I'd Like My Pony Now

Linkage

One of the great things about Sitemeter is it tells you how people are linking to your site.

A lot of one time visitors come from google images searching for "Empire Strikes Back Wallpaper" apparently. I am the third most popular site in THE WORLD for Empire Strikes Back Wallpaper.

Hopefully that last paragraph will move me into the top two.

I'm also the number one site for "Jessica Roberts" and "Hot Blonde" and "Scam". Is there something you want to tell us Jess?

It's A Question Of Numbers...

...or how to get your company an AC Nielsen Center grad.

Sometimes I find myself just stepping out of my current situation and looking at it from an outside perspective. It's kind of fun looking at the rest of my class and trying to work out where they'll be going in the summer, and looking at the second years and where they will get a full-time position.

The first thing that has to be pointed out when talking about the Nielsen center and recruiting from it is that the center has a 100% placement record for graduates. One of the reasons for this I think is the high proportion of job offers given to those who intern from the program. Of the nine in last years class I think only one or two didn't get offers after the summer, and they were due to the economic situation with the employer rather than any deficiency from the student's standpoint.

What this means is that any company hiring second years that didn't pick up an intern this summer will have to beat the offer that the student already has. Every single one of the second years had a great intern experience so they'll need to be offered a pretty nice opportunity to turn down the one they already have in the bag.

Despite this fact there are a lot of companies here hiring, or attempting to hire, second years. This includes some marketing research suppliers and consultancies. There are no supplier firms looking for interns and I think that's a poor decision on their part. Not everyone here wants to head to a P&G or a General Mills or a Kraft, some would much rather learn how to do research rather than plan and conduct it. These people, particularly the career changers, would do really well in a revolving system at any major supplier where they got to see all sides of a market research supplier. I'm sure there are some economic reasons why this may be difficult, but I also know how hard it is to hire good people on the supplier side so what about it?

My Life: Interviews, Informational Sessions, and Midterms

And they are in that order as well.

I was sitting in Data Analysis this morning and it struck me that I'm about exactly midway between coming to Madison and Christmas. This made me very happy. I wonder if anyone noticed. Probably wondering why I was smiling in the middle of a lecture about confidence intervals. Damn he must be really into the idea of estimating a population mean from the sample mean in order to find the degrees of confidence.

But I digress.

So far this term I've had four interviews, ten company informational sessions, one midterm. The mid-term was for Accounting. I got a solid B and on the class distribution chart the professor showed I was pretty much dead in the middle, give or take a couple of percent. I have no problem with that, it's one of the two courses I'm disliking and I'm within touching distance of an A/B in it. One of the nice things about the way they've set up this semester is that they have staggered the midterms this year, so Accounting was last week, Finance is next week, then Data Analysis is the week after. Marketing and Marketing Research don't have mid-terms, they're both more based on projects and case studies.

The informational sessions are great. Ranging from an hour to two and a half. You get a powerpoint presentation on why ConsumerPackageFoodandBevPharma Inc. is the place for you, then a quick Q&A, then they hand out free stuff. Nice. Oh, and there's food and drink as well. Usually the food is better when the session is at the Fluno center which is the executive education building and they serve alcohol but I have no problem with the free pizza or chicken fingers they normally serve up in the regular business school.

Interviews have been a mixed bag. The first question has always been a variation of tell me about yourself, why market research? why UW-Madison? The rest are generally a series of behavioral questions. Tell me about a time.... Give me an example where... For the four interviews I've had one with two people together for 30 mins, one with two people one after the other for 30 mins each, one with one person for 90 mins, and one with three people together for 30 mins. The one that lasted 90 mins went extraordinarily well I thought, the one with two people together for 30 mins went really badly. Go figure.