NBMBAA Conference...

This past Wednesday I boarded a plane to Indianapolis. Right about now you might be saying, "What? What business would Patrick have in Indianapolis?" Well, the answer is the National Black MBA Association Conference! And now you might be asking, "what business would Patrick have at a Black MBA conference?" Well my great, great, great... was Adam so I figured what the heck, why not?

BYU actually pushes the diversity conferences pretty hard. A lot of large companies set up booths and both first and second year students can go to talk with the companies their interested in and if selected have a chance to do a first round interview there at the conference. I felt a little weird about the whole thing until I got there and realized that maybe only 40% of the students were black.

The conference was actually pretty fun. I failed completely at the first booth, American Express. I was mechanical and it was a bust. The rest of the morning went pretty well. Unlike most of my peers I was only interested in a handful of the companies; just the ones located in Southern California, Oregon, or Washington. With the exception of Microsoft there wasn't to my knowledge any representing Oregon or Washington.

To the disappointment of me and my peers most of the companies were not there for interns. They often had information about the different internships but weren't interviewing. Bummer. That said, I made some good connections with three companies: Toyota (Torrance, CA), Amgen (Thousand Oaks, CA), and Life Technologies (Carlsbad, CA). I really hit it off with Toyota and was invited to their mixer that evening, which I attend for a couple of hours. It was fun and there were about 8ish Toyota employees there and only between 15 and 25 students. So it was nice to be able to chat with them for longer and more intimately than at the conference.

Overall, I had a good time but am glad to be home and with Ashley... for a few days at least.