LGO Interviews
This post is for those people who got an interview for the LGO program, and specifically targeted at those who are not blessed with the “gift of gab” like myself. Interviews have always been the toughest part of any application process for me, mainly because I don’t speak good. So to those of you who have a difficult time bullshitting, have no fear, it is possible to get accepted, and I have prepared some pieces of advice and tips for you. Interview Fest is coming up on the 29th. That is plenty of time for you to prepare, even if you haven’t started yet.
And I guess that is my first piece of advice – to prepare. I made the mistake of thinking I could basically just come in cold to one of my interviews (for another unnamed business school) and I completely bombed it. My theory was that my natural candor would be refreshing because the interviewer would be sick of canned responses. I assure you that canned responses are expected and much better than the default alternative, especially if the default alternative is rambling incoherency like it is for me.
But I’m sure most of you aren’t as naive as me and already know that these interviews are no joke, so on with the real advice:
- Relax. Just kidding, I know you’re not relaxed and won’t relax even if I tell you to relax.
Let’s start over:
The King (with apologies to Ron Popeil)
- Develop a message. You’re not being filmed in front of a live studio audience (as they used to say on the Cosby show), so don’t worry if you’re not naturally “smooth” or haven’t been in sales or something – most of us aren’t exactly Billy Mays (see picture). What I mean by this, though, is to really get it straight in YOUR head about two things: 1. Why you are excited about LGO – what appeals to you about the program at this point in your life, and 2. What can you do to help – what unique skills/views/background do you have that will help the program and your classmates develop.
Developing a message helps out for two reasons. First, I would be shocked if one of the actual questions in the interview wasn’t “why are you applying to LGO”, and second, it will give you a solid base for preparing for all of the rest of the questions – you can use your message as a gut check to see if you feel comfortable with a certain story. It isn’t absolutely critical that you have to force your message into every answer (nor should you – that’s annoying in my opinion), but if you really spend time thinking about it and referring back to it when crafting your canned responses, it will really help.
Remember – figure out what gets you excited about the program, AND make sure you focus on how you can help. A lot of people focus only on the first part, but the second part may be more important and impressive (and sometimes easier to answer!) - Prepare your stories. The majority of the interview that LGO conducts (at least the one I had) is fact-based behavioral-style, which means they’ll be asking you questions about what you did in certain general situations in the past (“tell me about a time when you X…”). For these types of questions, I found a great resource online at www.clearadmit.com/wiki. If you are like most of my class, you are also probably applying to other business schools. Fortunately, the ClearAdmit website gives you actual questions that were asked at lots of other schools. What I did was try to come up with “utility” stories that can apply to the most popular questions across schools, and then drill down into the more specialized questions. You’ll get the picture if you root around on that website for a while.
- Practice. I actually did not practice for my interviews at all, but I wish now that I did. If there is one thing I took away from Communications class and various competitions this semester, it is that practice is key. Get a significant other (SO – in the parlance of our time), your mom, a friend, a guy off the street, it doesn’t matter, to ask you some random questions. The more you have told a story, the less nervous you will be telling it during the actual interview. Unless you are the Allen Iverson of interviewing, you need to practice.
Now some hints/information on the actual interview:
- Know the partner companies, and think of which ones you are particularly interested in and why.
- Be able to talk intelligently about the engineering concentration you chose, and why you chose it.
- The interview is specific to LGO – it is conducted by LGO, not Sloan or the school of Engineering – so questions will be slanted towards LGO specifically
- LGO is very focused on getting people who can work in and lead teams, so try to focus on those types of experiences you have had. Also, examples of leadership (as we have learned) does not necessarily mean that you were in charge of a project – you can lead from below or side-to-side. In the vein of working in teams, it doesn’t hurt to show a little sense of humor either.
