One of my favorite things about coming back to school in the fall is getting to tell all the other kids what I did for the summer. This post is my opportunity to tell all of you about how I spent my summer vacation.
As I've posted about in the past, I'm a graduate student at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In the US, most MBA programs are two years long, with students spending the summer between their first and second years in an internship.
Many students in business school tend to go into consulting or finance. Many of my classmates spent their summers with firms such as Goldman Sachs, Bain, BCG and so on, but I chose to spend my summer working in the video games business, as that's where my passion lies. After an exhaustive internship search, which included a summer internship working on ESPN's nascent broadband games business in the summer of '05, I was offered an opportunity to work in Microsoft's games group. I accepted, and spent my summer learning all about the business of casual games, an area that's been sizzling of late thanks to the success of Nintendo's games-for-everyone marketing and the success of Xbox Live Arcade.
During the internship I didn't blog. Joystiq forbids such conflicts of interest. For example, we didn't let Microsoft pay to fly our bloggers out to Australia to toss water balloons for the launch of the Xbox 360 (though they offered, and though some other blogs regularly allow their writers to attend corporate junkets). We certainly wouldn't allow Microsoft to pay someone at the same time that he or she writes for Joystiq, so that's why I made no posts until this past Friday.
Now that my internship's over, I'm happy and eager to return to the blog world while I finish off my MBA. Just to keep a good wall between my summer experience and this whole blog thing, you'll probably find me steering clear of certain topics that I know a little bit too much about.
