My 500th post!!! — Tips on making an impression during company information sessions

What’s going on, y’all. I hope you’re all doing well. I know that it’s been a while since I posted anything on my site, but it’s been a busy few weeks for me…real life was calling me and I decided to focus on living it instead of spending my free cycles in front of my computer. As you can tell from the title of this entry, I’ve reached a milestone of sorts with this site. This is a moment six years and two months in the making…You’re reading the 500th entry posted on this site.

I know it may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but it feels kinda-sorta big to me because I didn’t think I’d maintain this site for more than a year when I started it in October 2003. I guess it just took on a life of its own and now here we are in 500-deep in December 2009. Wow! I’d like to send a big “Thank You” to all of the readers who have been following this site over the past six years. You all are the reason that I keep doing this and it makes me smile to know that I can help people simply by sitting down at my computer and doing a brain dump every now and then. I hope to keep on doing this and get to the 1000th post milestone at some point. We’ll have to see how that goes in the future…

As this site has evolved, I’ve tried to tweak it to make it better for my readers and make it a better representation of me, with the biggest recent change being the site redesign and move over to my own hosted server. Now, I’m taking those changes a step further and have decided to add videos to the site. Over the years, the biggest hurdle in providing good responses quickly has been the amount of time it takes for me to think through and type out meaningful responses to reader questions. By incorporating video responses, I hope to reduce that response time and get through my Inbox must quicker than I have in the past. I’ve posted my first video response to a reader email below and, while I hate the way I sound on video, I found it to be MUCH more efficient than how I’d usually do it. In the future, I will probably do a combination of text and video responses, but that’ll all depend on the feedback I get from all of you, so let me know what you think. NOTE: I will continue to use the guidelines laid out on the “Contact” page to determine whether to respond to an email or not, so I would advise you to use them if you choose to contact me.

OK, now on this entry…The email below comes from an executive MBA student from a “top-10 business school” (the reader asked for me to conceal the name of his school) seeking tips on how to make an impression at company information sessions. With the MBA recruiting landscape as shaky as it is right now, I imagine that students are in search of any type of edge that they can get to earn an interview insight. I’ve participated in a LOT of recruiting-related activities since leaving the GSB a few years ago, so I had quite a few insights to pass along in this one. Unfortunately, I’m just now getting to this reader’s message a couple of months after he first sent it, so I don’t even know if the advice I’m giving will be useful to him anymore. Hopefully, someone who sees it will get some value out of what I have to say.

Before I move on with this entry, I want to toss out an idea that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days. I’ve been considering offering my services as an advisor on the sort of topics that I write about all the time on this site. The seed for this idea came from a conversation with one of my readers (shout out to Josh D.) as I was giving him advice to prep for an MBA admissions interview. We were talking and, out of the blue, he asked me “Have you ever thought of making a business out of this? I know I would have paid to have a chance to have a conversation like this with you”…and, all of a sudden, a lightbulb turned on in my brain. In the past, I’ve stated that I didn’t have time to offer these types of services to readers (for a fee or not), but seeing how much I’ve helped people with these kinds of conversations and interactions has made me reconsider my earlier stance.

I figure that I could provide advice on MBA application strategies, do application essay reviews, conduct case interview prep sessions, review resumes, or just have career visioning/planning discussions with people. In other words, the kinds of things that I’ve been doing for my friends, family, and, often, random folks who ask for my advice over the past few years. It seems that everybody and his/her third-cousin is doing something like this nowadays and, from what people tell me, I’m one of the best when it comes to this career/education/life advising game, so I might as well jump in too, right? I haven’t thought too much about the logistics of it all, including pricing, process, my own capacity for this sort of thing, etc, but I wanted to bring the idea to my readers to find out whether this is something that I should think about further. What do you guys think? Feel free to leave a comment on this entry or send me an email at the contact address for this site to let me know your thoughts.

I guess I’m making all types of changes with this 500th entry, huh? 🙂

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RL wrote:

“hi Marquis-

Thanks for all the great insights you’ve answered and compiled on your blog. As a follow-up question to your responds to MS per ‘attending non-local presentation’, can you provide any insights and/or experience as to how candidates can ‘make an impression’ through the various information sessions, coffee chats, invited dinners, and the likes?

As an executive student at [top-10 business school], I feel fortunate to have various firms stopping by campus and answers perspective hire questions. However, since executive students only arrive on-campus on alternative Fri-Sat, I have a limited exposure to these sessions as well as other recruitment events (e.g., career counseling, case practices with ‘interned’ students, resume review, etc.). Therefore, I’d like to know what are some ‘tricks’ students like myself can employ to get myself that interview.

Thanks!

-RL”

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My response:

The following video clip contains my response to RL’s question:

 

Tips on making an impression during company info sessions from Marquis Parker on Vimeo.