- Most advice I found centered around finding “unique” things you bring to table. The “unique” label always was confusing to me – a lot of people have the same general background and skill sets. In brief, I think what is meant by “unique” is actually “specific and compelling experiences that demonstrate some broader trait.” Here are some buzzwords/phrases that are NOT unique for LGO (they should be a given): quantitative skills, engineering background and interest in operations. That stuff should come out in your resume, and the interviewer already knows about it, so don’t use them as your unique characteristic. Here are some top-of-my-head traits/experiences that I would find compelling (and have found compelling in my classmates): actual management experience (especially dealing with low performers), recent research in some academic field, military experience, personal crises, moral dilemmas, working for a failing (or failed) company, specific career goals and aspirations (but if you don’t really truly have a clear one in mind, don’t make one up or try to fake it – more on that in the next bullet), athletic accomplishments, “extra-curricular” activities (especially more recent ones).
- **Warning: I think others may disagree with me on this one.** When taking your interview, you may be asked something like “where do you want to be in 10 years” or an equivalent question (I don’t recall if I was actually asked this question or not). Now, here are the real facts: I think something like 85% of people coming into Sloan are “career switchers” who really have no idea what they want to do when they grow up, I would say that ratio is about the same in my LGO class, and I would still put myself in that category (though things are coalescing slowly). In my opinion, if you really don’t know what you want to do in 10 years, just say that you don’t know exactly – I think the honesty will be appreciated. However, if you take that approach, at least think about your ideal job in terms of job function. For instance, for me, it would be something like “I want to work in (or create) an environment which enables people to make better management decisions through more intelligent use of data.” To some extent, I think this type of question is actually designed to test your ability to create a compelling vision of the future, rather than hold your feet to the fire on whether you want to work for a partner company, or whether you want to be a consultant or not (though you shouldn’t say you want to be a consultant!). Granted, mine is probably compelling to approximately 13.5 people in the entire world, but probably the most important thing is that it is compelling to YOU.
As I think of more tips/advice, I’ll re-post. As always, I’m also free to answer questions, time-permitting (we’re on Plant Trek for the next two weeks). Just email me. Good luck!
Two semesters down, two to go (redux)
I just finished up final exams/projects on Wednesday. They capped a long, hard semester where I learned that graduate school is not exactly like the undergrad experience. For example, there was a lot less partying and a lot more commuting.
Um, wasn't exactly like this...
Last night I posted my highlights for the semester from the engineering perspective on my EECS blog. On this blog, I’ll list some highlights from the LGO/Sloan side (in no particular order):
- My Sloan core team. There were six of us (including myself). We really hit it off from the very beginning in the orientation activities, and we were able to keep it going the whole semester. My group included a girl from Senegal, a guy from Korea, a guy from the Dominican Republic, a girl from Peru and a girl who partially grew up in France. All very nice people, and I really learned a lot from them throughout the semester about their cultures. The group reflects the general level of multi-culturalism at Sloan (I think it is over 50% international at this point), which was something I definitely was not expecting, but was probably the best part of the whole experience.
OP class - seriously, we didn't pose for this photo...
- On that note, the one C-function I went to (Korea) was also a highlight. Done really professionally, I didn’t realize that companies actually sponsor these things for tens of thousands of dollars. Very impressive and Erika and I had a lot of fun (and it included free beer and food). I’m going to try to get to more of these next semester.
A fan dance by Sloanies
- The Sloan sponsored Oktoberfest was also awesome. It included free sausage, potato pancakes, sauerkraut, good beer (are you sensing a theme here?) and a sweet German oompah-band.
This isn't the band that played, but you get the idea...
- Out of all my Sloan classes I enjoyed Marketing, with Professor Mark Ritson, the most. Our case studies ranged from Snapple to Wal-mart, and he had a lot of real world experience, especially in luxury brands (which was fun). He told stories about working for Louis Vuitton where they would actually burn $10,000 extra handbags while drinking cognac and smoking cigars rather than put them on sale (true story!). He also explained how retail stores like Wal-Mart and Costco have so much leverage over brands. For reference, see the recent flap between Costco and Coca-Cola (guess who won?) As a direct result of this class, I’m going to get a Costco membership: they sell $160 Dom P champagne bottles for $80, and their store brand champagne ($10 a bottle) is rated a 94 out of 100 on the champagne quality scale (plus they have those trampolines up front!) Ritson will probably kill me for posting this seeing as how he works for Dom Perignon and I know he reads my blogs…
Costco brand champagne
- The SIP (Sloan Innovation Period) class put on by our LGO leadership committee on how to motivate under-performers in real organizations. This was the first year that LGOs had to take SIP classes in the fall semester, and our leadership committee really stepped up to the plate to negotiate the bureaucracy and offer this class to LGOs for credit. It ended up being a great class for me, because I had never managed a group where motivation was a problem, but that is definitely a major (and delicate) part of a typical managers job. It was great to hear from classmates (Steve Smith, Min, Steve Lee, and Tim McIntosh among others) who had actually been there talk about their approaches. Good stuff that is really practical knowledge – in general all the “leadership labs” that have been put on by our fellow LGO students have been great – a real highlight of the program for me and exactly what I wanted to get out of LGO.
