What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.
- Paul A. Samuelson, MIT Professor emeritus and 1970 Nobel laureate
When I started this blog in August 2007, little did I (or anyone else) realize how much the global economic situation would change in the following twenty months. Even as Sloanies attended coffee chats and company presentations with investment banking companies and raised concerns about the volume of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) dropping like a rock from its peak of $62 trillion, we were reassured that it is a short-term liquidity crisis which will correct itself in a matter of months... More Kool-Aid, anyone?
Trying hard not to be distracted by the doomsday predictions, I continued to explore my interests in venture capital and private equity. In February 2008, I was one of the organizers of the 2008 Venture Capital Investment Competition, where students got a chance to act as venture capitalists, and judge real entrepreneurs currently seeking funding. The MIT team (made up of MIT Sloan MBA class of 2008) won the regional semi-final competition and then went on to win the national final competition in North Carolina, second year in a row. It was a great achievement for both the team and MIT Sloan. My summer internship in 2008 at the private equity division of Fidelity Investments went great, and I took the time before and after the internship to tour Boston, check out local historical landmarks and catch up with family and friends. I also took sailing lessons at the MIT Sailing Pavilion, the birthplace of American Intercollegiate Sailing.
Before starting the fall semester, I also helped out with the white-water rafting trip in August to the Kennebec River in Maine for the incoming MIT Sloan MBA 2010 class.
Since I had gone to the hiking trip at the Mt Moosilauke in 2007, I wanted to take this opportunity to experience the other trip. It felt great to connect with incoming students and their significant others, dispense advice about surviving the core and give back to the Sloan community. Of course, the rush experienced battling the Class IV rapids was unforgettable!
Before I knew it, it was the first week of September and school had started again. It reminded us of the core all over again, as I and fellow students juggled academics and full-time recruiting. With the worst job market for MBAs in a generation, students worked closely with each other, professors and the CDO office to find full-time employment opportunities, and went out of their way to help each other. One Sloanie made his acceptance of full-time job offer from his summer employment conditional on the employer interviewing another Sloanie for an additional position. Some MBA students started thinking seriously about starting their own companies, while others looked at non-traditional careers. On the other hand, the entire business school community started asking themselves fundamental questions about what went wrong in imparting an MBA education, given how many of the top business leaders had MBAs. I hope they will come up with something more concrete than mandating graduating MBAs to take a "Hippocratic Oath".
Essentially, we moved from a world where banks were run by businessmen, to a world where businesses were run by financiers. Let's hope that the pendulum will now swing back.
- Ryan Avent, Portfolio.com
