Come on Hauser Nation!!

Attention all reader!!! (singular is corrrect for my blog)

Please go to the this post to go take a survey for my marketing research class, there could be extra credit available!!!

Sebastian Janikowski is a Real Man

I'm a Kansas City Chiefs fan, so this field goal definitely hurt. Kansas City went on to lose the game, but if you're going to get beat, you might as well get beat by someone doing something miraculous.



A 96-yard field goal would be miraculous, unfortunately it was just a glitch.

Under-Reported Story, But I'm Sure You're Following It

So GM has plans for an IPO later this month. This is both good and bad, first the bad. We own a large percentage of GM stock, which under normal circumstances an IPO would be good for, but we acquired that stock at a very lofty valuation. What was our valuation of GM? Priceless, or at least high enough that the company was deemed so important we couldn't let it fail. . . until of course, we did let it fail. After it failed, we converted our bailout dollars to equity, said "no jets for you" and prayed for an IPO to recoup our investment. From GM's prospectus, the mid-point of their expected pricing range is $25billion, we invested $50billion, so we're going to lose some money. This isn't bad, because like the prudent investor our government is, we're only planning on selling about 1/3 of our stake at the IPO, we're diversifying our divestitures and hoping the stock rises in the future and we can sell our remaining stake then, at a profit. The problem is that from my perspective, I don't see the company's shares doing much in the near future for a couple reasons. First, GM automobiles are still trailing the Asian manufacturers in reliability. Also, from GM's prospectus, "our disclosure controls and procedures and our internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective." They go on to say this could "adversely affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan," They sound confident, don't they? Their lack of confidence leads to my lack of confidence we'll ever see anything near one-hundred cents on the dollar we invested in GM, but at least we tried.

Please Solve This Issue Someone

Thought for the day, THIS bothers me. I can't think of a way to profit off of it, but I'm open to suggestions, please let me know. The only thing I could think of is using the empty space to transport coal to China, coal is cheap to mine here and China is a huge importer of coal. The problem I keep running into is that intermodal shipping containers are poor transports of coal and returning the containers to their pre-coal carrying cleanliness would have to be an absolute imperative responsibility. I keep thinking of some way to transport the coal in a bulk manner and conveyor it to railcars to take directly to a power plant, but I can't think of a way to do this and still take all the empty containers back to the factories making all of that inexpensive awesome Chinese stuff I love so much. If you have a solution to this problem please let me know and I'll give you $5 when I make my first million.

War Eagle

This past weekend, my lovely girlfriend and myself decided to take in some of the local sights and events, so we attended the War Eagle Fair on Saturday. The event itself is actually less of a regular fair and more about arts, crafts, and people peddling overpriced homemade stuff. We had been informed of the event by some people at my work and then some others here in the MBA program, they told me it was going to be big, but I had no idea how big it actually is.

We left the apartment around 9:30 on Saturday, made a quick stop by the farmers market in Fay-town to peruse the fruits and veggies, then we were off to War Eagle (which is apparently a very small city/mill/stream in addition to a yearly crafts fair). We then spent the next two hours in traffic waiting to park at the fair, it was a flippin' zoo! After we finally parked, we strolled through the various booths. My general rule of thumb after being there, the small stuff is overpriced, the big stuff is priced right/comparatively under-priced, I'm not sure if there's some kind of economic principle here or not, if I can think of something I'll try to post about it. We didn't get much beyond the expected and typical fried food and kettle corn, but the one thing we did get that I really liked was a small silver ring for the Novia (girlfriend in Spanish) at a booth with antiques. My guess (actually wishful desire) is that the ring was cherished by some sweet old lady for many years, she passed away, the vendor picked it up at an estate sale, and now we have it, and we can start the cycle over again. It might not be the case, but I can hope. My conclusion about War Eagle, it's pretty cool, but leave early, like really early.

After the Fair, we went back to the apartment and watched the Razorbacks get absolutely hosed by the officials. On the bright side, thanks to the generosity of a local optometrist, SEC teams should be spared from future officiating blunders. The Razorbacks game wasn't the only officiating problem in the SEC this weekend, check out this video and see if you laugh as much as I did.

