London

So here I am...back in London!
I flew in yesterday after a week at home with the family and friends.
After staying at a fancy hotel for a night, I moved into my flat today. My flatmate Amin helped to carry all my stuff from the car into my room. The afternoon was filled with unpacking, a trip to IKEA and a trip to Heathrow airport to return the rented car.

In a couple of hours my student life will finally be over and I am back as a member of the workforce...but this time as an Investment Banker in the British workforce.
More on that and what I actually do, after week 1 on the job...Good Night!!!

Back in Germany

I came back to Germany last Friday to see my family and my friends, and to relax for a week before I get back to work.
Initially I wanted to take 2 months off after my MBA to travel and see the world...so many friends from my MBA program invited me to visit them in their home countries. I could have travelled to Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Spain, Estonia, India, Pakistan, New Zealand, Thailand, Australia, China, Taiwan, Japan, pretty much every state of the US, Canada and many more countries. But it wasn't meant to be!
My dear employer gave me 3 weeks, take away a week to finish the MBA and one week to go flathunting in London, this leaves me with one week to prepare for my new job...this week (or what is left of it).
Not that I didn't want the job...I guess I wanted it so much that they were able to make me start earlier rather than later.

Nevertheless, so far the week at home has been a good week, filled with playing cards, eating excellent food and being taking care of by my mom - thanks!
Of course, I also met with some friends and I partied (only once), but I spent most of time in my bed with a book or sleeping.

The party last night was of course massive and me and my two friends Andy and Florian had a great time. Of course we partied in style with several other friends, champagne and a bottle of good vodka to celebrate my new job and Florian's new job (pilot with Lufthansa).

The year...

So this was it...my year in Oxford!
2 days ago I finally moved out of my college and vacated my room...officially, I will be a student until Sep30, but that's just a formality.

So, how was my year?

It all started with a car journey from Moembris to Oxford. I remember the night when we arrived, I couldn't believe that I actually made it into Oxford...it was unbelievable. From the first moment, I fell in love with the place and my new classmates...I quickly made friends during the first couple of days and my best friends from the year are still those who I went out with during the first couple of nights in Oxford. The courses started with a massive bang and I fell dead asleep on the couch in the cafeteria on friday afternoon after week 1.
The first term passed quickly with overwhelming amounts of work, two visits from Melina, Queer Bop (the party of the year), my first Oxford Ball, being run over by a car, a meltdown with my study group in the last week (I actually told them to go f*ck themselves and left) and my first exams in suit, gown and bow tie.
Spending christmas at home, my world collapsed when my love Melina broke up with me...nothing seemed to make sense any more and fortunately I managed to put up enough energy to start the second term...looking back I am quite surprised that I managed to do that, considering how shattered my life seemed to me. I guess all the hard work kept my thoughts occupied and the pain away, at least as long as I was around people.
The second term was easier than the first one from a coursework point of view - we all had our bruises and scars from the first term and now we knew how to shell out a 1000 word essay on a completely random topic that we had never heard about in 30 mins. After all those rejections during the first term and 1000s of trips to London to meet every Investment Banker who would listen to me for 2 minutes, I finally managed to make a bank interested in me...even though it was just an internship, I thought it was the chance of my life. During Hilary (term 2), I was even visited by my mom, who stayed in Oxford for a week, even though I had almost no time for her. Finishing with more exams and picking our electives for the third term, the second term went by in a second.
Trinity (term 3) was tougher than expected, but nevertheless, I had the most fun during that term. I was more relaxed, because I knew I had an internship over the summer and I knew the tricks of the trade to spend as little time as possible in the library and as much time as possible in the pub. Several college balls, the massive MBA Olympics in Paris, Wadstock open air festival, the African drumming session, the Sylvester Award show (Juergen = most likely to end up in jail) and the Wadham College ball were the highlights of Trinity.
The summer was all "work hard, play harder" as an Investment Banker in London. I literally worked my ass off to finally get the offer to join Macquarie Investment Bank after my finals in Oxford. I LOVE LONDON and god bless capitalism and the greedy investment banks ;o)
Last week I finished up my MBA in Oxford and said goodbye to more than 200 friends...and that was it, my year in retrospect.
There were good times, there were bad times (even very bad times), I learned a lot about myself and I guess I changed (at least I have become fatter, thx to the English food).

