Summer is over... Ross here I come again!

This is my last post for the summer, and I am glad to say that yesterday I had the best day of my life. I received a full time offer from Citibank, to return next year as a full time associate in the M&A Group. After all my efforts, energy and time dedicated to achieve such a goal, I felt extremely satisfied of what I accomplished. It’s a tough process and competition is fierce. Out of 5000 resumes received, the bank chooses only few of them and I realized that the opportunity I got was extremely unique.

This internship went far beyond all my expectations. I met great people, I learned tremendously and every day has been different. New deals to work on, new responsibilities, a dynamic and fast pace environment that kept my mind busy all the time. If you like difficult challenges, this is definitely the place you want to be.

I can’t wait to see all my classmates again. We all spent our summer in different cities and countries and I am sure it’s going to be awesome to hear all their stories. Ross is a great school, full of talented people that are down-to-earth and ready to achieve amazing results always with a smile on their faces. I am proud of being part of such a group and I am sure that if you are reading this post you have already realized what I am writing here by going to school.

Life is a never-ending journey and Ross helped me shaping my career in the way I wanted it to be, and I will always be thankful for that. Above everything, it’s all the people I met at school that really made the difference and my experience special.

Hope I managed to give you an idea of what I lived this summer, as for me it has been the most important of my life.

All the best and good luck with your career search.

Matteo

Only 3 more weeks to go!

In my last post I told you about how time goes fast and I am even more convinced now that I only have 3 weeks left.

Last week I had my mid-summer review with the staffer of my group and HR. It was a very comprehensive review where they highlighted they gave me an extremely candid feedback. The purpose of it is to make us reflect on what we did well and what we can improve on, and to update us on where we stand.

This is the first free weekend that I have and I have to say it feels really good. I am going to meet all my classmates who are in NYC for a drink soon, and after that we will go for dinner. NYC is amazing, it offers everything you need and it’s unbelievable the amount of different nationalities you can find here. I lived in Amsterdam before and I thought it was one of the most international cities in the world, and it is, but I have to say NYC is unique and at the top of my list now.

Chinatown, SOHO, Little Italy, West Village, East Village, Downtown… all the areas are different and you can really feel different vibes all around the city. Everywhere is full of restaurants, bars, pubs… anything you need. Everything is convenient: banks, shops, laundry service, groceries… the concept of ‘anytime, anywhere’ really exists here.

I am very excited about the city and the job so far. It’s been an amazing experience and I will always remember it as one of the most important and formative of my life. I met a lot of new great people and I expanded my horizon further.

I also look forward to seeing all my classmates again and to go back to Ann Arbor to live my second year at school. It’s going to be awesome and I am also very curious to meet all my new classmates MBA1. Go Blue guys!

Talk soon,

Matteo

It's unbelievable...

...Once you start, time goes really fast.

It’s unbelievable but I am already half-way of this amazing adventure. Next week we will have our mid-summer review and I am very excited to hear how I have been doing so far in my new role. I have tried to meet as many people as people in order to arrive at the review well prepared and not too much stressed.

In terms of the workflow, it has always been really busy. During the past week I have been staffed on five different deals and I have been learning tremendously. Everybody is willing to help and people in my group are extremely nice and friendly. Every time you need help, you can just shoot an email or walk to the desk of any colleagues and they are ready to guide you.

My ‘junior’ mentor has been very helpful in giving me great advice during the past weeks. We have a coffee chat once in a while and he updates me on what’s going on in the news and in the group. We also have a monthly M&A meeting where the head of the group is showing us all the financial results of our group. Each meeting he brings in different representatives from the bank and outside of the bank that can give us interesting different perspectives.

Last week it was the 4^th of July weekend. I had to work but I managed to go home at a reasonable time in order to see the fireworks from the rooftop of my building. It was great!

This weekend we have to prepare a presentation for a Monday meeting. Even if it is weekend, we are all together in the office and with a great team hours goes fast and hopefully tonight we will all find ourselves at a bar with a drink in our hand after an intense week of work.

Keep you posted!

