Goodbye!

Barcelona has been wonderful, I’ve been so glad to be living in Europe again. But as the announcements have come and gone for all the fun parties (and championship winning games!!!!) I’ve missed, I’m regretting my decision to stay in Europe long after school finished up here. I miss my Kenan-Flagler family, and I’m scared that my incessant Facebook status updates are not enough to keep me fresh in my friends’ memories.
I chose to remain this long to be able to explore parts of Europe I had yet to visit, and I have. I’m on the train home from Bilbao now, not riding a motorcycle as I’d hoped to, due to my extremely foolish insistence on riding from Barcelona to Nice in the rain. I hate riding in the rain, and crashed in Nice, so the train it is. However, since it seems to never stop raining here, I’m glad to be on the train and not cold and wet on a bike.
I have taken some wonderful trips, including revisiting two of my favorite cities, London and Paris, finally seeing the Cote D’Azur (even though most of that trip was spent recuperating from a sprained ankle in my hotel room), watching the World Superbike race in Valencia, and finally seeing the Guggenheim Bilbao, as well as the special bonus of seeing one of Bilbao’s nightly “Saint’s Week” processions, and sharing a hotel with the cast and crew of Cirque Du Soleil’s Varekai, tempting me to run away with the circus…
The big reason I’m staying so long and missing all the awesome parties with my wonderful friends is that I’m obsessed with MotoGP. This is the world’s premier motorcycling race series, and Spain competes head-to-head with Italy for having the most passionate fan base. The Jerez, Spain round was always the first on the calendar, and remains the first European race. It’s a big deal, like going to Mecca, but even bigger, for people like me.
So I figured why not stick around and be with my people the first weekend of May, then rush back to the Hill in time for graduation? Well, it turns out, as much as I prefer living in a European city over Small Town, USA, I also prefer being with my friends! I knew I’d miss being “in the bubble” once graduation comes and it’s time to start making money, but I didn’t realize just how much I’d miss my family at Kenan-Flagler. I’ve never been in such a tight-knit group before and it was an experience I’m sure I’ll always try to recapture.Here’s 3/4^ths of the Kenan-Flagler/ESADE crew gathered ‘round the laptop for one of our Tarheel’s winning games. Of course only the fashionista remembered to wear the right t-shirt!If you’d like to read the next chapters, you can always find me on LiveJournal.

Susanna Schick

A taste of Chapel Hill

Experience Weekend came to a close this evening with “Taste of Chapel Hill,” an event that featured food from various local area restaurants. There was Chinese, Mediterranean, and of course, barbecue offerings. Students filled up on hush puppies, pulled pork, hummus, vegetable lo mein and fortune cookies; drinks included sweet tea and beers from Carolina Brewery.

Second-year student Alex Auspitz set the mood behind the turntables.

As the sun set, students reflected on what was a long, yet informative, day. When the kegs inevitably ran dry, we made our way up to Mansion 462, where the MBA Student Association was sponsoring a tab. Also out celebrating was UNC’s VCIC team that won the competition this afternoon. Way to bring it home, UNC!

For our visitors, we hope you all enjoyed yourselves this weekend. For those prospective students who were not able to make it to Chapel Hill, we hope this blog provided a peak into the events.

And we hope to see you all of you in the fall!

– Marc Zawel

Photos in this post courtesy of Diane Dhaniardi

Activities at the Activities Fair

Tweet, tweet!

We’re about halfway through our day here at Experience Weekend. After this morning’s introductory session with Dean Dean, Dean Hoffman and Mindy Storrie, who leads the leadership initiative, prospective students broke out into various student life panels. There were sessions on financial aid, housing, life in Chapel Hill, international opportunities, case competitions, and, of course, academics. To answer questions, we had a wide variety of panelists available, including first and second year students, alumni, program administrators and professors.

Now, everyone has grabbed a box lunch and headed outside to enjoy the weather. All of the MBA student clubs have set up tables around Latané Plaza and the club presidents are talking with prospective students about their organization’s plans.

Judging by the crowds and the buzz, an informal survey indicates that the prospective students are interested in beer, entrepreneurship, golf and real estate (not necessarily in that order).