Would I do it again? Definitely! It was one of the best years of my life and definitely worth the sh*tload of ca$h that I paid for it.

Would I do some things differently? Definitely!
I would probably change my approach to getting a job (I wasted so much time on useless application efforts during the first term), I would try to better accomodate my love life in the whole situation, I would not walk home from a friend's house at 4AM in the morning just to get mugged (more correctly, almost mugged), I would probably not drink as much to avoid all those terrible hangovers I had (but then again I probably would), I would spend more time on exploring Oxford (and I mean the ancient Oxford, not the pubs, although some of them are ancient as well) and I would not miss the deadline of a 100% course paper for business history during my summer internship...I would probably have done some more things differently as well, but that doesn't really matter any more! I've done it the way I've done it and it has gotten me to where I am right now.
AND, from an academic point of view I am happy with where I am, from a professional point of view I am exalted and from a personal point of view I am quite happy about having made tons of new friends for life, but at the same time I am sad for having lost the most important friend...

Everybody is leaving :-( & I found a flat :-)

It is so sad! Everybody starts leaving...every night there are farewell drinks at some pub and all we do is pretend that nothing will change...







Every night good friends are in Oxford for one last drink, good friends with which I have partied, studied, argued and worked with. Friends who have influenced the way I think and act.
Hopefully, some day, maybe, if I am lucky I will see them again. Of course, I will stay in touch with some of them and others I will probably never see again.
Nevertheless, I wish all of them good luck and thank them for being the way they are and being with me in Oxford for the past 12 months.

PS: Fortunately, a lot of us took jobs in London and so we will be able to hang out once in a while with the Oxford MBA crew

ALSO, I FOUND A FLAT IN LONDON!!!
I will live in Maida Vale - Little Venice, in a really nice house and an awesome flat. I will share the flat with Amin, a 26 year old persian guy, who currently studies for a master's degree at UCL. In a year from now he will join an Investment Bank as well...so it will be a real Investment Banker appartment ;-)

paper finished

wwoooooohhhooooo, I just handed in my final individual assignment for the MBA!
(well, actually, I didn't, my buddy Andy Taylor did it for me, because after last night I was too hung over to go to the Examination Schools myself to hand in my paper, so Andy took it along)

anyways, i'm done now and that's all that counts
i probably won't get my results until November, but that doesn't really matter right now
tonight will be the farewell dinner and that's all that counts now!

presentation finished

Just had the final presentation for the capstone course as part of the group assignment...it went pretty good!
The whole team was happy with it and we went straight to the Jam Factory right across the street to celebrate the occassion with a beer.
Afterwards I almost forgot to upload our slides on the University intranet...if it wasn't for Ruben who called me, my whole group would have failed and probably killed me...lucky me and thank you Ruben.

Here is a picture of the team:
from right to left...me (Germany), Kevin (USA), Matt (USA), Daniel (Germany), Mihkel (Estonia), Richard (USA), Gabe (USA), Ruben (Belgium), Florian (Germany), Ean (USA), John (New Zealand)

Capstone Course

This is the final part of my MBA studies in Oxford...the Capstone Course!

What are we doing?
A scenario analysis - we try to see what the future holds for certain industry sectors and develop 30 year outlooks for them.
The topic this year is climate change and sustainability. The first 4 days are filled with lectures, guest speakers (excellent guest speakers who talk about everything that is related to the energy sector...the best part was the argument between the guy from the nuclear industry and the guy from the solar industry - omg, that solar guy had NO IDEA what he was talking about, i think he made up stuff along the way), group work and an individual paper.
Really interesting stuff so far!!!! The speakers and the panel discussions were absolutely excellent with really high profile speakers.
Now we are working on our group assignment, for which we picked the Oil&Gas sector. Our scenarios are called "Party like it's 1999", "Eco-Topia", "Fight Club" and "Forced Innovation"...to go into detail would take too much time now - we all want to get this stuff done quickly so that we can spend valuable time in the pub.
Here is what our brainstorming session has produced:























Oh, my individual paper. Yes, I also have to write a 3000 word essay until Friday, for which I picked the topic: "Ultimately business cannot reconcile the tension between its short term responsibility to maximize shareholder value and the long term imperatives of sustainable development - Discuss"

So what happened over the summer?

