CS @ HBS

This time: Cyberposium 13 – HBS tech conference I helped organizing, the beginning of the recruiting period at HBS (for summer internships) and two somewhat random cultural “events” I attended this week.

As they say here in the US, sweeeet!

Cyberposium 13 (http://www.cyberposium.com), as you may remember, is the largest MBA technology conference in the world. I was part of the marketing team of the conference, which meant I sent a lot of annoying emails urging people to buy tickets. The emails seemed to work – we had more than 600 attendees last weekend, and I can safely say the conference went very well. All in all, participating in organizing the conference was an interesting experience – I learned a lot, not necessarily about technology but more about teamwork, organizing a large event, working with different types of people, “soft skills” as they call it. And it’s a nice line on the resume ;)

In the conference we had three keynote speakers: Ray Kurzweil (who has very optimistic predictions about increasing lifespan in the next 50 years, and showed a cool demo of a small device reading texts for blind people), Philip Rosedale (who showed a very cool demo of second life and some impressive figures about the amount of money people make playing this… game) and Walt Mossberg (who complained – in a very articulate and funny way – about the need to be his own IT technician).

Ray Kurzweil demonstrating the reading machine

Philip Rosedale and his Second Life Avatar, “Philip Linden”

Walt Mossberg

We also had different panels, ranging from clean technology through technology in the upcoming US elections to online social networks. After my amazing success with supplying photos to the conference’s printed program (=few people liked my photos), I was named “the official conference photographer” (=they didn’t find anyone else to do it). So you can see the “Official Photos” here: http://computersexy.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=1402

Recruiting

First, for Israelis / other people who don’t know how the system usually works: usually, a US MBA degree takes 2 years. In the summer between the 1st and 2nd year, students do a 3-months summer internship. A lot of companies from different industries come to business schools to recruit students for these internships. In most schools, the recruiting process can begin as early as two weeks after school begins – mid-September. For people in Israel, I’m sure this sounds completely crazy – looking for a job almost a year in advance. However, that’s the way it works here, and I see many advantages in this structured, organized, well planned system. In contrast to the early recruiting, we began the process here at HBS only last week – mid-November. The school’s rationale is that they want to “protect” our time from the recruiters at the beginning of school, and allow us to focus on other things – school itself and social activities. I guess it makes sense – I definitely have no idea how I could have fitted in recruiting activities in the first two months of school, so in a way I’m glad it’s only starting now. On the other hand, it means that all the companies presentations / networking events are concentrated in the month left to the end of the semester. For people targeting multiple companies or industries, this means a lot of work. Some presentations aren’t even held on campus, but in Cambridge or even in downtown Boston, which means more time getting there (plus it started to get cold here…).

Personally, I decided to focus on the technology industry – which was my original intention anyway. I needed exactly one general presentation of consulting / finance (the two most popular MBA industries) to convince me it’s not for me and I’m staying in tech… Not many tech companies come to present on campus (only the largest ones), so my job search is composed of going to on-campus presentations but also independently reaching out to people working for other companies I’m interested in (like HBS alumni or Israelis).

Culture

So my time here isn’t only about work and study, one also needs something for the soul… last weekend I spontaneously went to see a movie with a friend from my section, we saw “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”, a really good movie, one of these movies that make you think. It also has a cast of ridiculously good actors – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei. Recommended!

Tuesday night I went to see an Opera (yes!) with the “HBS Art Appreciation Club” (yes!). We saw La Bohème by Puccini, sung in Italian with English translation. It was awesome – a strange mix of a comedy with jokes that are funny more than 100 years after being written, and a really tragic ending. Recommended!

More culture – my section is going to see the Harvard-Yale football game tomorrow.

something else for the soul.

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