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Rock-solid grounding for a career
Date: 09 Dec 2009
Pictured above: Siobhan O'Dowd
It’s a long way from Electric Picnic to the MBA and I will never forget walking into that first class. For the previous two weeks I’d been living in a caravan in a field in Stradbally and as I looked down at my handbag, I noticed it was covered in mud – it had been a wet fourteen days. My classmates looked terrifying and the first class was in Financial Reporting & Accountancy where my previous experience in the same would have involved a Biro and the back of a napkin.
When did I decide to do an MBA? There was no actual defining moment. What began as an idea this time last year developed organically and, came to fruition last month. To give some background; I went to school in Belfast, and upon graduating, moved to Dublin to study Drama & Theatre Studies in Trinity. Unfortunately, I quickly showed a distinct lack of interest and aptitude for acting, but I loved elements like Theatre Management, Technical Theatre, and Production.
I became a Class Rep first and then the second female Ents Officer in Trinity. Despite no real experience or background in music, it was a great year (I took a sabbatical) and a sharp learning curve.
Going back to do my final year in college with new classmates and just eight hours of lectures per week was the motivation to call The Pod. Redbox didn’t have a student night running on a Wednesday, I offered to give it a go for three months on unpaid trial. That was almost nine years ago. Yoyo (the student night) ran for three years. The Chocolate Bar became Crawdaddy. The Redbox became Tripod. Stradbally became a second home as The Electric Picnic became greater than the sum of its parts. The festival portfolio was increased to include Lovebox, Garden Party and Midlands. The outdoor events included Leonard Cohen’s run at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the world’s number one DJ, Tiesto at Ballinlough Castle.
I was spending six months of the year at a desk dealing with marketing, promotion and sponsorship, and the other six months on site, dealing with all the production. It was busy and tough and amazing – at time the best job in the world and at other times, the worst.
And then in September last year, like the cartoon character who runs off the cliff and doesn’t realise there’s nothing but thin air until he looks down, the tsunami of recession hit our ship. I had never seen anything like it. All of the formulas that I had been using to calculate numbers spend per head and to forecast everything were utterly obsolete.
Feeling lost, I called the five people I had met and respected most in my working life and met them all for coffee individually It felt like I had been given a two thousand-word jigsaw puzzle without the box, and I needed to be able to glimpse the bigger picture to see where the pieces should go. I’m still surprised and humbled that they made the time and I will always be grateful to them for this. The strategy? Survival. Turnover. Generating cash. The personal implications and the reality? Being the oldest, most sober person in the nightclub on a Saturday night.
I’d previously thought about an MBA, more as a way of legitimising almost nine years of what some (including my mother!) wouldn’t classify as a “real” job. There were other reasons: curiosity; meeting new people with different backgrounds who could give me insights into their experiences; seeing if I could bring the MBA theory into my office and sell more tickets for better events.
The recession had two important consequences for me; It became apparent I didn’t know as much about business as I thought, and it slowed the company’s output, and thus gave me some spare time.
So, I put it in the lap of the gods – I went for a scholarship assuming that I wouldn’t get it. When I got offered a bursary, I assumed I wouldn’t get the points in the GMAT so it seemed safe enough to accept. That summer – always our busiest time of the year – we had Leonard Cohen in the lead up to my GMAT and my abiding memories are of the crew riggers helping me with geometry, Cohen’s accountant giving me a dig out on percentages, and sitting in catering, trying to concentrate on grammar whilest wishing Leonard would just sing a little more quietly. When I passed the GMAT, it was straight to Electric Picnic, and I had to miss both the orientation week and the first fortnight of class.
Despite the horrors of that initial walk in, at break, my group introduced themselves, and things began to take shape. My group, Group 5, is made up, the Project Manager, the Financial Services guy, the Garda, and the Rocket Scientist (seriously – he worked in NASA). Having such a mixed skill set means that group work is always interesting and we always have varying perspectives.
My contribution to Group 5? Our presentations are probably the most colourful, and we have a Group 5 logo… At the end of the first half of the first semester, one classmate sent “Group 5 hugs” before an exam, and I think that was the point when I really knew I had made the right decision. Getting through the first part and on to classes that I have some experience and a higher level of interest in marked a massive turning point for me.
The pluses? The classes are - for the most part – extremely interesting, and it will be an amazing qualification to get. The downside is that it’s horrendously time consuming and expensive but a worthwhile investment. For me, doing an MBA means sacrifice. It’s early days, but so far I think it’s worth it.
Published: The Sunday Times, December 6th 2009
Siobhan O'Dowd is a student on the Executive MBA course at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and will be writing a monthly column on her experiences.
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