Last fall I had the opportunity to participate on the student/faculty team responding to the The Aspen Institute’s biennial survey “Beyond Grey Pinstripes: Preparing MBAs for Social and Environmental Stewardship.” This report measures the degree to which business school curriculums incorporate environmental and social issues that impact business performance.
In one of my favorite episodes of 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy drags Liz Lemon along to a corporate retreat. There, among fellow managers and industry gurus (Jack is the CEO of General Electric), he participates in team building exercises designed to hone soft leadership skills. As Jack reconnects with his fellow business bigwigs (each of whom “embodies a pillar of the Six Sigma Business Philosophy: teamwork, insight, brutality, male enhancement, handshakefulness and play hard”), Liz is left alone first to observe and eventually participate in the strange docket of workshops. During L.U.N.C.H. (”Lego Utilization to Negate Crisis Hierarchies”), Liz and her teammates build a Lego robot according to blueprints that only Jack can see; during C.L.A.S.S., (”Consuming Lunch and Simple Socializing”), Liz and others join banquet tables to network with new friends; and just prior to the keynote address (to be delivered by Jack), Jack psychs himself up, makes a fool of himself and then saves face with the help of Liz.
As we start to get more at home with the idea of being students again, its time for some club hopping. SOM has a large variety of clubs for us to get involved with and a completely unscientific survey says that we’ve joined on average 4.2 clubs.
You could broadly categorize the clubs into two groups. The first set are the professional clubs – these are the clubs that work very closely with the CDO and students on professional endeavors. They are a great way to network with your classmates who are into the same professional tracks as you – and probably most importantly (from my perspective!), the second years. (more…)
Mary Oliver’s poem “Summer Day” begins and ends with a series of open-ended questions. As the chill in the air and the falling leaves remind us that summer is decidedly past, I can’t help but return to the last of these questions, which resonates particularly with me. ”Tell me,” Oliver says in the closing lines of her poem. “What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (more…)
So I’m a second year. Hoo. Ray. I’m taking 4 classes, which is a lot less than 6, and that’s good. Over the summer looking forward to my academics, I was excited to have a more reasonable schedule than my Spring last year, just cruise, maybe get a job or something, and run clubs.
But I forgot about something in that process.
I forgot about the shadow core (see below.)
In my opinion, there are numbers people and there are words people. Numbers people do Sudoku puzzles in their spare time; they play with the different functions on their calculators; they’ve memorized the calculation of Pi up to 10 decimal places and they compute 18% of their dinner check divided by the number of heads at the table without missing a step. These are the people that can add, divide and multiply numbers in the 5 second window after a cold call before the silence gets awkward. And the ones who seem like they were born to build a beautiful spreadsheet. (more…)
We were so excited to meet the class of 2011 that we had BBQs connecting the cohorts (the new Gold Cohort got to hang with the Green 2010 and 2011).
What a fantastic new group of people to get to know! The first years are totally under water with problem sets and exams, which we all understand well. It’s all new issues as second years: if you can take classes anywhere at Yale University how do you possibly choose? What do you take to be practical and what for fun? what’s BOTH??? Where do we want to work? Did we enjoy our internships? Would we want to do them in the long term? (more…)
It’s always tough to say goodbye–and even tougher when the object of farewell is a fancy-free, mostly-inclusive orientation. But alas, the days of midweek bowling, free meals, and Yale-subsidized happy hours have come to a end, displaced by a long-anticipated but none-the-less surreal first week of classes. For me, at least the effect has been jarring. Who would have thought that the end of Orientation could be so disorienting?
But here I am, exactly 7 lectures into my SOM education and last week’s carefree bar-b-ques and beach trips seem as distant as Saturday mornings spent watching cartoons and downing Frosted Flakes. The Hall of Mirrors once jammed with hungry ice-cream lovers and sundae bars is now home to diligent first years, bent over Accounting texts and spreadsheets. We’ve already been assigned homework problems, problem sets and more reading than I’ve been able to keep track of without my planner; study group meetings are in full swing; and the CDO is already spouting the “R” word. (For those of you a bit more removed from B-School than I am, that’s recruiting). (more…)
A whirlwind week of Orientation has come to a close and it defies exposition. A true immersion in the SOM culture and community, we’ve emerged on the other side with new friends, new knowledge, and new experiences—and perhaps shed some of the inhibitions, anxiety, and preconceptions that we brought to New Haven. Because it’s hard to capture the entire week in a blog post, and because my CareerLeader test said I need to brush up my quant skills, I’ll attempt to recap SOM Orientation “by the numbers.” Here goes: (more…)
At the Lighthouse Point Clambake.
Well, kids it’s official. After two scintillating days of Math Camp (seriously though, for non-quants like me, it was an essential refresher and confidence-boost) and three-days of free lunches, fumbling name tags, and ice-breaker bonding exercises, we are smack in the middle of the whirlwind that is SOM Orientation. And while my brain is still recalibrating to 6-hours of sleep a night (and reminding me that 90-degree August days are no time to be in school), it has been a blast. (more…)
