Whew, your boy has made it one more year and reached another birthday yesterday. This officially makes it three birthdays that you guys have shared with me on this blog and that tells me that I’ve been putting all my business out in the street up here for waaaaaaaaay too long

This week, ATL played host to the annual National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA) Conference from Wednesday through today. I didn’t get a chance to participate in the first couple of days because I had to work, but I was fortunate enough to check out the career fair on Friday and do some recruiting for McK. From the time I walked into the Georgia World Congress Center on Friday, I could hardly contain my excitement from seeing all of the black folk representing their companies, firms, and themselves at the conference. My specific mission at the conference was to team up with 6 or 7 other McK Black Client Service Staff folks to interact with the first- and second-year MBAs in attendance to tell them about McK and answer any questions that they had about The Firm. I had mostly positive interactions with the students, but there were a few “special” exchanges with people, but I just had to let those go and take note so I could pass information about those people on to the recruiters (Word to the wise, if you ever get approached by someone from a firm and you say that you’re interested in the firm, it is a BAD move to be noticably checking out females’ booties while that firm member is trying to answer your questions. And, it’s even worse to walk away and chase one of those females while the firm member is in mid-sentence.) Of course, I had to make the time in the career fair as efficient as possible, so I took the opportunity to catch up with a lot of friends who had come to represent their companies. I hadn’t seen some of them in over a year, so it served as a great reunion for all of us. My network of black MBA friends is SO tight!

For the most part, I was impressed by the students I saw, but I was most surprised by the undergrad candidates that I spoke with at the McKinsey reception on Friday night. The MBA students asked good questions, but I got a feeling that they were in “networking” mode. There were several college seniors from Georgia Tech, Morehouse, and Spellman at the reception and those kids were ON IT!!! I was expecting them to be in network mode too, but they were all about picking my brain about how to get through the case interview process. They were all so excited to have a chance to speak to me that I felt like a bit of a celebrity. It was a little weird to have them call me “Sir” and to send me emails later calling me “Mr. Parker”, but it was all good. As i was speaking, they were pulling out pieces of paper to take notes and jotting down everything I said. And, when I mentioned the case interview prep guide I’d created, they got especially geeked up. These kids seemed to want McK so badly that I almost wanted to hire them on the spot…but, since i’ve only been there for 5 weeks myself, that might have been sort of strange. Overall, it felt good to talk to the MBA and undergrad students about my experiences at the Firm and going through the interview process this weekend. Given the struggles I went through getting my game tight enough to get a McK job, being in recruiting mode was sort of like “coming full circle” on the recruiting game.

One of the most enjoyable parts of being at the NBMBAA Conference was having people recognize me from this blog. It was the wildest thing I’ve experienced in a while. I’d have someone randomly stop me and be like “Heeeeeey Marquis, what’s up, man. I’ve been reading your blog for a long time” and I would have no clue who they were. Or, I’d be talking to someone about McKinsey and they’d stop the conversation and say “Wow, you look really familiar…don’t you have some sort of site up?” As random as these encounters sound, I couldn’t help but smile because I found out that a lot of people have been checking this blog out and used what I wrote as a resource when applying to business school to get an insider’s view of it all. That’s precisely why I started writing this thing and, 3 years later, I get excited when I hear that folks from all over are finding it useful. i just hope I can keep adding content that folks find useful for as long as i continue to write this blog.

I’d be remiss if I only concentate on the professional parts of it because the NBMBAA Conference is known for being a time to kick it and party with a group of peers that most of us seldom have the chance to do on a larger scale. There were tons of company-sponsored parties and events in the evenings that kept all of the conference attendees entertained when they weren’t trying to “get their professional on”. Included in those events were some concerts by artists like The Roots, Ludacris, and New Edition…I am a huge fan of The Roots and their joint was off the chain. That concert was held at Club 112 and was sponsored by Diageo (a liquor distributor), so the drinks were all free and people were GUZZLIN’. Good lawd, I hadn’t seen liquor flowing like that since I was back in DC and all the wanna-be ballers would buy out the bar every Friday night at Club Dream. Plus, the Roots put on a hell of a show that had the crowd moving the entire time…their set had to have been about 2 hours long and those guys cemented themselves as the best band in the world (at least in my mind). I wish I could have hit up the other concerts and sponsored events, but there are only 24 hours in a day and there was too much going on to catch everything.

The highlight of the weekend for me was a mixer that I threw along with two of my coworkers from the ATL office, Xavier and DC. Since we all had friends coming into town from across the country, we wanted to put on an event where our peoples could intermingle, hang out, and drink without having to spend an arm and a leg at the local clubs and loungs that had jacked up their prices due to the conference being in town. Plus, since it fell on my birthday, it served as a sort of Bday party for me (even though I didn’t know about 2/3 of the people there). We held it at the club room at DC’s condo building and we each invited about 20-25 people, for an expected draw of about 60-75 people. At the peak, we had well over 100 people in there and it made me smile to see so many educated folks kickin’ it without the usual knuckleheadedness I see when I go out to clubs. And, since X, DC, and I paid for the liquor and mixers, our friends could simply be concerned with having a good time and meeting new people. I love being able to facilitate a good time for people. The mixer went so well that we’re talking about possibly organizing a monthly set of mixers like this to help people from different social circles in ATL mix and mingle. I’ll let y’all know how that goes if we decide to do it.

That’s all for now. I’m flying out to Cali in a few hours to help the GSB on-campus recruiting effort, so I’ll let you guys know how that is in a couple of days.