This afternoon, we’ve got a career services presentation followed by career panels. Let’s talk jobs!

– Marc Zawel

Kicking off Experience Weekend

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The sun was shining as students arrived at Kenan-Flagler for today’s Experience Weekend events.

There was a continental breakfast out on Latané Plaza before everyone gathered in Koury Auditorium.

Shawn Brandt, chair of Experience Weekend, welcomed everyone before introducing Michael Patrick, president of the MBA Student Association. “I’m excited to be here,” Michael said before turning the mike over to Dean Jim Dean, who kicked off Experience Weekend with a discussion of Kenan-Flagler’s core values, his vision and the school’s strategic priorities.

He touched on the five values — Excellence, Leadership, Integrity, Community, Teamwork — that Dean summed up as “Excellence with a heart.” “This is where we come from,” he said. “This is what we stand for.”

Dean then ran through the school’s priorities: enhancing leadership development, continuing Kenan-Flagler’s globalization, enhancing its research impact, broadening and deepening corporate relationships and using technology to enhance education and research. He also spoke of “One School and One University,” an initiative to strengthen the business school’s involvement in the broader UNC community.

“You continue to inspire me. As our current students do,” he said in closing.

– Marc Zawel

Dessert at DuBose

We had a great kick-off to Experience Weekend here in Chapel Hill this evening. Admitted and current students gathered at DuBose House, which is home to the Exec Ed program at Kenan-Flagler. The main buzz came from the entry hallway, although many people also retreated to smaller living rooms and the upstairs bar.

It wouldn’t be a dessert reception without the dessert — and there was quite a spread. Chocolate covered strawberries, bite-sized molten brownies, fruit tarts. The general consensus was that the deep fried cheesecake was the best. Honestly, deep fried cheesecake — who thinks this up?

Weather is forecast at 77 and sunny tomorrow. It should be a great day.

Check back here for updates throughout. And, if you’re not already, be sure to follow us on twitter, too.

– Marc Zawel

Faith vs. Fear

In the spirit of our fearless leader’s words during his inaugural speech, I am pretty much committed to starting my own company right now. Obama’s inspirational words that I have held close were: “Choose hope over fear” and “Risk-takers built this country”. I have long tried to base my choices on faith rather than fear, knowing that when I make choices based on fear, they’re never as good. The funny thing is, starting my own company seems like the easier, softer way. In my off-campus job search, I pore through ad after ad seeking someone precisely not me, even though I’m sure I could do these jobs. Changing careers is a leap, and one that is generally made much easier with an MBA. For many of my classmates, this is true, but I am still a star-shaped peg and will clearly never fit any of the round holes seeking to be filled with MBA’s.

And I’m okay with that now, with some help from Mark Albion’s book “More Than Money”. For quite some time I have grappled with the idea that I need to be hired by a major corporation to “validate” my MBA, disappointed that my dream gig- sustainability consulting- overwhelmingly prefers people with Fortune 500 management or big 5 consulting experience. I have finally admitted that this is more about satisfying my ego than about wanting to work in Corporate America.

Yet starting my own company would certainly require the use of absolutely everything I have learned at Kenan-Flagler, and be a much better fit for an MBA who had pink hair for 10 years. Not to mention that the pieces of this new venture do seem to be falling into place so easily. While writing cover letters that only get read by computers feels exactly like banging my head against a wall, developing this business has been fun and easy, so far. I have a tremendous amount of resources at my disposal, and the newfound ability to clearly see what needs to be done and how. It certainly helps that the highly respected industry experts I’ve pitched some of my business ideas to  have given me positive feedback.

The news makes it seem impossible to find work right now, with all their hysteria about the state of the economy, and a part of me (ego, again) thinks I should fight harder and push my way into a job. But that’s never been my style. I’d rather go build something new, do my own thing. Most employers seem to be letting fear rule their decisions, seeking only the most experienced candidates. Companies are panic-stricken now that American consumers have run out of credit to keep their businesses growing, and I suspect the majority are not the least bit interested in finding out how to build a more sustainable business model.

