On Being Thankful

**Post backlog**

Thanksgiving is huge in the US. Every year, Thanksgiving officially ushers in the holidays, the lightening of the wallet, the heavying of the closet and the weighing scale. Having no family in the US, Thanksgiving offers me an opportunity to squeeze in a trip since it’s a day more than a traditional long weekend.

This year I decided to head back to the Bay Area to meet all the friends I have been missing since I moved to Seattle. Also, the weatherman called for clouds and rain here (surprise!) and beautiful summer weather in SF. It was a no-brainer! I hung out with the bestie, meet up with OR and NR and their adorable 7week old K! I also drove down 101 to meet AC and her adorable new baby, L. Both my girlfriends make beautiful, natural mothers and it was a pleasure watching them in this new role.

My last evening in SF, the bestie and I ate at one of our favorite joints in Burlingame, where they still recognized and remembered us. We talked about the things we can’t tell anyone else, fears, hopes, dreams, insecurities. We talked about being thankful for each other and the life we were given.

Role Models

As an early user of Google Plus, I have come to love the flexibility and selectivity the social network affords me, especially in comparison to Facebook, whose privacy settings I have finally given up trying to understand as they apply to the timeline format. More on that in a different forum. I started to add companies to my circles when they first came out with that. And recently I’ve started to add people I don’t personally know. I call this new circle the People I Admire circle.

To this circle, I recently added Drew Houston. This was in part inspired by reading about him in the much tweeted about LA Times article (which, by the way, doesn’t really add much to the much circulated Forbes article about him and Dropbox) and also in part inspired by his Google+ profile. I discovered that he went to undergrad the same years as I did, albeit in a totally different part of the world! He, and the article, made me think about my years as an undergrad, around the time I began this blog. I think about my ideas, motivators, priorities at that time and hold it up against what they are today. If you had told me back then that I would be where I am today – literally and figuratively, geographically and professionally – I would have dismissed you as an incompetent fortune teller.

bI realize now the importance of having role models. But that’s just such a generic thought. I wish I had known the importance of having role models for the right reasons. My undergrad major was driven by my desire to escape computer programming. I turned to mechanical engineering because it’s what my father had done. It was an easy choice. In retrospect, it was a great choice, I loved my coursework and the skills I acquired. But in 2001, I had no idea what it entailed and what I was going to do with it four years on. Same time, half the world away, Drew Houston was getting into MIT and thinking about starting his first tech company.

Back then I didn’t know he existed. Today I admire him immensely, not just because he has this wildly successful company that actually means something to a lot of people and not just because he has this strong vision of building the next Apple or Google. I admire him also because as someone who is the same age as I, he has shown vision, maturity, motivation and determination to do something with his life. I think the word I’m looking for is focus. He has remained focused on the thing that matters most to him professionally, and given it his all. He’s just one example. There are other thirty year olds I can hold up… or the twenty two year old Doogie-Howser-of-the-tech-world co-founder I met a couple months ago; or the Google Guys whom I’ve admired pretty much all my professional life! In comparison, my own professional history reads to me like a drifting log.

I am still trying to figure out what my “thing” is going to be… you know, the thing that you were born to do, the one you’ve been preparing for your whole life without actually knowing it. A month ago, I stood at (what seemed at that time) a very important, life altering crossroad in my professional life. I had been building up to it for a while now, taking certain decisions and choosing a path to get there. When I finally reached, I threw out the obvious choice and selected an entirely different one to go down (remember the drifting log?). I still can’t extrapolate forward the dots in a way that makes any sense. But I now have role models whose successes, failures, tenacity, creativity and focus I can look up to. I am fortunate that my role models are real people, who I could easily run into at a terminal at SFO. It makes the dream seem that much more achievable. It makes me believe that I will be able to connect the dots someday soon. All I have to do is keep moving forward.

No more excuses

Sunset picture from my window at work

It seems to have become a trend of sorts for me to disappear from my blog for weeks on end and then resurface with a post on an excuse for my disappearance… like anyone’s counting! I won’t make excuses this time. I’ve thrown myself headfirst into my (not so new now) work, into settling down in this (not so new now) city and just generally reconfiguring life and times overall. At some point I even had a nice end of year post crafted in my head all ready to be hashed out on the keyboard but I let it go. Now it seems that the urge to write has built up inside until I finally was able to put fingers to keys to hash this out before Facebook, Netflix and all the other distractions on the interwebs drag me away again.

In the months since I last posted, I have found and made a home for myself in this wonderful area and while not everything has been perfect, I think I have made peace with the fact that that’s exactly how it’s going to be – not perfect but good and definitely something I can work with. I have been trying desperately to get my reading habit back but I’ve had to contend with just reading the California drivers manual!

The weekends have been passing by in a blur of social and home-related activities. In the nesting process, I have a project every weekend that I have to tackle… one weekend it was the linen closet while another it was the bookshelf. Needless to say nothing gets done a hundred percent but I am working on it. Add to that a baking/cooking project and a mandatory me-night that I’m trying to make a habit out of. I want to spend the next few months reaching out to the community at large, trying to get to know places and faces and events around the Bay and discover newer interests and pastimes.

