One of the main reasons I opened this blog (apart from the natural wish to share this amazing experience I’m going through with friends, family, prospectives and the world) is for me to be able to install stuff.

This is especially true in times of increased overload at school. After all, what’s better than adjusting a new blog template when what you really need to do is write cover letters and prepare cases.

So, I just moved from Blogger to WordPress and am experiencing the wonders of the 2.7 version. I hope I’ll like it, and I hope you do too! Just remember to update the address for the RSS feed to this new one:

http://westcoaststory.avatiach.com/?feed=rss2

One of the main goals of all of us coming to business school, is naturally to find a great job afterwards. It can be finding the right partner for opening a new venture, taking on a more senior position in your field of interest or switching to a new career track, job search is one of the main things that occupies our minds since day-1 at school. There are tons of activities in school to support us in this quest. Here are some of them:

Companies - On Campus

Since the first week of school companies start coming to school to present themselves, their culture, the students they look for and potential positions (although at this early stage most of the sessions are more general than specific. This is a great opportunity to learn about companies you are interested in, network with some of the company’s current employees and understand differences between companies (for example, when a company says Product Manager - what are they really talking about). Most companies also give some fun collectibles (although some have real attractive raffles - Microsoft gave an Xbox, Adobe gave the entire Creative Suite etc.).

(Exhibit 1: The pens)	(Exhibit 2: The not-pens)

In addition, once in a while there will be a firm night dedicated to specific industries (consulting career night, tech career night etc.). In these events companies of the same industries come to campus to meet with students interested in this industry. In some cases, companies will attend a special discussion or sessions - one such example was the case competition Facebook conducted on campus, allowing students to work on a real business case for Facebook.

Companies - Off Campus

The proximity of Berkeley to the Silicon Valley allows us to reach out to companies quite easily. The High Tech club organizes career treks to many companies in the area. so far I visited eBay, Adobe, Symantec, Yahoo! and Google and next Friday we’re at Facebook. Another great initiative that is unique to Haas is “Rich’s Silicon Valley Tour”. In this half-day tour, Rich Wong, our Tech Account Manager (from the Career Services Office) takes groups of five students each day for a tour around the silicon valley, including lectures on the area’s history, geography and culture and, of course, about companies we see along the way.

(Naveed, Kazu, Hannah, Akhil and me @Intel)

On the next posts I will cover other opportunities we have in the area of job search, and a few words about the current economic turmoil

This year we celebrated our first thanksgiving with our new friends from Haas. As I’ve mentioned in the past, there is an amazing group of people living in the UC Village (aka “The Village People”) that became really close friends, and we try to celebrate all major events together.

Progressive Thanksgiving Meal
The holiday events started with the traditional thanksgiving meal, only due to the large number of participants, it was split into three events. We started at David and Hannah’s apartment with drinks and appetizers.


After everyone got into the right holiday spirit, we moved to Christine and Vince for the main Thanksgiving meal, including the traditional turkey, professionally prepared and cut by Vince’s father - a turkey expert. During the meal Vince told us the story behind the holiday and each of us wrote (anonymously) what he or she are thankful for this year.

After the meal we all went to Sagy and Moran’s for deserts and (some more) drinks. At this point the Texan people in the group went to see the traditional thanksgiving football game while the rest of us went to play the traditional Rock Band game (we are turning this into a tradition, just have a little patience).

Black Friday
The Friday that follow thanksgiving is known as Black Friday, and it marks the beginning of the huge sales season that ends after the new year arrives. It is called Black Friday because this is the day in which most retailers more from red ink in their books (i.e. losses) to black ink (profits). One of the traditional ways of celebrating the day is DoorBusters - special offers of products in really cheap prices that are offered in a very limited number to the first customers. And the stores are opened at 5am. This creates huge lines throughout the night of people trying to be the first to win these sales. This year things went so crazy that a WallMart employee died as the crowd tried to get in the store. I had to see this for myself, so I woke up at 5 am and drove to the nearest WallMart, but since I arrived at 6am, most of the attractive items were already gone. Yes, it’s that crazy.