- The Sales club sponsored three day Sales training class. This was also very practical and valuable outside of class knowledge, and I would recommend that everybody take it. Among other things sales related, the instructor basically taught us how to write emails to high level executives that optimize your chance of actually getting responses. Since taking the course, I have actually used his techniques and they really do work (valuable for company liaisons on the internship committee to take…)
- The trip to the Michigan-Notre Dame game that I went on with my friends Tim, Bayan and Todd. I think 8 LGO ’11s went to Michigan as undergrads, and pretty much all of them went to this game, so we had a good crew out there.
Superfans
- Last but not least, LGO ice hockey. Awesome. I can’t really skate or play hockey, but it is good times. We even had a bunch of local alums show up and play with us. I figured out that a good way to defend is to dive all over the ice – more surface area when you’re horizontal, and I turn my fat ass into an advantage that way, rather than a liability.
We're not really as good as the uniforms and gear make us appear
That’s a lot for now, there was a lot of other cool experiences this semester but didn’t quite make the cut given the time I have to write this post (on the bubble, as they say). Those include competing in the 100K elevator pitch competition, an American Airlines case competition, and all the talks and seminars that I went to. I do have a blog post about a lot of that stuff on my EECS blog.
I plan on writing a few more blog posts over the next couple weeks, definitely one about my internship at Raytheon which is really exciting.
But right now, I’m gonna go play some video games…and maybe shovel a little bit…
Big Daddy - you're going down...
Love it…
New York Times article about how more and more cities are releasing data they have been collecting for years about all kinds of stuff. They’ve taken the cue from the federal government, where more and more data is being released on data.gov under the new administration.
I know in Boston they have released real-time bus location info on some selected bus routes (finally!) for developers. Hopefully Boston starts releasing a bunch of other relevant and cool data.
Unfortunately, it doesn't include the 71 bus...oh well
I think government can be held a lot more accountable when all the data is out there for the public to use – and maybe ordinary people can help out our city (for free) by developing useful applications and ideas that our busy public servants haven’t thought of before!
Business Intelligence?
I guess I now have a new buzzword for what I’ve been thinking about for the past 8 months. Looks like its a decent place to be right now too, from a business perspective…
In the last two years, the major software companies have scooped up companies in the business intelligence market. Among the larger moves, SAP bought Business Objects for $6.8 billion, I.B.M. bought Cognos for $4.9 billion and Oracle picked up Hyperion for $3.3 billion.
This is from a New York Times article talking about the company culture at SAS.
A personal note about SAS – in the article, they claim that SAS is under attack from open-source software like R, and that they didn’t recognize it in time. I guess I was one of the assailants. I remember when I was working at a startup, we had a need for automating analysis and developing graphics (we were dealing with patient biometric data). SAS wanted to sell us a package for like $3,000 – we didn’t even have that kind of money for salary! From my perspective, R was just as good, if not better, and we made it work automatically using stat-connector (which at that time was under heavy development, it’s probably a lot better now than it was back then in 2004).
The major gripe I have with R is that there is no really good development environment. I’ve used Tinn-R, but the version I’ve been using lately hasn’t been that great. In terms of usability and support, Matlab still is the best option – but you definitely pay for it. Fortunately, I’ve had a free license at MIT – I think if I go to a company that doesn’t have a Matlab license I’ll probably go through withdrawal, but I would definitely take R as my next choice.
I wonder if anybody has been able to implement R on a grid environment?
Belichick uses results from Dynamic Programming!
Just had to get this one out there…thought this was pretty cool.
Respect the rings.
So all you second guessers out there – know you are on the wrong side of Bellman’s equation! Not a good place to be…
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?