Currently

Currently I am sitting in a dark room behind a one way mirror looking at six U of A undergrads and a graduate student,I swear it's not what it sounds like. I'm not a creeper or anything, but for this one day I'm posing as a marketing researcher. The grad student is in a group of mine for our marketing research class and we're conducting some primary research into body wash. We're in kind of an exploratory stage right now, trying to decipher what it is we're actually going to study, so a focus group seemed like a good way to help boil down our research goals. We're videotaping and recording the audio from the group and my other group members are taking notes, something I should probably be doing right now, but it also seems like a good time to blog, so that's what I'm going to do.

These past couple weeks sure have been interesting, we just finished up our last midterm this morning, it was actually the final for a half-semester class on ethics. The class was nice, and something I really enjoyed was that it stayed away from academic ethics almost entirely and instead we debated Enron, Wal-Mart's green initiatives, and various other ethical cases. While the acedemic theories are great (I'm a cultural relativist with a firm belief in social contract theory, I know, somewhat contradictory) they don't represent the issues, challenges, and gray areas facing many global and multinational corporations in today's "flat" world.

I'm going to wrap it up soon here and get back to the real world, but I just want to speak to something I harped on last time I posted. Being at this school, in this MBA program, provides so many opportunities for interacting with the most powerful people in industry. Just last Wednesday, most of the MBA program got to go attend a conference with Proctor and Gamble CEO Bob McDonald, Wal-Mart US CEO Bill Simon, and Google US Sales Director Jim Lecinski. For my money, Lecinski was by far the best speaker and his presentation on the "zero moment of truth" was the kind of deep insight not seen from the more generalized CEO's.

In the near future, the Czar will be guest posting, he's still trying to think of a topic.

Apparently Someone Reads This Thing

This evening I was looking over the wasteland that is my blog and I noticed I had a comment on one of my recent posts, two of them actually. The first one was (I'm assuming) a fellow MBA student here and the second was somewhat more serious from a fellow named Ehram, asking "where are you doing your MBA? What are your thoughts on MBA courses in London as opposed to those in the US?" I started writing my response, it became rather garrolous, and I figured it would make a wonderful post. Not having direct experience with MBA programs in the UK, I expanded the field of the questions to something I do have knowledge on, what sets a Walton MBA apart from other MBA programs. My response was as follows: (my apologies for the spacing, Blogger is having issues, I swear I know how to write a paragraph)

Hi Ehram, I am currently completing my MBA at the University of Arkansas, Sam Walton College of Business. While I do not have direct, first-hand knowledge of any MBA programs in the UK I will attempt to put forth what I believe sets a Walton MBA apart from all schools. And I will try not to sound arrogant when I say this, but a key difference between a Walton MBA and any other MBA program anywhere is our proximity to a Fortune 1 company. As the name implies, there is only one Fortune 1 company, and we're the closest top-flight school. This proximity affords us select few in the program the opportunity not only to interact with them, but also to take advantage of all the resources they have drawn to the area. Just this morning I walked into my marketing research class (a few minutes late to my embarassment) and speaking to the class was Bob Seelert, the Worldwide Chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi. And I can honestly say that was not a random occurance, just yesterday evening I had a thirty minute long conversation with a VP of Category Management for Micheal's (North America's largest crafts and hobbies company).

Wal-Mart (the afforementioned Fortune 1 company) has drawn to the area every vendor they deal with, I know they (Wal-Mart) have a permanent contingent of Deloitte people here (I know there is a PWC and E&Y office in the area, not sure about KPMG), and they have a very active International M&A department (I know this because they employ a former Walton MBA grad). All of that is to say that while the area is dominated by a single company, we are not limited in our employment options either by the employer whom we wish to work for or what line of work we wish to follow. As an analogy, Wal-Mart's $400+billion in revenues puts them on par with the economies of Ohio, New Jersey, and Belgium (they're actually slightly larger than Belgium), something that large has to be diverse.

Another competitive advantage of the Walton MBA is our entrepreneurial track record. Last year we were listed as the #7 most competitive MBA program in the country, and that was before we swept nearly all top prizes at Moot Corp (the "Super Bowl", or "FA Cup" if more to your liking, of business plan competitions) and a host of other business plan competitions. In addition to the cash prizes, two new businesses have been formed out of last years entrepreneurship track, which is quite amazing for a program of our size. With regards to our size, being a small program ( < style="mso-spacerun: yes"> While I do not begrudge people for going to Harvard (they're obviously a great school with an exceptional track record), with near 2,000 full-time MBA students, I don't think I would be afforded the firsthand opportunities I have had here in Arkansas.

