Bay Area Business

70 first- and second-year students just finished our annual San Francisco job trek.Some classmates focused almost exclusively on a target industry. Others, in keeping with our love of multiple perspectives, spanned industries. I took the opportunity to visit venture capital firms (Accel Partners and Lightspeed Ventures), design and innovation consultancies (IDEO and Frog), a mature tech company (eBay), a startup (Airbnb), and a nonprofit (Kiva). One of my fun activities was to apply lessons from earlier hosts to challenges faced by later hosts – a cross-pollination of ideas that was helpful despite vast differences in industries. (Don’t worry, hosts, I obeyed your NDAs). We also attended happy hours organized with prospective Yale SOM students (Tuesday), other MBA students (Wednesday – incl. HBS, NYU, etc.), and Yale University alums (Thursday). But taking the cake was an unplanned lunch today featuring: - an engineering-trained Chinese who worked in HR - an accounting-trained Bulgarian who worked in journalism and education - a finance-trained Ukrainian who worked in accounting - an engineering-trained Indian who worked in finance And me, a political-science-trained Vietnamese American who worked in strategy consulting. While I ate inhaled my crab enchilada, I was really struck not by the fact that such experiences are rare at Yale SOM but, rather, that they are incredibly frequent. Just one of those appreciating-the-moment moments, I guess. Tomorrow I take a red-eye flight to kick off my last (!) semester as an MBA student.