History in the Making

Today is indeed a special day. I’m not going to talk about the political implications as I believe that each is entitled to their own beliefs and I personally don’t care who’s Democrat and who’s Republican, I care about the individual, the results, and the values. I’m just going to say that I was very impressed to see people all over the world watching the inauguration, to see the energy present in D.C. and how hopeful and united they all seemed.

Unfortunately I was in my macroeconomics class, so I couldn’t watch the whole inauguration. I snuck out to listen to the inaugural address. Obama has definitely come a long way since two years ago. He seems more confident, more assertive, he looks and acts like a true leader. I wish I could ask him what he was thinking as he walked out in front of the crowd. His speech was as I expected: strong, loud and clear, and very real. My favorite lines: “For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; … know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.” Somebody said to me today that Obama’s speech was written by 24-year-old. If so, congratulations to him. I wish I was that wise when I was 24.

I also wish I were in D.C. today. It must have been an amazing and humbling experience.

Women in Marketing

Last Thursday I attended the Women in Marketing Event at Red Bull Headquarters in Santa Monica. It was an event organized by Tadpole, a marketing and consulting company owned by Carolyn Deighan. Carolyn worked with Red Bull for a good number of years then she moved on to opening her own company.

The event was amazing and the response overwhelming. There were about 200 people there. Although the event was called “Women in Marketing”, I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few men attending. They were probably hoping to get a good insight into the female psyche. News flash, guys: sometimes we don’t even understand ourselves.

The nine women invited were a breath of fresh air. Successful, funny, very direct, smart, and very passionate about their job. Amy Stettler, Global Account Director at Apple, Amy Taylor, VP of Marketing at Red Bull, Caralene Robinson, Marketing Director at Boost Mobile, Circe Wallace, Senior VP at WMG Management, Dyana Kass, Sr. Marketing Director at Interscope Records, Kenna Bertell Florie, VP of Marketing at Roxy, Renne Lawter, Owner of Eyerus, Shanti Sosienski, Owner of SOS Communications, and Staci Levine, Partner, SnL Communications, each answered specific questions prepared by Carolyn Deighan. I was happy to learn that although most of them work in a male-dominated environment, they did not attribute their success to having to act as a “dude” to be taken seriously. If I were to sum up their answers into one sentence, it would sound like this: find your passion, be yourself, be prepared, set goals for yourself, don’t take things personally, laugh at yourself, and don’t be afraid to express your opinion. It sounds like very common sense, I know, but to me, it was refreshing to hear from the mouths of these very successful women.

The night then continued with smaller open discussions groups where participants were able to ask their own questions and network and then ended with goodie bags and lots of smiles. The event was definitely a success and I recommend both women and men to attend the second edition.

B-school Is Speaking My Language!

First week of school! Lots of familiar faces and some new ones, but more important, lots of readings and work. Yes, I have to remember I signed up for this. This is my full-time job. And seriously, in this economy, I am lucky I have this job.

School is finally speaking my language: marketing. I just had my first marketing class this week and I love it. By now you probably noticed that I either love something or I hate it. There's no middle ground. And yes, I love my marketing class and my marketing professor. It's a new professor, so I took a chance signing up for his class, but it's already starting to pay off. I might have not taken a marketing class before, but I knew what I didn't want in one and that was a researcher. I wanted somebody with experience and this professor has lots of it. He uses a lot of examples from projects he worked on that sometimes contradict Kottler's "Bible" and that's exactly what I was looking for. I don't care that much about books, I need to know how theory translates into the real world. So far, so good! I love it and I thank my marketing fairy for inspiring me to sign up for this class!

The part that I'm looking forward to in this class - but that also makes me nervous - is the E2B project. This means that we have a real company coming to us with a real problem and we are supposed to offer them a real solution using real money. The details of the projects are unfortunately confidential, but all I can say is that we have a certain budget to market a new product. The five teams in our class have 14 weeks to come up with a marketing strategy that will be presented on our last day of class. The best strategy obviously wins and the company will implement it. Pretty exciting!

I promised an update on my finance class. Don't be jealous, but I got lucky again. My finance professor is amazing. I couldn't go to the makeup class on Friday and he allowed me to take the quiz (yes, we have quizzes every week) during his office hours. Then he said I could ask him questions during the quiz. Initially, I wasn't sure I understood what he meant as I've never had a professor say that. I was thinking "a quiz is a quiz, you either know the answer or you don't", but then I got stuck on one of the problems. So I said to him that I was 100% sure I had the right logic, but didn't seem to get the right answer. I explained my thought process, he nodded then asked me if my NOPAT was for 2007 or 2008. Ohhhhhhh! I was calculating the 2008 NOPAT with my 2007 numbers. Good one, Simona! And then I got why he allows questions. He wants to make sure you get the concepts and the logic. And if you're a distracted student with the attention span of a 2 year-old like I am, then you might lose precious points on a test. Who would have thought I'd like finance?! That is when I understand the concepts and I'm looking at the right numbers.

Back to School!

I was going to continue with what happened in Cabo, but we got back to L.A. in the meantime, life got in the way, and here we are: it's Sunday night and tomorrow is "back to school" day. I am excited to go back, but I'm definitely not looking forward to the workload. I used to get very frustrated and didn't get why graduate school is so much work if you cannot possibly get everything done. Then I realized - or at least that's what I've been telling myself to feel better - that one of the things business school teaches is to prioritize.

This session I manage to have only 8 a.m. classes. It sounds brutal, but I feel that I'm going to be so much more productive if I'm forced to wake up early and then I'm done with class at noon. If I have an afternoon class, then I tend to sleep in - that is if waking up at 7 a.m. qualifies as that - then I can't do too much because at 10 a.m. I start getting ready for class and by the time I get back home around 6-7p.m., I don't feel like doing anything productive. Finishing class at noon is going to give me the rest of the day to get my work done. Hopefully this little ploy of mine is going to work and watch out, Pepperdine, I'm going to become the definition of the word productive.

My first class tomorrow is Finance. I've never taken a finance class, so when I was deciding on classes, I asked some second-year students for advice. I told them I needed a "Finance for Dummies" class and a professor with a lot of patience. I realize this is graduate school and my request is ridiculous, but I'm spoiled by nature, so you can't really blame me for asking. Luckily, they had a recommendation for me. So, I signed up for Prof. Harjoto's and I guess I'll find out tomorrow how that's going to work out. Just reading the class assignments for tomorrow got me sort of nervous as I felt that part of it was going over my head. Luckily, I understood most of it and got excited that now I get how the stock market works - something I was never really interested in - and realized that so much of Financial Accounting goes hand-in-hand with Finance. I quietly thanked my accounting professor for making us analyze financial statements as part of our individual project, because now I understood what chapter 3 was all about. Although I thought I would never say this, I'm pretty excited about Finance class. I do predict a love-hate relationship at times because of the math involved and all the formulas. But the concepts and the strategy behind financial decisions, that's exactly what I came to learn in business school!

Wish me luck though, I'm still not ready to go back.