My intention was not to go this long, but I guess I did get a post out of it so it's not all bad, my regrets to Ehram for my lengthy answer, next time I'll try to keep it brief! In other university news, this weekend we get to roll Alabama on the football field, I'll try to post pics sometime next week if we win.

Yeah, I Occasionally Do Homework

I've been meaning to post this for a while, it's a memo I wrote for one of my classes here. The class is called "Managing & Leading Organizations", it's taught by the only non-PhD professor we've had in the program thus far and even though there's no PhD, the wealth of real-world knowledge is so exceptional I don't think it matters. Anywho, about this memo, throughout the class we're supposed to write ten memos about current events and discuss the implications for an organization. In the following memo, I'm assuming I'm writing to a manager of a corporate treasury/CFO-type individual and I think the implications, while not explicit, speak for themselves:

"I am writing to inform you of a recent conflagration of events and occurrences that may have widespread implications for global M&A activity into the near future. Given recent corporate proclivity to hold excess cash ($1.84 trillion in cash and marketable securities on non-financial corporate balance sheets) and worldwide investors insatiable demand for bonds it seems many companies, especially those under pressure to deliver results to shareholders, will derive lofty valuations for firms they seek to acquire.

As evidence for the insatiable demand of bonds, I will present the results of two recent debt offerings, one by McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD), and another by Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC). Late this July, MCD issued $450mil of 10-year notes and $300mil of 30-year bonds. The 10-year notes were issued with a yield of 3.5%, matching the lowest 10-year rate for all US issuers in 15 years, the 30-year notes (issued at 4.875%) matched an all-time low mark set recently by Wal-Mart. In addition, NSC recently issued what has been termed “century” bonds. These bonds, as the name indicates, will not pay back their principal until 2110, a time at which (likely) all current purchasers will have ceased to be living. NSC initially planned to sell only $100mil of these bonds, but prior to announcing the quantity of the deal, investors expressed interest in at least $75mil, the issuance was then raised to $250mil and was still oversubscribed. This oversubscription and the competitive bidding process for the paper led to the bonds selling above par (6%), and with a yield-to-maturity of 5.95%. While very few assets can have a lifespan of 100 years and thus will not be able to match the lifespan of the liability, I will offer a short defense of the century bond. If (and this will likely not be the case) the coming hundred years is analogous to the last hundred years, the present value of the $250mil principal payment in 2110 is currently nominally worth approximately $13mil, which is $2mil less than the real annual coupon payment.

This ability to acquire cheap cash could lead to an expansion of worldwide M&A deals. While above I state this cheap cash will lead to expensive acquisitions, I believe this has already begun and should serve as a cautionary tale to executives thinking about expanding through acquisitions. Recently, there have been three large acquisitions or attempted acquisitions that have occurred. Intel recently acquired McAfee virus protection in an all-cash deal and publicly stated the deal “will not significantly contribute to next year’s income”, seemingly fitting the bill of an expensive acquisition. Additionally, HP and Dell are currently locked in a bidding war for the data storage company 3Par, with the most recent bid nearly double the initial offer. And this acquisition spree is not limited to tech firms, with Australian mining giant BHP Billiton having recently taken a $130/share offer directly to the shareholders in an attempt to win control of the Canadian fertilizer miner Potash of Saskatchewan, this $130/share offer has been rejected by management as being too low and the company is currently searching for a “white knight” with several sovereign wealth funds being considered as potential bidders in addition to BHP. Companies that may or may not be on the prowl for acquisitions in the near future include Apple and Cisco, both with net cash positions of at least $25bil."

I wrote the memo about two weeks ago and some changes have already taken place, just a couple days ago Cisco announced they would be returning some of their large cash pool to shareholders through a dividend. Of the two main methods of returning capital to shareholders, dividends are the method I least like, but it's a good start and that's a discussion for another day. If you (my reader, singular) have any questions about that writing, or any other questions about classes here at Walton, let me know, I do take blog requests. Also, sometime on the horizon, I'll be having a guest blogger (the Czar) do a post for a little different perspective on the program.

