What’s up, everyone. I’m writing to you from a hotel in NYC, where I’ve been since Sunday night. I came to town to participate in a diversity recruiting panel at Columbia Business School and doing this event has shown me once again how devoted to diversity McKinsey is. As you guys know, I usually spend my Mondays at my client site in the Midwest, but, when I heard about this event at Columbia, I wanted to help out because I love working on these recruiting events. I thought my team would give me a bunch of pushback about missing out on client site time, but, when I mentioned it, they were totally supportive. I’ve got to fly out on the early flight from LaGuardia, but that’s fine because it’s important for us to have good representation at events like this.

The diversity panel itself was actually pretty low-key. There were around 20 Columbia MBA1′s i attendance and 6 of us from McKinsey on the panel. As the most recent addition to the Firm, I answered a lot of questions about the recruiting process and my impressions of the process at McKinsey as compared to that of other firms…and, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you KNOW that I would have a lot to say about that point The beginning of the panel involved us introducing ourselves, describing what made us want to come to McK, and describing our experiences as being minorities at the Firm. Unfortunately, some of the panelists’ answers were very…err…extensive…and I don’t think we had enough time to get through all of the key questions that the students had during the panel, but some of us stayed around for about 30 minutes afterward to chat with folks one on one. I did have a chance to chat with 4 or 5 of the Columbia kids before leaving and they had some great questions for me. I love sharing whatever insights I can provide with candidates because it’s like my own little contribution to developing diversity within the Firm…and it’s especially good to know that the Firm is supportive of these efforts, which is more than I can say for other employers I’ve seen.

In addition to the Columbia event, I was able to have a mini-GSB reunion of sorts last night when I met about 15 of my classmates for dinner and drinks in the city. When I found out that I was going to be in NYC, I sent an email to 7-8 people because I had no idea of an exhaustive list of my classmates in NYC. Before I knew it, the group just started picking up more folks and the word started getting around about it. We ended up meeting at a spot called Carmine’s in Times Square and I had no idea how much I missed being around GSB people. It was so good to see folks and it was cool to see classmates who were actually working on Sunday night take a few minutes away from the office to come out and check in with me. Another thing that impressed me was looking around and realizing how many of the people in the group were doing so well for themselves. A couple of the attendees were working for private equity firms, two of us were from McKinsey, one was a Director at CapitalOne, and we also had a couple of hedge funders too, just to name a few. Stanford GSB 2006 are doing it up so big and we’re doing it all over the place. i can’t wait to see what my classmates end up doing in the next few years.

This last note is about something that cracked me up when my mother told me about it. Recently, a garage band from California just happened to be driving through my hometown when their truck broke down. They were forced to spend a few days there and they actually wrote a song about it. As someone who grew up there, so I found so many of the things from this song to be the real deal…
Link to a song I find hilarious