
Avoiding a scud attack from Floribama.
I got kind of lazy and didn’t finish a couple of posts from the previous week so here they are all at once.
Tuesday
Today’s agenda was for more mandatory information overloading and socializing.
The faculty started off the day with a run through of the different concentrations, specializations and emphases that Owen offers. I’m concentrating in marketing but after listening to the presentations from the strategy, operations, health care, finance, accounting, HOP (aka HR), and entrepreneurship professors, I’m thinking that I’d like to dip my toes in a bit of everything. OK maybe not accounting or finance.
We then ran through an overview of the “core” curriculum with the Dean Lehman, the Dean of Students, who reminded us that we’ll feel like we’re drowning through Mods one and two but that we’ll come out alive.
In the afternoon, we went through a “World Shaping” event where the entrepreneurship, Net Impact, international, volunteer club gave a presentation on what their last club is all about. I’m looking to get on the trip to Kyoto/Tokyo with the Global Business Association and to Guatemala with Project Pyramid.
I battled the late afternoon malaise the rest of the day as the director of the Leadership Development Program talked about Owen’s unique standing as the only MBA program to offer the cutting edge leadership transformation products offered by Korn Ferry. Dean Brafford was the last speaker and closed with “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant” and gave out a copy of the book The Big Short by Michael Lewis.
The day ended with pizza and beer.
Wednesday

The weather in TN is the most suffocating weather I have ever been in. The heat plus the humidity surpasses the heat and humidity of the worst days in Singapore and Taiwan that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing. You know it’s hot when the Indian students are complaining. I know, we’re a bunch of softies.
Regardless of the weather, we all boarded the bus to do some charity work today for Habitat for Humanity in heat stroke inducing conditions. Needless to say, there were quite a number of sour faces on the shuttle on the way to the work site. Everyone enjoyed the work in the end, however, and had a chance to bond, not to mention sweat.
Thursday
I postulate that another reason the school wanted us to do manual labor yesterday was so 1) we can get our tan on and 2) we can shed some water weight. Why? So we could look real svelte for our class picture.
Of course I learned nothing from all the sweating I did yesterday because I walked to school in my suit today. I’ve been riding my bike to school and it normally takes me ten minutes. Walking takes twenty minutes and in this summer heat, there’s no way to not show up at your destination without a sweat stained shirt. I sort of lucked out in the morning because it wasn’t that hot. The walk home is another story. I’ve never completely soaked a tshirt from sweating but there’s a first for everything.
Enough talk about sweating.
We sat through a couple of tech and time management info sessions during the day. At night, we were greeted by the alums at Kegs, the weekly networking/socializing event @ Owen. Free beer every Thursday? Yes!
Friday was an off day. I went to watch The Expendables with a couple of classmates Friday night and went for a 22 mile bike ride through Werner Park with Dean Lehman on Saturday morning. The Expendables was awesome and my groin is aching (from the bike ride, not the movie).
So what did I get out of orientation?
It goes without saying that the remaining four months of the year will be the most difficult time of my life. At least that’s what the the faculty, staff members, alums and second years like to keep reminding us. This has put the fear of god into some people but I’m optimistic and think it will be manageable. I’ll probably be eating those words in a couple of days.
Orientation also gave me flashbacks of freshman year in high school and college where I was trying to figure out where and how to fit in. With about ~185 MBA students, there are a lot of people to get to know and I’ve met about half of them. About half of that half I’ve talked to more than once and then half of that half I’ve had a conversation with that lasted more than fifteen minutes. Coincidentally, I was reading this post earlier this week about how it’s impossible to be best friends with everyone we meet at these orientation parties and events. Totally true. Realistically, and this kind of goes back to the “don’t network but build relationship” thing from the guest speaker on Tuesday, I think I’ll probably get to know maybe 4-5 people really well in the next two years if I’m lucky. The rest will be people in my network that I can hopefully count on to takeover the world in the future.