intense and takes a lot of time, if you focus seriously on networking and recruiting it inevitably hurts your academic performance and vice versa. Hm, why does everybody keep saying this?

P.S. By now we should’ve had the official employment stats for the class of December 2008, why is it taking so long?

Tagged: crisis, finance, INSEAD