Hello Again

Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted, too long in fact. With the amazing sense of humor the Eternal Almighty has, I seem to have been dealt the perfect time to remedy this problem. Currently, I am sitting in a wi-fi-less Wendy’s waiting for my ride to come rescue me from this technological backwater. You see, I’ve had a spot of car trouble this afternoon, hence the perfect blogging time. (and before we actually get underway, just one quick question for both of my readers, what were laptops used for prior to wireless internet?)

Anyways, I’ve been planning to post an assignment from my management class because I thought my writing was pretty smart, but I’ll start back blogging with something a little lighter, a weekend recap!! This weekend was awesome, fun, and fortunately long thanks to Labor Day.

My weekend got underway Thursday with a “team training” event in Branson with the company I intern for. We stayed at the Chateau on the Lake and participated in such well-known events as “The Wal*Mart Pivot” and the “blind-folded move the ball with a ring and strings game”. Anyways, as skeptical as I am of most of this corporate team building hullaballoo it was actually quite interesting and we learned how to interpret most anything through the value system the company has laid out. The real fun however, began after dinner when we went to the hospitality room, and as much as I would love to post about the debauchery that took place there, if I did I think Rebel (GSB admin director) would have my head. If there’s a big outcry for it from my reader then I’ll post it, cuz I do what I want!!!! Anyway, this little fella here was our mascot: (we were the yellow team)

After the crazed Thursday evening I woke up at 4:30 on Friday so I could be back in Fayetteville by 9:30 for my summer internship presentation. I thought my presentation went really well, but apparently it didn’t go well enough because I lost my flight. My roommate won the flight I was in, which is kind of odd because he and he and he .(I sure hope he doesn’t read this) But I did get some good news when I got my scores back this morning, the judges had mainly positive things to say about my presentation and suggested I look into efficiency consulting based on what I said in the presentation, so I think I will.

Friday evening was completely devoted to getting ready for Saturday, and like most autumn Saturdays in the south, there was only one thing on the mind. . . FOOTBALL!! My roommate (the one libeled above) acquired a parking pass a pretty decent lot so we could tailgate, and tailgate we did, we grilled, threw the pigskin and imbibed! It was my first taste of SEC football and only served to whet my appetite for more, the next more is Alabama in a few weeks, which should be a great game if our defense continues playing well. My girlfriend took this picture while we were tailgating, the large blob in the trailer is apparently the same speedy razorback seen on the side of the truck:

The rest of my weekend was spend recuperating on the farm in Oklahoma, and I could probably still do some recuperating, but I’ll have to wait ‘til this weekend, fortunately it’s a short week. To my reader, I promise to blog again soon! No more three week intervals, I promise!

Having trouble sleeping, random mobile blog, hpq closed at 40.77 today, it'll touch 44 by months end, over sold following Hurd's departure

Weekend Update

So the weekend is over. . . and while I always lament the end of a good weekend I think it's about time I share with my faithful readers (I say, that's a joke, son.) what it is that fills my weekends. First and foremost, as a good boyfriend, I am dutifully obliged to state my girlfriend fills up most of my weekend when she's down here from her home in Joplin, MO. And we get out and try to take in some of what the area has to offer. This summer we've been very diligent about going to the farmer's market on most Saturday mornings. While I wish I could say this is for the health aspect of locally grown organic food, it's not. Personally, I think the food just tastes better. To demonstrate how unhealthy such a healthy event can be, think of this market basket we acquired on a Saturday a few weeks ago:

• Bacon-Local, grain-fed, and soaked in honey and maple, in a word: Delicious
• Coffee-Iced mocha latte with a splash of vanilla
• Potatoes-This one seems healthy on its face, but after cooking, the first item from this list was applied, as well as copious amounts of butter and cheese. Also, I can really tell a difference between farm-fresh and store bough potatoes
• Cookies-From a local bakery, slightly overpriced but definitely worth it

So there it is, does that sound like the shopping list of a hippie? I think not. Anyway, the point is that while some people think of Fayetteville as the liberal bastion of Arkansas, there's still stuff here for everyone even if it is at the hippie people, uh. . . farmers. . . market.