Going Out
That very Friday we went out with the Village People to celebrate Jack (Amanda’s husband) birthday. We went to a great Italian restaurant in Berkeley, had some great Italian wine and shared huge family-style dishes. From there we continued to the Albatross, a very nice American-style Berkeley pub, which not only offers all kinds of beer and snacks, but also has several special darts booths. I would be really Happy to meet the guy who thought that giving sharp, dangerous objects to drunk people is a good idea. Luckily, the evening ended without casualties.

Movie Night

The Village Thanksgiving weekend events ended the next day (Saturday night) at our place with a festive screening of the 80’s classic Top Secret. Jack and Amanda brought home-made Hummus which was absolutely fantastic, Shauli brought old scotch and cigars and everyone got into the right mood for this hilarious spoof.

Last Sunday, we lost one of the most inspiring professors in Haas - Bill Sonnenschein.

When we just arrived to Haas, we could sign up for two modules in the pre-school summer camp. One was math/finance/accounting introduction, and the second was Communication Workshop. We didn’t really know what exactly to expect from that second workshop, but I decided to take it anyway in what turned out to be one of the best experiences I could have before Haas.

Bill was the professor leading this workshop and he immediately captured us with his unique approach to communication, public speaking and people in general. The workshop was full of activities that allowed us to get to know each other better, while improving our ability to communicate regardless to our country of origin.

Bill was also our professor in the Leadership Communication course during fall A, and here too he managed to create a learning experience that was unlike any I’ve had before. He built a wonderful team of GSIs (Graduate Students Instructors), which were second-year students that practically led the class and I don’t think there is even a single person in class that didn’t become a better public speaker by the end of the semester.

Bill spent the last few months in Madagascar as a communication consultant for the government there. He was extremely excited about this opportunity and told us lots of great stories in class. unfortunately, after only few hours of intense gastric illness, Bill passed away last Sunday in the small village of Maronsetra on the East coast of Madagascar.

We will all miss him at Haas, his great sense of humor, his unconventional way of thinking, his ringtone (Hendrix’s solo in All Along the Watchtower) and most of all his genuine passion for people and for experiencing life to the maximum.

Unbelievably, yesterday was our last final test of this semester. Yes, as weird as it may sound, a quarter of the academic part of this journey is behind me. This half semester we studied Accounting, Finance and Strategic Marketing (fascinating!). And now we move on to a 5 week break which will be mostly dedicated to preparations for the internship search that will actively start on the Spring semester.

I mentioned it is a quarter of the academic part, because from a calendar point of view there is tons of activity happening during breaks as well. For example, during this winter break there are academic trips to India and Brazil and student organized trips to Israel and China. During spring break there is a student trip to Japan and an academic trip to Vietnam, and on summer break we all hope to work for our internships, and about a third of the class also participates in IBD - a course which involves consulting to a real company, mostly in developing countries, with a trip of 3 weeks during summer break to finalize the project on the actual company’s location.

Since I haven’t written in a while, I carry a heavy debt to you guys (I’m tempted to say that this is a risk-free debt, but that’s a joke that only finance students will understand, and even than it’s debatable how funny it really is). So my plan for winter break is to make sure I write here retrospectively on all the major events that happened in the second part of last semester, together with updates on activities during he break itself.

I conclude this post with the immortal words of our accounting professor (as can be also seen on our t-shirts in the picture below): In this world, first there’s sex, then accounting, then everything else.

On our first day at Haas, we were assigned to our study groups. Each study group has 5 students, pre-assigned by the school, which try to achieve a mix of locations, backgrounds and interests within each group. I am (of course) part of the best group ever together with Gary, Bill, Jenny and Kazu.

Dinner
Last week, Kazu got summer internship offers from big investment banks and he and his wife, Mayu, invited our group along with other friends who helped him with his applications (Fiona, Anaal, Jesse and Anup) to a Japanese dinner at their house in the UC Village.