Until a company’s success is measured on something more lasting than quarterly growth, they will not be able to adapt to this new austerity. My greatest hope is that this reduced consumption will continue and everyone will find new ways to create and define wealth. Instead of relying on passive investments, we can take a more active role in creating our own wealth. Which is risky, but then so is the stock market. Instead of having faith in something beyond one’s control (few of us have the power to move markets), we can have faith in ourselves, our own ability to create sustainable value.

Susanna Schick

Honduras Habitat for Humanity

The following is a  post from UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Habitat for Humanity Web page detailing Kenan-Flagler MBA’s Honduras Habitat for Humanity project.

Travel and Country Music – 2/28/2009
It’s hot and muggy when we step off the plane in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.  Our contact, Jennifer, meets us at the airport.  She’s with the Peace Corps and will serve as a liaison between our group and Habitat for Humanity, and will work with us at the site all week.  During the 3 hour drive west from San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba, where we’re going to be spending our next couple days building, we attempt to communicate with our driver who speaks very little English, and listen to his favorite type of music, old-school American country music.  It’s surreal seeing the bright colors of the buildings, the tropical vegetation and the landscape of Honduras with the country music in the background

First Day at the worksite – 3/2/2009
It’s raining on our first scheduled day to go to the worksite, so instead, we pick up some supplies like work gloves, and then visit one of the communities that is being helped by Habitat for Humanity in the area with their refurbishing efforts.  The two women there tell us how happy and thankful they are to have the help of Habitat, and how many improvements have been made to their homes.  There is a lot of poverty in this country and it is saddening to see some of the conditions of the homes.  After lunch, it has stopped raining, so we go to the worksite and take a look around.  There’s a foundation that’s maybe a foot above ground outlining where the walls are supposed to go.  There are some bricks maybe 100 feet away by the dirt road, which are clearly for building up the walls.  We get to work immediately moving the bricks from the road to the worksite.  The two ex-Navy guys on our team, Dan and Chris G., organize a daisy chain.
Later on at dinner, Liz and Chris do a formal demonstration of proper daisy chain procedure.  After that Gustavo, the Habitat coordinator in La Ceiba, introduces us to Glenda, the woman for whom we’re building the house.  She’s struggling to take care of her parents, who are both ill, and making ends meet with her used clothes business.  You can tell that she doesn’t want to say too much for fear of getting too emotional.  The mood is lightened when we all celebrate the beginning of the week together by dancing and experiencing some of the local culture with some Garifunas who have come to play some music for us and show us their traditional dance.
We’re geared up for more work for the rest of the week to help Glenda!

Cheke Leke – 3/3/2009
Today we meet the site foreman, Don Antonio, and some of his workers as well as his son Josué, who is 16 years old and stronger than any two of us combined.  Don Antonio is tough, and even more so because he will tell you what to do, in spanish, even though you may not know any spanish.  We made good use of the few in the group who have Spanish speaking skills like Rick and Chris H.  We are all somewhat equipped with some of the “lingo” that we learned at dinner the previous night, like “cheke leke” for OK or “cemento” for cement.  The sun is hot and we have to take frequent water breaks and sunscreen breaks, but we are all sweaty and dirty and loving it!  I’m especially pleased by the attitude of everyone on the worksite.  Everyone wants to lend a hand or figure out a way to help.  And no one is shying away from the hard work.  Some of us were down the road, shoveling dirt into wheelbarrows which others were wheeling up a small hill to the worksite.  Others helped Don Antonio build the walls and mix cement.  During lunch, some of the guys in our group played football with some of the workers and kids on the worksite.  It is great to see people from our group interacting and making connections with the Hondurans.

Sunburns, bruises, sore muscles and smiles – 3/6/2009
By the fifth day of working, we’re all used to getting up early and being ready to leave for breakfast at 7:15am.  Our driver has switched from country to 80s ballads.  We are serenaded by Phil Collins and Stevie Wonder on the way to the worksite every morning!  This is the last day and we move a lot of gravel, trying to fill in the foundation to three bricks high, and put some finishing touches on the walls.  Gustavo, the director of Habitat for Humanity in Honduras, arrived at 4 pm as we were finishing our work.  He was accompanied by Glenda, the woman for whom (and with whom) we built the house.  I remember us being quite sweaty, dirty, and bug bitten.  Gustavo gathered us around the house and delivered an elegant and moving speech to celebrate our work.  Speaking in spanish with Jennifer our fearless Peace Corps volunteer translating, Gustavo breathed life into the cement blocks surrounding us.  The unfinished walls were transformed from mortar and cinderblocks into a home for Glenda.  He said that he hoped Glenda would love the house the way that we had loved it and that she would care for it as we had.  He wished her parents recovery from their health ailments and he said that he hoped she would soon fill the house with children.  It was incredibly powerful and I remember looking around at the dozen people in our team and just feeling really good.  I was impressed at what we had accomplished and how we had come together as a team.  I was also happy to part of a project so utterly vital as giving someone a house, something that we often take for granted in the United States.