In addition to the bountiful cornucopia of food every Saturday at the farmers market there are other activities. One which my girlfriend and I partook in this weekend was the natural beauty of this, the Natural State. Just about thirty minutes south of Fayetteville is a state park around a series of caves called Devils Den. Apparently it's called this because when the breeze flows through the caves, the resulting breeze was thought to be the devils breath. In this park there are many campsites, horse trails, and mountain bike trails, but we were there for the hiking, and we took this wonderful picture while there:

What you can't see in this picture is out of the frame just to the right is a cave dropping off about twenty-five feet really quickly and you can't see much further than that. It was closed this weekend due to a fungus on the bats living in them, but we're rebels and went spelunking anyways, just kidding, I needed an excuse to type spelunking. This is just one of the many fun things to do around here and when I find other cool stuff I'll be sure to post it.

Also, we're approaching the second week of Citi-watch and I think I'm winning so far. Volatility, and not fundamentals appear to be the biggest threat to my impending triumph but we'll see.

That Was a Crazy Game of Poker

The game is finally over! I have flexed my Walton MBA statistics-enhanced muscle at the expense of my fellow students and have won an unnamed sum from my peers! (well actually I tied) Thanks Prof. Aloysius! Also, please no one mention this to the IRS, I don't like taxes, I feel safe posting this on my blog because nobody reads it anyways.

Bubble Logic

-This picture was taken in Bentonville last week, and it's not the only cupcake store in NorthWest Arkansas, do I smell a tasty & delicious bubble? Also, sorry for the random co-worker who stepped in front of my phone.

My dear readers, it’s finally occurring, the long brownies/short cupcakes arbitrage strategy is finally paying off! I quote a headline from a recent article on Yahoo!’s homepage: “Cupcakes and 6 Other Food Trends That Have Lost Their Cool”

I don’t like to brag or anything, but I think I could be the John Paulson of the dessert market. And, if this comparison proves to be true, I would really like to have a book written about this mythical trade entitled “The Tastiest Trade Ever”, you may remember Mr. Paulson had a book written about his short of the housing market in 2008 called “The Greatest Trade Ever”.

To explain how to make a killing in the dessert market without spending a single grain of sugar from your sugar reserves you must have an understanding of a couple key terms, we’ll start with arbitrage. Arbitrage is a wonderful idea, but typically only occurs in theory and the world of super-computing, the latter I don’t’ have access to and the former doesn’t exist so none of the following writing is applicable to much of anything in my world or likely yours, but I digress. What I was about to get to is that arbitrage is all about mis-pricing, this can be the mis-pricing of a single asset traded in two different markets or the divergence (a statistical anomaly) of one or more assets from an expected or observed, price or pricing relationship. This statistical divergence lends itself to the particular kind of arbitrage set up in the long brownies/short cupcake strategy, statistical arbitrage (statarb for short, try using statarb in a sentence today, people will think you know more than you do).

I have long been an observer/partaker in the dessert market, and have participated in many of the ups and downs of this market. I was a participating member in the 2004 Great Vanilla Ice Cream Intake bubble and sadly I was also present for the subsequent sugar crash that always follows those kinds of gluttonous bubbles. Dessert cakes have long been a favorite sector but until recently I hadn’t noticed the trade to make it profitable. The dessert cake sector of this market is highlighted by a small, but tasty, set of securities ranging from the aforementioned cupcakes and brownies to such luminaries as lemon bars, cookie cakes, tiramisu, and coffee cake. An interesting thing is that while all members of this sector compete against one another, their prices are highly positively correlated, or at least I think they could be. When cupcakes began outpacing the others after much publicity in the Sex and the City TV series and subsequent movies I began to take notice. Not wanting to expose myself to potential upside still in the cupcake bubble I looked to statarb to remove the risk. To illustrate this risk reduction, imagine I short cupcakes at a $2X/unit and buy an equal dollar amount of brownies at $X/unit. Knowing, from prior research, brownies trade at parity with cupcakes (unlike pricy tiramisu) I can go long brownies and short cupcakes as I believe brownies are undervalued relative to cupcakes and when the prices converge, in percentage and not actual price, I make money.