The food was awesome! It felt like an exclusive Japanese restaurant with top-quality ingredients, lovely looking dishes and high quality Sake which was bought on a tour to the local Saki factory that very same day. The table was full of goodies and people were not sure where to start although it didn’t take long for everyone to develop a silly smile of happiness. It was that good.

Entertainment
After dinner, Kazu and Mayu played on the Accordion (Kazu) and the Piano (Both). It was the first time I actually attended a party where there was formal musical entertainment, and it was such a great idea. Specially since both Kazu and Mayu are really top-class (and I mean, really…they can play!).

Naturally, all of us had to try the accordion too, which turned out to be
1. heavy and 2. pretty easy to learn.

There’s no better sign that things start getting crazy than the fact I’m writing today about an event that happened two weeks ago (instead of writing about the amazing >play conference that just ended, but a dedicated post will arrive soon and that’s a promise!). Anyhow, I proudly present our first Halloween report!

Preparations

As I may have stated in some of my previous posts, people here do things seriously, and this definitely applies also to holidays. For weeks before the actual date our street started to be painted with orange, black and white - orange for the pumpkins, black for the witches and white for the ghosts, skeletons and fake spider webs (as if the area is missing real monster spiders!).

We also wanted to prepare, so we bought tiny light bulbs for our windows (which the cats enjoy very much!) and tons of candy for the “trick or treat” parade. We were strictly following the rule which states that only store-wrapped candies are allowed as there are lots of horror stories about poisoned candies. We couldn’t really tell what’s true and what are urban legends, however, parents here take this really seriously.

Trick or Treat!

As it got darker, some of the decorated houses turned out to be multimedia enables, with sound, lights and smoke effects. Around 7pm (you don’t write 19:00 in America - just one more of those things) the kids started to come. It was really fun except for the fact that Noozie didn’t appreciate their costumes as much as we did and decided to happily bark on each and every visitor. Being the big dog she is, we had to split roles with one of us serving the candies and the other holding Noozie while desparately trying to take pictures.

As you should expect by now (if you’ve read this blog in the past), Haas students have organized a huge costumes party in San Francisco to celebrate Halloween. Unfortunately, we couldn’t attend it this year, but we did manage to conclude an exciting evening watching a movie with our amazing friends from the village.

Prospective students at Haas hear a lot about how the school is highly student-driven, and that there are numerous opportunities to get involved even from day-one. I can now testify first-hand that this is absolutely true.

DMEC & >play
One of the most exciting clubs at Haas is the Digital Media and Entertainment club, which brings together people with passion for technology and specifically its impact on the consumer world through digital media, such as TV & cinema, computer games, web applications, the living room and even your car.

The club organizes the >play conference, which brings together industry experts from all the areas mentioned above and more, to create an unforgettable annual event. The event provides a unique opportunity to meet both the newest startups in the Media and Entertainment sphere, as well as the latest innovations from the well established players in this market. The main attractions of the event are traditionally its great keynote speakers, the expo that demonstrates the hottest new technologies and the panels who bring in industry leaders to hold fascinating discussions about the latest trends. This year, the >play conference takes place on November 15th.

Getting Involved
When I applied to Haas, I knew I wanted to take an active part in the DMEC activities, I just didn’t realize how fast this would happen. Even before arriving at haas, the >play committee published a message in the new admits Google group, inviting first year students to volunteer in helping organizing the event. Truth is, I assumed that we will get mainly administrative or logistical tasks. Nevertheless, I’ve expressed my interest in helping with the panels. Only a weeks after arriving to Haas, we had a first meeting with the second year student who is responsible for the panels, and he told us about opportunities of getting involved with existing panels. However, he strongly encouraged us to come up with ideas for new panels and suggested a few topics that we can follow up on.

Making it happen
One of the topics suggested was a Gaming Panel. I’ve long ago marked the gaming industry as one of the most exciting and innovative ones, and looked for ways to getting involved in it, and this was a great opportunity to do so while also helping >play becoming even better. I joined forces with several classmates, and with the help of many students from both years we gradually started forming the list of participants for our newborn panel.

