Stinky coat (My accident in Dallas)

During my trip to Dallas, I had an accident.

It was Thursday afternoon and Anthony and I had just left our visit at the McKinsey office. We were at Kinkos so he could print off copies of his resume, and while he was working on that I decided to go to the restroom. I was wearing my suit with an overcoat, and everyone knows you can't sit on a toilet wearing two coats, so I looked around the restroom for a coat hook. There were none to be found, but I did find one of these, right at eye level, glued to the wall.

I decided that it looked study enough, so I hung my suit coat and then my overcoat on it.

After sitting on the toilet for probably 20-30 seconds, the air freshener ripped off the wall. I noticed that the air freshener had been attached to the wall with a sticky-tape, and didn't leave damage the wall, so I wasn't too concerned.

When I got off the toilet and picked up the device, however, I noticed that it had been leaking its oder-neutralizing oils directly into the inside of my suit coat.

Holy crap.

I grabbed a wet paper towel and tried to dab the stuff up, but it was a very "dry" oil and didn't seem to have any interest in leaving my coat.

Holy crap.

I was on a business trip - I'd flown in this suit for heaven's sake - I didn't bring a spare and I didn't have time to buy a new one.

Anthony and I went back to the hotel as fast as we could, where I left the coat lying on a bench in front of the heater/AC unit, put on full-blast.

By the time we came back that night, my room smelled very strongly of a recently cleaned bathroom (but on the too-potent side...), and my coat had not lost any of its pugnance.

I had to wear the suit for our visits the following day (I didn't have a choice). At our first appointment (with The Boston Consulting Group), I could feel the fumes rising (warmed by my body, I'm sure) out of my coat and creeping up my neck. My nose and eyes were burning a little bit for the first several hours of that day, but thankfully the fumes wore down a little bit throughout the day.

Once back in Provo, I told the dry-cleaners what had happed and asked them to do what they could to fix it. They dry-cleaned the suit twice with the most powerful oder-neutralizers they have, and mostly fixed the problem. If you smell the suit directly you can still tell that it smells a little too "clean", but at least it doesn't "refresh" an entire room any more.

Ugh.

PS - in case anyone is concerned, at least that overcoat wasn't my European coat. That one still smells like adventure.

Sigh of relief

I just received approval from my boss to cut my hours from 20/week to 10, effective immediately.

On top of school projects (which now that I'm taking 3 business classes is taking a TON of time), studying, etc., I've been busy preparing for internships, applying to internships, trying to contribute to my role as a VP at the Management Consulting Club and take care of my congregation's leader's schedule (I'm his secretary), play on my intramural Wallyball team, and be a decent husband. And as soon as all of this internship business is over (which will hopefully be in the next couple of weeks), I'll put all of that newly freed time into preparing to ace the GMAT.

Another sigh of relief has come in that I've had two interviews now and I have two more, so far, scheduled for next week. Dish Network was my first, then I just interviewed with LEK Consulting yesterday. Next week I have The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Sears Holdings.

I was happy to get an interview with Dish and excited to get one with LEK and Sears, but I about died when I received the invite to interview with BCG - literally. I was in class when I saw the email and nearly fell out of my chair. Simply getting an interview with them is such... such an honor. Getting an internship with them would be huge.

I'll keep you up to date on the proceedings. At this moment, I'm just really glad that I have half the work hours to worry about. My schedule suddenly looks a lot more friendly.

{Earls Court}

I just went on google maps and found Earls Court underground station in London - the first place I saw when I arrived in Europe last spring. I miss it. I just virtually wandered the streets for a couple minutes.

now it's time to do homework again.

{Early Spring}

Sorry, Punxsutawney Phil.....I just don't wanna get my hopes up. [Also, what kind of name is that? I didn't even know the groundhog had a name.]

Groundhog Day is a weird day. Don't believe me? Just watch the clip on the Washington Post article - and read it as well, so funny!

Happy Groundhog Day.

{Ukraine's Got Talent}

I decided it's about time I share another youtube video.
This is pretty awesome! She's drawing that all with sand!

Dallas trip

This is the last of my three part series on my adventures with management consulting so far. One, I had the overview of Management Consulting and my 90 applications to different firms. I talked about how I've been on three networking trips, one to D.C., one to Houston, and my most recent trip to Dallas.

This email is all about that trip to Dallas - a unique trip for me, because this was the first and only networking trip so far that wasn't piggy-back riding on something else. With the D.C. trip, the real reason for going was to attend a political fund-raiser with my dad. With the Houston trip, I was really just down there for Christmas. On both trips, however, I made an occasion to make some great connections while in town.

I went to Dallas with two other undergrads (there was supposed be a third, but he was trying to fly standby and didn't make it - so sad!) and had a phenomenal time. On Thursday, we went to McKinsey's office, and on Friday we went to the offices of Boston Consulting Group, Bain, and AT Kearney. We also had lunch with a guy who works for Delloitte Consulting.

It was incredible - McKinsey, Bain, and Boston are consisted lauded as the top strategic management consulting firms - and also the hardest to get in to. Again, with only a 3.72 GPA, landing a job there, much less an internship, might be difficult, but visiting their offices and making a very solid, positive face-to-face connection with them hopefully helped.

Some photos from the trip:

The two undergrads I went with, Anthony, and Andrew in downtown Dallas, being awesome.

Anthony and I, dowtown.

Andrew and I right in front of the spot where President JFK was shot. That building closest to us, in the top right window was where the shooter was.

Aon, phone calls, and tons of emails

In my last post, I talked about what I've been up to for the last couple months.

In this post, I'll give you more of the juicy details of it all. You might remember my trip to Washington D.C., if not, click here. During that trip I met with 5 federal consultants (rather like management consultants, but they consult different governmental agencies instead of businesses).

Since then, I've had a great phone conversation with a fellow who works for Accenture (a management consulting firm that specializes in IT consulting), and a good dozen or so email conversations with consultants at firms like AT Kearney, and Aon.

I've had two great face-to-face networking opportunities since the trip to D.C. One was in Houston, and the other in Dallas (I'll write about my Dallas trip in my next post).

You probably know that both Heidi's and my families live in the same corner of Houston, so we've gone down there for the last several Christmases. Well, last October or so, a huge consulting firm named Aon was on campus for full-time recruiting, and there I met one of their employees who works in the Houston office. I told him I'd visit him over Christmas break, and I was true to my word. He was great enough to set up a lunch with himself and another Aon employee, so I could get a better feel for their business. He then took me on an hour long tour of the office, introducing me to just about everybody there, including several of the office's senior VPs.

During lunch that day, he asked about my dad's job, and after I explained my dad's business to him, he got really excited because he had just finished a case (an engagement) with a very similar firm, and wanted to know if my dad might be interested in their services.

Two phone calls and two days later, I was sitting at another restaurant eating breakfast with my dad, my contact at Aon, and their senior vice president of Sales for the entire Houston office, watching the SVP do the sales pitch to my dad. It was incredible - such a great opportunity to get that inside look at Aon, how they work, how they sell, and the services they offer.

I was very lucky to be able to see all of that. Oh, the powers of networking. I'll tell you about the Dallas trip soon.