As I see it, the beauty of this trade is two-fold, 1) I don’t have to know anything about the current price of the items, or even where the prices are going, essentially I am betting the percent spread between cupcakes and brownies will tighten in the future, and 2) I can fund the purchase of brownies by the short of cupcakes, thus limiting, or even reducing altogether, my capital outlay. Another benefit (although one I don’t subscribe to) is, theoretically at least, this is a risk-free trade.

So to wrap this all up I’ll conclude with this profound statement, I’ve just profited from a trade in which I didn’t have to spend a dime and didn’t take on any risk, sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Also, and as promised, the new poll should be up, the czar (fellow MBA’er here at Walton) thinks Citigroup common stock is headed to $8 within the next year, it currently trades around $4. I think he’s wrong, where do you think it’ll end up in two weeks? I’m going with $3.85, apparently I’m short Citigroup. I’ve had enough blogging for one night, I’m off to O’Hara’s house to hone my statistical skills playing poker (thanks Prof. Aloysius!!).

As promised, today I will deliver why I chose to attend the University of Arkansas and get a Walton MBA. But first, a little divergence to post an interesting thing I read over the weekend. If you know me, you know I love NPR, and they have a section called Planet Money every once in a while that attempts to make sense of the massive amount of economic and financial news out there, but sometimes it's a little whimsical. They also run a blog and podcast and if you click on the following quote you'll be directed to a recent post about economic bubbles. A teaser from said post:

"If I were playing the dessert market, I'd have shorted cupcakes and gone long brownies the minute "Sex and the City" went off the air." (Planet Money blog)

And now to the main event, the reasons, both multitudinous and compelling, I chose to get a Walton MBA. As I was preparing to finish up my undergrad I wasn't quite sure what was coming next. Fortunately, and unlike most in the economy of early 2009, I had options in staying with Smucker's (with whom I was interning) or attending graduate school.

In early April of 2009 I decided to take the GMAT and in mid-April I took it and did fairly well (as a note, the route of signing up and immediately taking the GMAT is not one I endorse). So I began my decision journey and started close to home and in my comfort zone. Initially I looked at KU, MU (Missouri), OU and OSU (Oklahoma), and TU (Tulsa). I wanted to stay in the region and I wanted to go to the best in the region, so I started with those five. Walton was literally not on my list even though it was the closest geographically to my family home in NE Oklahoma.

Initially, and like most in my generation, I turned to the internet for my first cull. I liked what I saw from OU, OSU, and TU, and I had good e-mail correspondence with all three. About the same time I was selecting which schools to visit I was participating in a business competition with a group from MSSU and with a friend of mine (Alex Kieslich) who had already decided to attend Arkansas. During a weekend when we competed in Jefferson City he told me some things about Walton and offered to mention my name and e-mail address to Rebel Smith, the admissions director for the graduate school. About a week, and a personalized e-mail from Rebel after that, and I had a visit lined up. (Also, as a note to any admissions people, the personalized e-mail is the most priceless persuasion tool)

At that point, pre-visit, I wouldn't say Arkansas was at the top of my list, but at least now it was on my radar. My visit was on a Friday and I took it off work and carpooled down to Fayetteville with Alex. I remember thinking the campus looked nice (I had never been on it despite living slightly over an hour away) and liked the parking garage right next to the graduate school. While there I had the standard talks with the program director and admissions director, spoke with career services and had lunch with a current student, all par for the course, pretty much the same thing I experienced at Tulsa which I had visited about a month earlier. None of the standard stuff held much sway with me because, the way I look at it, one afternoon visit is not enough to gain an understanding for the intracacies of the faculty, one student is not enough to decide if you'll fit in socially with a particular program, and fifteen minutes with career services is not enough to decide if they'll work with you to help you get the best job possible after graduation.

