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MARCH 2004 MBA JOURNAL: YEAR TWO Michelle Walters: Academics, the Placement Process, and More "I'm congratulating myself for not wimping out to become a (gasp!) marketing major as I was struggling through my basic finance classes."
Part of this has to do with my own personal learning style – some of the core classes were difficult for me because there was little context for the quantitative theories that I was learning. This year, I have taken classes in which we are approaching business issues at a macro level, but employing the same techniques that we learned during our first year. For example, my introductory finance class was extremely difficult as I struggled to understand the Capital Asset Pricing Model. But the concepts became less murky last semester, in my Equity Valuation class, when we started to drill down into a company's beta and what numbers went into constructing that beta. Suddenly, all of these disparate pieces of knowledge from my first year started becoming clearer as they were put in context. I'm congratulating myself for not wimping out to become a (gasp!) marketing major as I was struggling through my basic finance classes. So, here I am, in my last semester, looking for a job in real estate. My summer internship was not related to this industry- it was a blend of general management, operations, and marketing, and was largely disappointing. After going through the on-campus recruiting process in the fall and interviewing with a number of companies, I realized that real estate is one of the industries I'm truly passionate about. I was interested in it prior to starting business school, but didn't have the background to work in real estate. It's a unique industry that usually requires a background in real estate or finance. This year, I've started to build a solid academic foundation of the industry. Stern's MBA program offers only one class in introductory real estate finance, a big disappointment considering New York's reputation as a real estate nexus. But I have taken a few classes at NYU's Real Estate Institute, a program that Stern partners with to allow students like me to get a grounding in the industry. To get my foot in the door, I also found a part-time job on Wall Street as a Real Estate Credit Analyst, where I am doing different types of analyses on the bank's portfolio of commercial real estate loans. Hopefully, by my next entry I will be gainfully employed!   Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | MARCH Learn about your online education options |
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