Few days ago I visited Columbia and asked a friend who is a current
second year MBA student there to take me to his class and show me
Columbia's campus. He met me at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Uris Hall and we
went to his first class.
It was a Private Equity class and
and the class consisted of three logical parts. At the beginning, a
group of four students made a 5-10 minute presentation about certain
company in Mongolia that was producing Cashmere products and sweaters.
The company was having management issues and certain expansion problems
and the group made a detailed analysis of the situation and suggested a
strategic plan to address the issues. It was like a typical management
consulting assignment except that the company was in Mongolia. The
presentation was really good.
After that the class started to
discuss a case that they had left from the previous day. The case was
about a PE shop which invested almost all of its capital in a Chinese
company that produced various components for cars. Because it was such
an important investment for the shop, the
General Partner went from the US to China to manage the company (they had
bought majority of the company stock and thus had total voting control). The company
was quite big. It had $250 million
dollar in sales last year, is the biggest company in China in its
industry and since the Chinese car market is currently exploding, it's
positioned to become one of the biggest companies in the world which
produce various parts for automobiles. The case ended few years ago when
the company was in deep troubles and the management had to decide
whether to fight through those issues, sell the business part-by-part or
to sell the whole company to GE which had made a takeover proposal. So
the students discussed the pros and cons of all those options.
Then, in the last 20 minutes of the
class, the professor introduced a "guest speaker" who turned out to be
the General Partner himself. He told us the decision the management
took, which was to deal with the problems and build the company instead
of selling it, vividly described all the problems they went through -
starting from diplomatic battles with Limited Partners, to interesting
work episodes in China, up to having beer bottles thrown into his office
when he removed a well-connected individual from the previous management
- and then described the final result which is 20-30% growth in the last
2 years and a company that is currently in a terrific shape. His
presentation was truly superb and the students clapped for probably a
full minute after it ended.
It was an impressive class.
At around 1:30 my friend and I went
and had a lunch together. During the lunch I asked him what makes
Columbia different from other top B-Schools. He basically said two
things:
1. New York City: It's a great city
to live in and much more importantly it greatly facilitates the
recruiting process. He said that he and his friends sometimes scheduled
I-banking appointments the same day, took the subway and had an
interview with a Managing Director of a Wall Street firm just a few
hours later.
2. Internationalism: NYC is the
most international city in the world and Columbia AdComm truly tries to
build a diverse international class (according to a data sheet that we
were later given, this year's class represents 64 countries and speaks
50 different languages).
There was an interesting event for
prospective Columbia MBA applicants at 6:30 pm so my friend and I stayed
in campus from 1-7 pm. During this period my friend took me to a Lehman
Brothers' presentation about credit markets. The presentation was not a
recruiting event per se, it was more like a lecture about current
situation and history of the credit markets, but I guess many student's
showed up just to sign their names and to get free pizza and drinks :).
The presentation lasted for about 1.5 hours and it was quite solid
presentation.
At 6:30 pm I went to the event
scheduled for the MBA applicants. It was not an information session but
Linda Meehan started it with a brief 5 minute introduction. The main
point that she stressed was that Columbia has a strong alumni network.
She said "Ten years ago I could say that Columbia has a good alumni
network. Now I can say that Columbia has a great alumni network".
Then the applicants were divided
into 4-5 groups based on the interest that each person had (the interest
groups were entrepreneurship, media and 2-3 others which I don't
remember exactly). I went with the entrepreneurship group into a
classroom where the faculty member in charge of the entrepreneurship
program and a second year student who was the president of the
entrepreneurship club gave a presentation for us and later answered our
questions. There were about 40 of us interested in entrepreneurship and
the event lasted for about 1.5 hours. The 2 most important things that I
remember and which were emphasized in that event were 1) Columbia is the
only top school which has its own VC shop where students can submit
proposals and get $50K - $100K for initial startup money (of course, if
their proposals are accepted) and 2) unlike most other top programs, in
Columbia entrepreneurship is thoroughly integrated into curriculum i.e.
in marketing, accounting, etc. and is not just a stand-alone major.
I finished my campus visit at
around 8pm. It was an excellent experience.
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