Really interesting article in Business Week that I just caught wind of by Adrian Slywotzky talking about how the importance of public/private research labs for America’s economic recovery.
He estimates that due to the Recession and outsourcing, we need to create 6.7 million jobs, and then to spark demand to truly “recover”, we need to create another 10 million. He says this isn’t impossible, because in the 1990’s the U.S. economy generated 22 million jobs (2.2 million a year), but between 2000-2007 (before the Recession), the economy only generated 900,000 a year.
In addition, as he says,
Of the roughly 130 million jobs in the U.S., only 20% (26 million) pay more than $60,000 a year. The other 80% pay an average of $33,000. That ratio is not a good foundation for a strong middle class and a prosperous society. Rather than a demand engine, it’s a decay curve.
His argument is that basic scientific research by both government and private labs has fueled the various “blockbuster” economies over the past hundred something years:
Cars and petroleum in the 1920s, movies and radio in the 1930s, defense in the 1940s, appliances and television in the 1950s, pharmaceuticals in the 1960s, aerospace in the 1970s, PCs in the 1980s, the Internet and cellular telephony in the 1990s.
He observes that all of these industries grew out of basic research conducted either at private research labs like Bell Labs or government labs like DARPA.
What he sees as a problem is that unlike in previous recessions, the funding for basic research has dwindled over the past decade. He cites Bell Labs as an example where as recently as 2001, there were 30,000 scientists employed and now there are only 1,000.
Underlying much of this, of course, is the oft-observed truth that I can certainly confirm personally, that most of the smart technical people (especially the ones I graduated with at Harvard) have been going into finance over the 10 years. As he says,
Science has lost its allure as the domain for our best and brightest. Much of the best technical talent has been drawn to the promise of riches from Wall Street and financial engineering. We need to reestablish a culture that rewards and celebrates the scientist who is willing to work on tough problems even if the commercial return is less certain.
He fundamentally calls for greater investment in labs and R&D in the United States. His three recommendations for how to get back on track are:
• Clear national goals in two or three key areas, such as carbon-free energy and preventive medicine.
• Government commitment of $10 billion a year above and beyond spending for national agencies to jump-start new industrial research labs
• Government tax credits for corporations that commit to spending 5% to 10% (or more) of R&D on basic research
Incidentally, I saw a while ago, that the third point sounds like something President Obama is proposing as part of his general tax reforms – namely a $74.5 billion tax cut over 10 years for R&D.
Having worked at a government research lab over the past 3 years, I can’t comment much on what it used to be like pre-2000. But I know that the people working there are brilliant. And I also know that the finance sector is not going to create 17 million jobs over the next 10 years. What’s wrong with giving scientists some love, for the good of the country?
Google and IBM say we need to train more supercrunchers
There was an article in the New York Times today about the effort that companies like Google and IBM are making to allow university students access to very powerful computing environments to allow engineers and scientists to plow through massive data sets. Their argument is that students are being trained right now to think on a gigabyte scale (if they’re lucky enough to be trained how to analyze real data at all), when all the breakthroughs are happening with datasets in the tera and peta-byte scales.
I couldn’t agree more with this analysis. If people are serious about analyzing those “very rare events”, “long tails” or whatever that can make the difference between a profit and loss, success or failure, or even life or death, then we can’t continue running around assuming things because the model fits 80% of the time and anyways, it’s too hard to do that level of analysis. We all saw what happened with that idea.
When I was working at Lincoln, we created a highly accurate model of U.S. near mid-air collisions. We did this by analyzing about 5 terabytes worth of radar data from across the country (about 8 months worth). Nobody had ever done this before on anything close to that scale.
As a result, we had orders of magnitude more data on near mid-air collisions (a very rare event) than the last model in the early 90’s. Without this data, and the high-powered systems available at Lincoln that we used to analyze it, our model would have suffered from the same assumptions and modeling error as previous attempts, and that is just not good enough for developing something as important as the next generation of collision avoidance systems for manned and unmanned aircraft, which people are now doing at Lincoln, largely as a result of that effort.
The ability to analyze massive data sets has been proven again and again as a competitive advantage in bio-tech, finance (those who do it correctly), internet, and even marketing, making those companies who developed those competencies hundreds of billions of dollars.