UNC Honduras Team
Dan Sowder- Team Leader (2010)
Micaela Maxwell – Assistant Team Leader (2010)
Rick Miranda (2010)
Liz Paxton (2009)
Sumeth Suwanpusaporn (2010)
Mahogany Coleman (2010)
Chris Goodwin (2010)
Chris Hunnicutt (2010)
Suzi Mahrt (2010)
Matthew Meyer (2009)
Mike Talplacido (2010)
Janelle Veldman (2010)

Doing Good and Doing Well

Because I just can’t get enough of that planet-lovin’ feeling, I went to the 6th annual DGDW conference  that is held by IESE business school in Barcelona each year. This year it was also Net Impact’s major EU conference, and was sold out! IESE is right up the hill from ESADE, and I had fun making up stories about the (imagined in my dangerously fertile imagination) rivalry between the Jesuits who started ESADE and the Opus Dei who started IESE.

The conference was more pleasant than the US conference because it was smaller and had fewer panels to choose from. Thus, I didn’t feel like I was going to miss some life-changing presentation by picking the “wrong” panel. The Friday networking dinner was great, we had a private room at the back of a great restaurant, and the cool thing about dining with mostly “extranjeros” was that the smokers in our group didn’t realize that in Barcelona it is not only legal, but practically compulsory to smoke in restaurants. So we enjoyed a smoke-free evening of scintillating conversation on CSR and so much more. We had a very interesting mix, and really gelled, so it was a great evening.

At the career fair, I discovered a sustainability consulting firm I hadn’t heard of, and talked to a couple of other companies I’m interested in working for. It was smaller than the one in the US, but not by much. The big takeaway I got from the panel on sustainability consulting, the career fair and the speakers was a reiteration that if you want to work for an NGO or in sustainability consulting, you’re much more valuable if you start out in traditional consulting or management roles. Noted.

The Social Entrepreneurship panel was really fun for me, not only did we get to hear from the founders of Kiva, First Book , and My Bank but the panel leader also asked for some social entrepreneurs from the audience to do elevator pitches. Since I am at a point with my business idea that I could do this, I volunteered. It was really fun to try and get the key value proposition across in under 60 seconds, and I did it! A few people told me they liked the idea, which certainly gave me more confidence. Unfortunately, none of them are my target segment, but that’s what my customer survey is for. My Social Entrepreneurship professor asked me to pitch it to our class as well, and I’m hoping to get deeper feedback from that.

Susanna Schick

Update from Admissions

Here’s a quick update from the admissions front.  We’re about ¾ of the way through our admissions season (well, 3 of our 4 deadlines have passed).  We are about to make admissions decisions on round 3 (January round) applicants.  And they’ll hear from us on March 23rd (and not a day earlier!).  We’re very pleased with the quality of the applicant pool so far this year.  Lots of applicants with great numbers in addition to strong work experience and amazing interpersonal skills…a powerful combination. 

Our application volume this year is slightly down overall.  Domestic applications are about flat, but international volume is down.  To some people this is surprising, since the projection coming into this admissions season was that application volume to MBA programs would be sky high given the economic situation.  But, I suppose, the fear factor has been more of an issue with this recession.  People who have jobs are hesitant to leave them and go to school for two years.  And people are probably more cautious about taking on debt to go to business school.  But people who are able to have a longer-term perspective still realize the MBA is  a terrific investment and option for a lot of folks. 