Matteo

Social games are changing the industry

Halfway into my internship at Ubisoft. It keeps getting better. After working on various projects in digital casual games, my supervisor put me on the GRO team.
GRO stands for Ghost Recon Online. Ghost Recon is a award winning, 10 years old franchise, based on best selling author Tom Clancy novels. The background story revolves around a fictional secret military unit (the Ghosts), which serves as the last resort of the U.S. Army when stuff gets really bad. The games have generally been first or third person shooters , with a strong emphasis on cooperation and team strategy. Ghost Recon online will be a free to play game. Players will download it on their computers and play online for free. Thanks to Ross , a lot of us ended up working with great stuff such as bleach, food, drugs.. or Ghost Recon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-6P5rE9L4o

As the title of this post mention, Social games are changing the videogame industry. and this is good news for any MBA who wants to be in this field. The industry has been recession proof since the nineties, and thanks to Facebook, broadband and the Nintendo Wii, a new , huge market was born. Social and Casual games are all the games that.. people who dont play videogames play. Farmville, Cityville, Bejeweled, but even Guitar Hero, Angry Birds are played by women in careers, bored fathers, grandparents. The market is so much wider and there is so much money to be made. Companies like Zynga receive skyhigh valuations , while giants like EA purchase smaller companies (Playfish, Popcap maybe) for impressive prices. Social gaming is about number, how many people play, how many people pay. It is not as artistic as gaming , and require a lot of analysis, promotion, marketing strategy and pricing. Several MBAs are getting into those new companies, using their business skills to improve the games and to find out what happens behind the scene. While I cant say I love casual and social games now, I am very intrigued in seeing what will happen and how this industry will evolve. It feels like the videogame industry is going to change impressively (probably in less than 10 years we will have no consoles anymore), and the industry leaders are acting as pioneers. I cant wait to see what will happen in five or six years, and how the whole system will evolve. And hopefully, I would like to be a part of this.
Speak soon.
Nicola,

The investment banking journey continues...

It’s been only two weeks of full time work and I learned tremendously. Working hours are pretty intense but once you start you get used to it quickly. The pace is fast, extremely challenging and every day there are new things to learn. It is exactly how I thought it would be.

My colleagues are very nice and helpful. Every time I have a question they are ready to sit down with me and help me. In my first week I got staffed on two live deals related to two different industries. It is very exciting because even if I never worked in those specific industries, I have the possibility to learn a lot in few days by reading reports, asking my colleagues and using all the resources that Citi has.

Two days ago I got staffed on a new project, my third deal. In banking you have to learn how to work in parallel on different deals, at different stages of the process and with different senior and junior people. You develop a unique set of skills that are and will always be extremely valuable for your present and future career.

All the people I met during the training week are now friends I can trust and on which I can rely. Every time our group has requests in terms of data I can ask my peers in the other groups and in few minutes I get what we need. I learned how important is to build relationships across different groups in the bank and to maintain them throughout my career.

I got assigned to a junior and senior mentor within the group. These are the people that will follow me through the process and will help me in case I have any problem with work, colleagues, etc. I have a bi-weekly coffee chat with my junior mentor, who is a director. It is very interesting to hear his perspective and also his background and role within the bank now.

Despite the fact that we work hard, we also love playing hard. Even if we go out of the office late at night, we try to find the time to hang out together. This is a great way to meet new people and to extend my network even further.

As always, I will keep you posted!

Best,

Matteo

The game goes on

Hey all,

Sorry for the delay. Life at Ubisoft is going great! Now that E3, the most important videogame exhibition in the world, is over, my supervisor has more free time and my deadlines get tighter every day. People here are great. For the first time I understand the meaning of fitting into the company culture. We all love games, we are all young, we are all laid back, and we all want to make an impact in the industry. While there are only two other interns here (great people too!!) I am bonding with the full time staff and hope to leave the company with some good new friends. This week I have a major presentation to the VP who is responsible for my project. I am a not too nervous, since I worked with this executive a lot during my MAP, but I am still trying to perfect my deliverable and really want to make a good impression (I wanna come back here next year!!).
I am developing my macro project in micro or medium steps. For now, I am done with two parts of it, that include presentation, documents and charts. I like to work in this way because I can assess the result of my work more easily. The videogame industry is going through major changing because of Facebook, Iphones and Online games. This is a great time to enter and I am participating to every networking event I can attend. I went to one last week and were able to meet several people from the mobile gaming industry. Videogames are like some sort of brotherhoods, very networking basis. It seems like the most important thing is working hard to get your foot in the door, and then passing from one company to the other is relatively easy. I am heading out to another of those events right ne now , will let you know how it goes.