The Darden group in the Bay is a large and fun gang of people and so there have been frequent meet ups and social events. We recently even hosted current Darden students at our respective work places and I’ve had a very satisfying time playing alumnus to students and helping them with my insights on school and recruiting (which is after all the all consuming sole conundrum of business school life). Slowly but surely it is becoming a way of life to make time for Darden centric events – be it phone calls with students or socializing with the D-crowd in the Bay.

I think I am on track in the reconfiguration-of-life project!!

Think big, and then think small!

Last year, when I went to the session on choosing electives for second year, there was one class which consistently appeared on all the panelists’ (in this case the second year students of last year) list of must-take courses. A part of the Taking Action classes, this course brings back Darden grads (and some non Darden grads) to the classroom to take a class for the students and is called the General Managers Taking Action (GMTA). The case is supplied by the guest and we come prepared to discuss it with him. And since all the cases are real-life situations, and issues he/she faced, the discussion takes on a very action oriented path and we learn, literally, what he/she did in detail.

Today we had a 1986 grad who worked in investment banks come and talk to us. I was amazed by how “real” he was – we talked about the world economy and the banking industry and the housing bubble and BRIC among other things, and it was all in English and not banker-speak! I also thought this speaker was exciting because he was part of a firm that invested in Silicon Valley startups and technologies and his enthusiasm and appreciation for technology was very apparent. My favorite part of this class is the end, where two students ask the speaker for advice for our class and things he wished he knew when he was graduating. Today’s advice was “think big and then think small, do the little things, work hard because there is no fast and easy path. And don’t be in too much of a hurry.”

In my mind, there are two trends that are emerging from all the sessions I have had so far in this class: one, the higher up you get in an organization, the daily challenges and issues you deal with tend more on the OB and people management side of the spectrum (as opposed to the technical, spreadsheet model side); two, everyone talks about being in touch with the people we went to school with here… they wax eloquent about the intellectual pool in the school and some even talk about how the network is lifelong and helps them in professional and personal ways!

The more times I hear the second advice, the more I start to wonder if I am investing enough time and effort in building these relationships. I have come to realize that there are some fantastically interesting people here and I did not in the past and probably will not in the future have the opportunity to interact with such a diverse . There is so much personal growth I have witnessed from my associations here and I wonder how much of the iceberg I haven’t scaled yet. This year has been very different because there are people I haven’t seen all year – for reasons such as exchange programs or just taking a different set of electives. I go to a class with one of my learning team mates and I haven’t found the time to say hi in the three weeks we’ve been in that class together. There is a constant struggle to experience everything in these last few months, and yet this economy and my yet unsuccessful job search acts like the Sword of Damocles over everything I want to do. However, I feel better about it today because I am going to dinner with some friends I haven’t caught up with all year… I have to try to get more of these in before May.

SF again - Darden West Coast Job Trek

I obviously have some kind of major love affair going on with San Francisco! In just over a month of being here for Thanksgiving, I am back in the Bay Area, this time as part of a team of students from school doing our annual West Coast Job Trek. The trek is for students (FY and SY) interested in making a career in the Valley in tech companies and is our way to show interest and build relationships and contacts for our job search. Add to it the brilliant weather here after the bitter cold back east, and you have all the trappings for a great one week at CA!

This year we went to a bunch of really great companies and were hosted very warmly by alumni in most places (Darden and other UVA alums) and by non-Darden folks in others. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the majority of MBAs at these companies come from schools in the backyard (Stanford, Haas), but there are some people from east coast schools as well. From a chance to shop at the Apple store at One Infinite Loop to a gourmet lunch at the Googleplex, we had a host of experiences and had the opportunity to learn just a little bit more about what these fantastically interesting organizations are up to, from people who not too long ago were in our shoes!

I had a great time visiting companies and hearing about the work they are currently doing. I also had a really good time getting to know alumni from the Bay Area at a networking reception held in one of the pubs in downtown SF. The more time I spend talking to people in tech or visiting the Valley, the more convinced I am of my choice to head to this industry post-Darden… the internet and e-commerce space is exciting and there is plenty of opportunity to make lasting impact right from Day 1. In fact, I even mentioned it to an alumni, in response to why I wanted to settle down in the Bay Area, that I am so excited about the space that I am willing to go almost anywhere if the right opportunity came along, the Bay Area is just one stop.

It hasn’t been all work though! I took a day to spend time with friends here and among other things, had the opportunity to take a drive up/down Lombard Street! I have to mention that the best thing about this trip to San Fran has been flying Virgin America and having the wifi internet on the flight (thanks to Google!) I’ve managed to get SO much work done on the flights, especially since the alternative is to sleep (badly) and land at my destination feeling groggy, cranky and with a crick in my neck!