In July - right after my last lecture - I took off to London to start my internship at Macquarie Bank. Since I didn't have a place to stay I just crashed a friend's place, where I slept on the floor between the TV and the kitchen table. Not very comfortable!
Monday morning 8:30 - I make my way to the office with hundreds of other suits in a part of London called "The City". This is one of two areas in London where a number of financial institutions are located. Suits, Suits, Suits as far as I can see, some of them holding the Financial Times Newspaper, others with a Starbucks coffee in their hand, but all of them seem to be in a rush to get to their offices FAST.
So I arrive at Citypoint (the building I work at) and I am led up to the 29th floor, where my colleagues for the next two months, a laptop and a whole lot of work is waiting for me.


The office is amazing and my colleagues are great. The company does everything so that we don't have to leave our desks and that we feel important:
-you can drop off drycleaning at the reception and they take care of it
-a massive kitchen with everything you could ask for on every floor: sandwiches (nutella, marmelade, jam, honey, peanutbutter,...), fruits (incl. fresh mangos, papayas, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, etc. every day), more than 10 different kinds of cereal, sodas (coke, 7up, orangina, perrier, etc.), fruit juices and a huge flatscreen TV for the occasional break...and all that for free
-dinner (we usually order sushi) on company account brought to your desk
-a cab home paid for by the company if you work past 9PM (which is usually the case)
-a chaffeur service to and from the airport whenever we have to travel
-of course we only stay in the best hotels in town whenever we have to travel
-drinks, dinner, lunch...everything is on the company account when on a business trip

I end up working 13 hours on my first day...that night I just crashed as soon as I got home. But it didn't get any better, I usually work 12-14 hrs a day and 3-5 hrs/day on weekends. I loved it!!
Also, who wouldn't want to work with a view like that right from his desk?!


You wouldn't believe how much responsiblity you get in an investment bank. From day one, you are expected to deliver to the highest standard. I was hardly there for 2 weeks when I was asked by my director to come out to one of the companies we had taken over. During the management meeting there he told the management and me that he wanted me to work with them to develop an analytical way to price their product for a multi-million dollar government contract. I thought I hadn't heard right, but he was expecting me to basically tell the management how to price their products - they had done that for more than 30 yrs probably and I had hardly gotten my head around what exactly their product is. INSANE!!! Again, I loved it!

Apart from all the work, there was still time for a lot of fun. Constantly cracking jokes at work, going out for drinks aftre work (no matter how late it is - sleep is overrated), go-karting (guess who won out of more than 40 racers - oh yeah, the GERMAN!), clubbing (of course only in London's best clubs), etc.

Within a couple of days I had completely fallen in love with the investment banking world!

After 2 weeks I finally found temporary accomodation for the summer and moved to Swiss Cottage in London. This gave me the opportunity to experience numerous rides on the London tube during rush hours - horrible!!! The tube transports more than 3 million people every day and I was one of them...I can only imagine how much this must suck when the summer is really hot (thank god this summer was not really a summer).

So my summer consisted primarily of working 7 days of the week and having a big night out on Fridays. I haven't really had the chance to see anything of London, but I enjoyed my work, it didn't really matter.
Towards the end of my internship, when my project finally started to come together, I was asked to attend a feedback session. The feedback was very good: they were extremely impressed with the work that I had done, the way I had dealt with the management of the company that I worked on AND...they want me to join their team full time!!! WOW!!! They gave me a contract (insane salary and even more insane bonus) and 1,5 weeks to make a decision.
So...from October onwards I will be an Investmentbanker with Macquarie Bank in London - a dream come true!
For a start I will join their Renewable Energy team in one of their Private Equity funds. My first position will be as an executive and...I have my own two analysts who will do all the spreadsheet modelling for me, because "...considering your extensive experience and your excellent work, we want you to focus on improving our businesses...". As I am the only German on the fund so far, the fund management has told me that they probably want me to get involved in every transaction they do in Germany - which means: tons of management exposure!
But what will I really do there? Ever seen the movie "Wall Street" with Michael Douglas (aka Gordon Gekko)?! Oh yeah, that will be me ;-)

As you can see, my summer turned out to be the best summer in a long time, even though I didn't have a single day of vacation.