Mondays nights are usually the nights I end up dreaming and speaking in my sleep about numbers and balance sheets after a late class of Entrepreneurial Finance. The takeaway from that class is always very straightforward: Entrepreneurs don’t have to be accountants in order to see financial statements from arms-length and be able to perceive uses, sources and status of capital and hence be able to conclude what’s wrong or right about the business. Our faculty for this course insists on neglecting the use of spreadsheets and calculators, he wants common and rapid sense when looking at numbers in financial statements. Gut-driven entrepreneurial finance. Love it.

So Mondays are always days filled with numbers and today was not the exception: I received 2 emails that had a number in the first sentence and that together give a simple summary of my life these days: 208 days until graduation and 168 days until my wife’s due date (the latter arrived in my inbox from BabyCenter.com). The former was from the Center for Career Development of Babson, sharing with us all the open positions and job-seeking resources that are available to us…and scaring the crap out of the entire Class of 2009 at the same time. The second email, I must say, provided comfort, excitement and joy. I can’t wait until the cold New England winter is over and I can greet my son/daughter into this world.

In case you were wondering, in my own scared-to-death-because-of-the-economic-meltdown job search process, things are progressing. At least I know where my passion is inclining me to apply: Apple, Facebook, Google, Digg, AT&T and Netflix are on my list as of today. Let’s see what happens.

I must first say how much I’m enjoying the class of Prof. Anirudh Dhebar called “Marketing High-Tech Products”. It is some sort of philosophical marketing class in which we discover the inner mechanics of every part of the theory of marketing, heavily applied to products and services that have a high-profile or high-tech component.

In one of his classes he put marketing aside to briefly give us some advice in our search for a job. There’s one quote that really resonated in me (which I bold and underline below) regarding the way we present ourselves. I literally quote from the email he sent later to follow-up on this subject:

First and foremost, never, ever, ever, ever forget the following line (attributed to Nicolas Hayek of the Swatch Group conglomerate): “Everything you do and the way you do everything sends a message.” You want potential recruiters to treat you as “world-class,” then there is only one choice: In how you prepare for and conduct yourself during and after the interview, be world-class in what you do and how you do it. And that requires your “message” to be “strong, exciting, distinctive, authentic, consistent, clear, and credible.” Yes, a tall order!

Thanks a lot to Prof. Dhebar for this and if you know of somebody searching for a job, please forward him these thoughts.