The investment banking journey began!

The journey started only less than two weeks ago and so far it has been amazing. I arrived in New York City on the 6^th of June and I was hosted for a week by a classmate from Ross. I managed to find an apartment on Craigslist in a very nice location, pretty convenient to commute to go to downtown to the office.

The summer associate program started with a week of training. The first day was very exciting as I met all my new colleagues of the summer associate class and I am proud of representing Ross as an international student. I am surrounded by smart individuals from other top business school in the US such as Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Chicago Booth etc. Training was a great way to get started and to meet most of them. Despite the fact that it was a week of training, one night I went home pretty late as we had an assignment due in less than 24 hours. It was a job simulation and we had to value a company that was exploring a merger with another company. We had to learn how to use Factset (an investment analytic tool) and use all the excel files they provided us to perform the valuation. We were divided in sub-teams and this was a great way to bond with some of my colleagues and to make new friends.

The last day of training was volunteer day. We went to a park and we had to do gardening all together. It was nice to see how future bankers can contribute to the community and have fun at the same time. After that we had a welcome drink event where I met other nice colleagues.

Next week is my first ‘real work’ week and I am very excited. I will be staffed on Monday morning and I guess it is going to be very busy. I spoke with some summer analysts in my group (M&A) who started a week earlier and they told me they have been going home very late every night.

Keep you posted on how it goes!

Matteo

Summer Internship in New York

Hi All,

My name is Matteo Dominianni, I am an MBA student at the Ross School of Business and I just finished my first year. I am going to Citigroup Global Markets Inc. this summer, I will be joining their M&A group as part of their Investment Banking Summer Associate Program.

My background is Corporate Finance. After graduating in Telecommunications Engineering, I worked for two major telecoms operator, both in Italy and The Netherlands, first in M&A and then in Financial Planning, Reporting and Analysis. I am very excited about my summer internship as in my previous work experience I saw an M&A transaction from the corporate side, and now I will see it from the banking side. I will leverage all the skills learned in my previous financial jobs combined with the ones learned at Ross in order to bring valuable contributions to the team.

Now that all the first year exams are done and MAP is over, my only concern is finding a place in New York City that is close to the office. All the people I talked to told me it's extremely important to find a place to stay that makes commuting easy. I know it's hard to find a nice place to stay, but all my Ross classmates are very helpful and I am sure I will find something nice soon.

Talk soon,

Matteo

MBA & Videogames

Hi, my name is Nicola. I am a rising second year MBA from Italy. Videogames have always been one of my greatest passions. I've been an hardcore player since I was able to handle my NES joypad. When I came to Ross, I was wondering about what career path I would have choose. At the time, I considered the Electronic entertainment industry as an unreachable dream, since it is a pretty close circle and companies usually don't hire international students. I decided to network with videogame companies, but to pursue a more typical MBA career path.
However, Ross was able to exceed my ambitions by far. Thanks to a great alumni network and the power of MAP, I will spend the summer at the legendary software house Ubisoft Entertainment, in downtown San Francisco.
My title is "Active Game Manager", apparently the job involves a mix between product management and videogame production, and is therefore very creative. I will work on a major videogame franchise, but at this time it is not clear what I will do on a daily basis. Whatever it is, it's extremely exciting. Ubisoft is at the forefront of game developing, having released hits like Assassins Creed , Just Dance and Splinter Cell. The company is very informal and the offices are extremely cool and well located. I really can't wait to begin on the 23rd of this month.
Will let you know more A.S.A.P.