Yet at the end of the day, I walked away with Walton at the top of my list and so far out in front of the others I didn't even want to look back. For me, there ended up being three reasons for this:

1. Direction - My dad is a civil engineer and all of my family is very mechanically-minded so I have a tendency to analyze all objects with flow and direction. This leads to three possible outcomes, forward, backward, and static (going nowhere). And what I saw when I looked at other schools was not necessarily atrophy or backwards motion but apathy, they didn't talk about getting nationally ranked and they didn't talk about how competitive they were, which left me feeling apathetic about their schools. Both of these things were talked about by nearly everyone at Walton, and I could tell the staff felt they were on the cusp of something big. Essentially I had the feeling the program was in forward motion with everyone working to make the program better. As it turns out, my feelings were correct and we were just ranked the #25 full-time public MBA program this spring by US News, and now we're tasked with keeping, and building this impressive momentum.
2. Camaraderie - One thing that personally made a difference for me was the feeling of camaraderie I felt I would receive at Walton. Unlike all the schools I visited, the full-time students at Walton travel in one large pack. We started with 36 people this spring and at the change of classes we would move as a 36-person mob from one room to the next. This allows you to know everyone in the program by name, know their significant others, know their hometowns, and eventually it creates this fabric where you don't have to remember any specific due dates or meeting times because the group will. I think of this past semester like no one knew everything, but collectively, we knew it all.
3. Facilities - For me, this was the one that held the most sway. I remember Rebel taking me up to the MBA floor and we looked at the case study rooms and the classrooms and I was absolutely stunned. The facilities looked better, in person, than any pictures from any other school I had seen on the internet, even crazy aspirational programs I wouldn't consider applying to. Rebel told me some of the GSB staff went to Cambridge, Mass. to examine Harvard's facilities and the people who did their's did ours and honestly, I think we must have the best facilities in the nation.

I know I'm leaving many small reasons off this list and if I think of them I'll post them, but this is getting lengthy and I'm getting hungry so I'm out. Stay tuned because I think I'll add a poll with a predicted close for Citi stock in the next coming weeks, the Czar thinks it's going up and I think he's wrong so we'll let you decide.

An Introduction

So. . . this is my first attempt at blogging and I'll start with an introduction. My name is Brock Hauser and, as indicated in my blog title I am an MBA candidate at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and have one year left in the program. I'm 23, which is slightly young for our program and for most top MBA programs in general so I thought an apt title would be "Doogie Hauser" as the other Doogie Howser was an MD of exceptional youth.

A little background information about me, I've lived in Fayetteville for about six months now. Prior to starting the Walton MBA program I worked for two years as an accounting intern with The J.M. Smucker Co. at their canned milk manufacturing plant in Seneca, Missouri (and if you're wondering; yes, we cried over spilt milk). While working there I completed my undergraduate degrees in Accounting and Finance at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin. However, I did not begin my collegiate career in Joplin and was actually a transfer from the University of Kansas, where I spent my first three semesters, and between those two academic stints I lived for six months in Australia. You might ask what I was doing in Australia, and while I wish I could answer that I was studying abroad or work and broadening my horizons this is not the case, I didn't really do much of anything, I lived in Brisbane, and spent most of my days sitting on a beach, hiking, rock-climbing, bicycling, and learning how to do other fun things like kite-boarding and surfing. I had a blast while I was there, but I also realized it wasn't a realistic lifestyle, after all, you can't sit around and not contribute to society for all of your life (unless you live in France or Denmark, but that's a story for another day). Anyways, prior to Australia I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but when I got back I figured it out pretty quickly. I had always held a keen interest in finance and business but finance, while seemingly rock solid when compared to art history, is not the most tangible major, so I tacked on accounting as well.

This is getting a little long so I'm going to wrap up all of my life prior to college in the next 2-3 sentences. Born in Joplin (coincidentally where I finished college), lived in Stillwater, Grove, and Tulsa, OK for the next nine years and while in Tulsa, as a young tyke, participated in everything from figure skating, ballet, and piano lessons to soccer, ice hockey, and road racing (completed my first 5k at age 5). We then moved from Tulsa to American Samoa and lived there for two years before moving back to the mainland and living in Neosho, Missouri for the next three years. However, my parents wanderlust was not satiated and we moved to Ma'adi, Cairo, Egypt for eighteen months before moving back to Neosho where we stayed for two more years. After the second stint in Neosho we moved to Wilmore, Kentucky and I attended all four years of high school there and competed in varsity soccer and tennis.

Just as some minor foreshadowing, and to keep all of my readers (ha! like I have any!) intrigued enough to come back, next time I will discuss why I chose the to get a Walton MBA!!!