Overall, we’re still pleased with the season so far since the quality of the pool is so strong.  We also feel like our pool of applicants truly understands why they are pursuing the MBA and what they expect to get out of their investment. In fact, this year we modified our admissions essays to be able to identify those applicants who are the most “ready” to benefit from this experience.

We still have one deadline left…March 13th…so there’s still time to apply if you’re on the fence.  We anticipate being able to admit candidates in all of our rounds.  I’ll try to post after our last round and let everyone know how things end up for the season.

Lisa Beisser

My STAR Experience

I’m currently leading a STAR project. STAR (Student Teams Achieving Results) is a Kenan-Flagler program that sends student teams on consulting projects for corporations and not-for-profits seeking to strengthen their global competitiveness.

My team is developing feasibility study for a local entrepreneur. He had a couple of ideas he was kicking around and wanted to figure out if either was worth the investment of his time. One was the manufacturing of a standard set of products using gypsum, a byproduct of coal firing in power plants. This went nowhere; as our team quickly learned, gypsum manufacturing is an established and capital-intensive industry; definitely not the place for a startup.

The other potential idea was biomass pelletization. North Carolina has significant biomass resources and pelletization allows a wide variety of biomass sources, from wood waste to switchgrass, to be dried and transformed into a shape that enables easy transportation and consumption. Pellets are primarily used in heating applications as a fuel for pellet stoves. Unfortunately, pellet stoves are not popular in the southeast; they are present in the northeast and more common in Europe, and the costs to transport the pellets would turn the business opportunity into a volume game. This would again squeeze out the opportunity for a startup.

Enter a process called torrefaction. Torrefaction was new to me and to the team, so we had quite a bit of research to do. What we found was really very interesting. To summarize, torrefaction:

• Is brand new, with only a few firms developing and/or commercializing the technology.
• Reduces biomass weight by 30% while retaining 90% of its energy density.
• Causes biomass to be hydrophobic, significantly improving its storability.
• Allows biomass to be co-fired along with coal in traditional coal-burning power plants, at rates of around 90% coal to 10% biomass.

The implications of the last bullet point are fairly significant from a carbon perspective. The US has over 600 coal-burning power plants, none of which currently utilize this technology. These power plants emit 2,142 million metric tons of CO2 annually. If torrefaction and biomass co-firing were done at every power plant in the US, that would work out to a reduction of 214 million metric tons of CO2 annually, assuming that the biomass feedstocks were grown as part of a closed loop carbon cycle.

No one on my team has any experience in this industry or in a startup environment.  When we started down this path we had literally no idea where it would lead us, and two months in we still don’t know what our final conclusions will be.  But wow! are we learning a lot. Here’s a quick explanation of how STAR works for any of you who might be considering participating in the future:

• The STAR program office lines up prospective clients on an ongoing basis.
• Students submit applications in the middle of first semester.  The STAR folks look through applications and try to establish a fit between clients and students and try to create teams with well-rounded experience and skills.  The percentage of students selected depends on the number of applications received and the number of clients lined up, but this year most of the students who applied were matched with projects.
• Teams are matched with paid advisers who are responsible for meeting with the team on a regular basis and providing guidance.  Advisers’ roles are not to lead the team but rather to prod it along in the correct direction.  My team was lucky enough to get paired up with a very good adviser.
• The project itself is run like a consulting engagement.  There is an engagement letter that defines to scope of work, regular status meetings, deliverables…everything that you’d expect.  In this way, it’s great training for individuals looking to move into consulting from another field.
• There is a weekly STAR class that teaches consulting skills and provides a forum for teams to share ideas and talk through issues with one another.
• Teams meet internally at least once a week and typically more often.  Frequent communication is critical because with all of the other things that each of us have going on, it’s easy to let time slip by without realizing it.
• There are four official client meetings but teams are free to meet with clients more often.  At the fourth meeting, results of the team’s analysis are presented to the client and all deliverables are turned over.

All in all, I’ve truly enjoyed my STAR experience so far.  It’s also looked great on my resume to have experience in the renewable energy industry since I’m trying to change careers into that field; many students find the program valuable for the same reason.  A word of warning however: STAR is not for the faint of heart.  It’s real work, and your performance has real consequences for real businesses.  Plan to commit a significant number of hours every week if you apply.

Tristan Handy