New business models in gaming
The main theme of the >play conference this year is Disruption, so we examined several ideas for our panel that could fit this theme. We eventually came up with a list of companies who are redefining the ways in which games are delivered to customers - from live online game servers through episodic gaming to user-engagement games, the panel started to include an amazing list of people, and they were all extremely responsive and excited to take part in >play.

I proudly present the >play 2008 gaming panel:

Quite exciting, isn’t it?

Last week we had our Fall A finals (in Stats, Micro and OB). To celebrate the end of a sleepless week, Our group of close friends from the Village gathered together to an afternoon tour at Scharffen Berger chocolate factory here at Berkeley.

We started at the factory’s cafe with a great lunch and even better deserts.

We then moved to a very entertaining session about the factory’s history. Scharffen Berger’s history is not that long actually, as the factory is 11 years old. They specialize in dark chocolate on various percentage categories (less percent means more sugar!). We also learned about some of the internals of the chocolate making process, the machines, the different ways to grow it etc. We also learned that we prefer the cheap, unbranded milk chocolate over the expensive quality dark one.

The event concluded with an actual tour in the factory, which was a bit disappointing, as no chocolate was involved. No chocolate rivers, candy bar trees or even big bowls filled with steamy, thick cacao. Just many many iron machines. Nevertheless, it was still lots of fun, the company was great as usual, and it was exactly what we needed after final’s craziness.

One of the things that I was looking forward to is buying a car in America. Everyone told me how cheap cars are in the States, and how big the variety is - just select your preferred car and take it home at a surprisingly low price.

ahm…not really.

Apparently, the recent year have changed the Americans’ driving preferences quite a bit. Goodbye huge cars, Jeeps or SUVs - hello small, Japanese, gas-saving cars.

What this means in practice is that those lucky people who have bought:
1. Toyota Corolla
or
2. Honda Civic
Are sitting on gold mines. They can sell their cars within seconds while people who hold any other type of car are stuck with it for weeks.

How it works

• You start by defining your budget, target models, years and source (dealers are not very popular here, so you will most likely go to private owners). The best source of helping you making these decisions is Kelly Blue Book (http://www.kbb.com). This is an online price-list for cars that will calculate a market value for any car by model, year, milage, condition etc. It also contains user reviews for each of the car models.

• Once you define your target specturm of cars, you start searching for it. The search usually starts (and ends) at craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org). Everyone is selling and buying there now all over America. It’s quite amazing, but this site have become the de-facto standard of classifieds over the internet.

• If you find a car that seems relevant, first thing you do is that you ask for the VIN#. Each car here has a unique identification number by which you can track its complete history through websites like CarFax (http://www.carfax.com). You put in the car’s VIN and you get a full and detailed report of every accident the car has ever been through, number of previous owners, milage each owner did etc.

• An interesting term you should know is “salvaged title”. It basically means that this car was through a major accident, or that it was stolen and returned at some point. In reality, this actually translates into - “this is the car of the devil, do not touch it and if you do no one will buy it from you”.

• Once you do find a car and run it through the neccessary tests, the actual sale is done by the onwer simply handing you over an ownership title, which declares that you are now the owner of the car. You must then register it within 5 days in the DMV (Department of Motored Vehicles).

(Our car, in the middle of our street)

Our car
Our little community of friends have encountered some horror stories regarding cars - people who give you a VIN and then try to sell you a different car, people who “forget” to mention that the car is salvaged or people who sell their car for their brother who lived in Hong Kong, did not sign the title as required and doesn’t have a US Visa so he can’t sign it now as well.

We were extremely lucky to find a nice 2005 Hyundai Elantra with only 40,000 miles and another year of valid warranty. To find such a car it took over a month and a half of daily scanning of craigslist on all the areas that were near enough to reach without a car (the classic “I need a car to buy one” paradox). Keep your fingers crossed for us that it doesn’t get stolen!