Is it then a stretch to say that the next lucrative opportunity in operations management will be to develop the capabilities to harness the massive amounts of data companies already generate every day? I’m talking about everything from inventories to machine control outputs and even to intra-company emails. There are signals in that data, just as there are signals in everything from our DNA to the stock markets, if you look hard enough.
To be honest, I don’t know (I’m new to this stuff!) but that’s why I and several of my classmates are trying to start a new track for LGOs in the EECS department this year called Information and Decision Systems. The focus in this track is to develop the theoretical, practical and communication skills for students who want to take on this operations challenge in the real world, for real companies. That means not just studying and learning the algorithms, but also getting a design background in the networking, database and parallel computing systems that are critical enablers of this type of work. It also means developing specialized communication skills to explain the opportunities and the results, because like the NYT article said, most people have not been trained to think on this scale before.
I could talk for pages more about this topic, but lets just leave it at that for now. I just had to write something because I’m obsessed with this idea, and this article got me all excited. I’m definitely going to look into Hadoop…
Blogger^2
Quick note to say that I’m now blogging for the EECS department too. I even got my first “first” comment!
LGO Admissions
Now that I am blogging for both LGO and (soon) for the EECS department, I thought I’d write a post specifically for prospective students about the admissions process. That might be slightly more relevant than shaky videos about football games.
In terms of LGO, I am coming from the perspective of somebody who did not have a whole lot of operational or manufacturing experience – in fact, I’ve never worked for a company has actually turned a profit! Even worse, I don’t even have an undergrad engineering degree – I was applied math (or fake engineering, as I like to say). And there are several of us in the ‘11 class who have similar backgrounds, so don’t sweat it if you haven’t worked on a factory floor or in a supply chain environment.
That being said, if you haven’t had the industry background, I would recommend visiting LGO either for an info session or on your own as soon as you can. LGO is a unique program, and it may not be for everybody. Going to these sessions is not just about getting the “official” information (most of which you can find on the website anyways), but about meeting your potential future classmates to see if you fit in. Personally, I was on the fence at first about LGO (then LFM) for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but after attending an info session I got really fired up, mainly because the people I met were awesome, and that even helped me write my admissions essays.
Now, if you haven’t had industry experience, that’s O.K., but you should figure out why you want to focus on operations and/or manufacturing. The essays and the interview will be focussed on that question. I know I only had a vague idea of what operations meant before I applied, so if you are in that boat, I would suggest checking out the INFORMS website for some more information – as I found out, Ops is about a lot more than just assembly lines. For instance, I found that my background in applied math and statistics has been a perfect preparation for a lot of the latest challenges in operations and manufacturing, but I didn’t know that going into the process. Instead, I tried to play that down, thinking it wasn’t relevant.
Maybe my best advice for those with atypical backgrounds would be to try to find how your experience relates to operational challenges. I guarantee that you can find something that you can speak to and get excited about, and that will help in your essay writing. Particularly if you lack industry perspective (like I did right about now a year ago), I’d be happy to help out if you send me a message.
As an introduction to the topic of Opeartions, I’d like to pass on a reading recommendation that Chris Lin posted on his blog last year that really helped me out.
Good read as an introduction to Operations
BONUS:
You should also check out the roster of current LGO partner companies – they are the ones who are going to be paying for most of your school, so you should probably be knowledgeable about them and be able to speak to which ones you may be interested in and why (hint, hint).
Hail to the Victors
I just spent the weekend in Ann Arbor, with a few friends from LGO and went to one of the best football games I’ve ever seen in person (Michigan vs. Notre Dame). Final score, 38-34, and it came down to the last drive.
Check out my youtube video of the winning set of downs from where we were sitting. I didn’t get such great shots of the actual plays, but you get a sense of the atmosphere (insane!)
I’m cautiously dipping my toes into the college football water, and I think I’m going to start following Michigan. Being from Boston, and going to school at Harvard, I never really had a Division 1 program to really get into (BC is a non-starter). But there’s about 8 people in LGO who went to Michigan as undergrads, and after going to this game at the Big House I liked the vibe around the campus and in the stadium (which seats about 110,000!).
