San Francisco Trek

I’m part of the Real Estate club at UNC Kenan-Flagler, and one of the things that the club spearheads throughout the year are trips to various industry events around the country. There was a career trek to New York over the fall break between Mod I and Mod II and now there are 25 of us heading to San Francisco for the Urban Land Institute’s fall land expo. I’m pretty excited about this. It’s a four-day event, but the first day is really just meetings for the committee members. Wednesday through Friday are several lectures and workshops that we’ll be attending while staffing a booth to promote Kenan-Flagler’s real estate program.
In addition to several academics and real estate professionals, we’ll have the opportunity to hear from Adrian Fenty, Mayor of Washington DC; Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco and Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, will be giving the keynote address. There are two main types of sessions during the conference: Real Estate Academy educational talks and Market Trend discussions. Most of what I’ll be going to are the educational workshops since I’m still new at this. But I’ll be hitting a couple of the market trend talks as well. In fact, one of Kenan-Flagler’s own, James Johnson, director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center will be discussing “The Demographics of the Next Decade: Pent Up Demand is Building – How will the world be different after the downturn?”
I’m really interested in attending the expo for two main reasons. Primarily, the education I’ll be getting from attending these lectures and hearing about the industry from it’s movers and shakers. Secondarily, I’m looking forward to meeting more people in the industry. I’m considering going back to Michigan after I’m done with school, so I want to continue to develop my network with that geographic focus but still with a broad view. To do so I scoured the attendee list for the conference and made contact with a handful of people I was interested in meeting and made some contacts. I know it’s just informal meetings, but honestly, I had been a little anxious since I have felt like every interaction with someone outside of business school had to be official “networking” and like I was unofficially looking for a job. But, if you’ll recall my post from a week ago, Roy Cowell gave us some excellent perspective and that really took the pressure off.
I won’t be arriving until close to 11pm local time tonight and then I have to be at the Kenan-Flagler table tomorrow right away at 8am, so it will be a short night. But really, after cramming in all the homework that I had to do in advance of this trip; I think tonight will be the most sleep I’ll have gotten in a week.
Jeremy Bergwerff

Class of ‘11

A Day at the Farm

Saturday had some beautiful weather. It started off a bit cool, but by the time the sun had a chance to do its work, we felt quite comfortable in shorts and t-shirts…on the last day of October. Where I’m from (Michigan), October is usually frost in the morning and a good jacket most of the day, so this is definitely a change of pace. It’s got some positives and negatives though. It’s great to see the changing of the seasons and not have to be bundled up, but at the same time, when you’re accustomed to the cold, it feels like you’re missing a little something when the leaves are red/yellow/orange but you’re still in sandals. Missing something or not, it was still a beautiful day.

The MBA families club organized a day at Ganyard Hill Farm compete with a hay ride, pumpkin patch, corn maze, animals to pet…the whole bit. For Amy and I, it was a nice reminder of home. We’ve got several farms and apple orchards that we have had the opportunity to visit each fall. Admittedly, we did this before we had kids. But now that we’ve got kids, it just adds to the fun. Seriously, it’s pretty cute to see these little kids (yours or otherwise) squeal with excitement when a goat licks their hand or eats some cornhusk right from them (don’t worry, they have hand sanitizer right near by).

In addition to seeing your kids have fun, kids also provide an instant medium for conversation. We’ve got just under 300 students in the class of 2011 so I have not had a chance to meet everyone, much less the second year students, but these types of low key social events are great opportunities for conversation. I’ve talked to my classmate Shahid Murtuza a handful of times, but Saturday I had a chance to meet a few second years and my wife made some new connections with the wives of some second year students. It’s great to have other families to talk with and realize your families seem to be experiencing some of the same things. Shahid and I both have an older daughter and a younger son and it’s interesting to see so many similarities in how they interact.

All in all, Ganyards was pretty fun. It was a bit pricy, but we got a partial admission subsidy from the families club budget, so that was nice. We had a fun time, met a handful of other families and even got to pick out a pumpkin as we left.

Happy Fall!

Jeremy Bergwerff

Intensive Networking To Offset a Bad Job Market

Before coming to business school I was already aware of it and had tried to practice it.
Now while I’m at school there are various events or times in between events specifically for it.
Whenever I tell my wife about this she comments as though she has a bad taste in her mouth: “Oh, you’re doing that.”
What is it? Networking.
For me it has seemed like the necessary evil (emphasis on evil) of being in the business world. Some doctors have to stick their hands in unpleasant places, business people have to network. It’s our cross to bear.
So, when the Career Management Center advertised a three hour session on Intensive Networking I thought about switching professions (surely doctors don’t have it this bad). But, I was wrong.
Roy Cowell is an executive recruiter/transition coach based out of Chicago. He’s worked or consulted with McKinsey, BCG and several other companies (I couldn’t write them all down quickly enough to recount them here). Anyway, he’s been around the block and knows his stuff. How did we get him to come speak at UNC Kenan-Flagler…through Jeff Fischer’s network. Jeff is the head of our career management center.
We had probably 200 people at his talk last night and I am pretty sure that everyone entered the room with the same skepticism that I did. “Intensive Networking? Sounds like in-your-face-multi-level-marketing.” But the talk was really good, worth every one of the 180 minutes we were there. Roy systematically deconstructed the job market and explained why it doesn’t really matter that “the job market is so bad” and then explained (from a recruiter’s perspective) how most jobs get filled.
After giving us some great context to understand the landscape, Roy laid out a three step process for an effective job search, complete with explanation of how many people go about it wrong and how to do it right. He used stories from experience to describe various tactics and gave a lot of depth around each of the sub-steps involved in the main categories.
Now with this description I’m sure that this can sound like any old pep talk in a down job market, but this was different. What impressed me the most was something that has been present throughout my experience at Kenan-Flagler. Roy discussed/explained/disarmed networking in such a way that he explained some of the phenomenon that I have experienced in my working experience, he challenged some of the ways that I already thought about networking (“using” your network) and taught me several new tips in a framework of understanding that I hadn’t seen before.
It was a good session…long, but I’m glad that I went.
Jeremy Bergwerff