Korner Talk

How do I survive bschool without MS Outlook (or whatever the equivalent is in Apple-land)? Answer: I can’t! From scheduling group meetings to figuring out which room my next class is in, Outlook is a mission critical component to getting through my day. I can’t believe I’m still using work speak… Anyways, the 2010 version of Outlook, although not ground breaking, has a couple of neat features. Example, every email has a picture of the people that are on the email (picture below). It’s a very useful stalking feature. There are also things like embedded Office files and a slicker meeting scheduler that makes productivity soar.

Send me an email and this is the handsome mug you'll see in Outlook 2010.

So the weekend is here and I’m quickly realizing that it means nothing more to me than not having to go to class but still having a bunch of homework and studying that needs to be done. The work is not that difficult (although it did take me and a friend seven hours to balance our first financial statement). The difficulty is balancing school work with career search obligations, club activities, and maintaining normalcy outside of school. Note to self: block off time in Outlook to do laundry on Sunday. Thankfully I’m past that age or state of mind where I want to drink/party all the time (did that even happen?) so I can concentrate on adjusting balance sheets over the weekend. It also helps that the group I hang out with most of the time is pretty well balanced in terms of doing school work and wanting to have fun. We’re talking Vegas already.

Anyhow, in tribute of lost weekends, the following song by BEP – before they became Fergilicious – popped into my head last night while thinking about debits and credits.

What a first week. So much went on that I don’t think I can remember all of it but here it goes.

For mod* 1, I’m taking managerial finance, financial accounting, stats, team leadership, and leadership communications. Despite having five classes, my schedule feels pretty light. Wednesday is the only crappy day because I have class from 800 straight to 1300. There’s a bunch of “free time”, most of which is spent studying in the library or doing group stuff.

Monday started off with much anticipation. It seemed like a lot of my classmates had trouble sleeping the night before. I had trouble sleeping as well, but I think it was more because of the coffee after dinner rather than the excitement of the first day of class. Monday kind of flew by, as did Tuesday.

The shit hit the fan on Wednesday though. As I mentioned before, Wednesday is my long day. It also happened to be the day that my group met for the first time to discuss our first case for our team leadership class (aka LTO). For LTO, we are assigned to teams of five to work on group projects. The first project is to analyze a case about a manager named Erik Peterson – who has ten million managerial problems on his plate – and write a paper on a suggested plan of action. Sounds easy, except we were given no framework to work with, which was probably part of the “fun”. We ended up spending approximately 70 man-hours on a five page paper. If you know the real Erik Peterson, please punch him in the face for all of us.

My team and I spent Thursday morning wrapping up Erik Peterson. After the final class of the week, the sober reality of doing all the homework and studying that I’m behind in hit me. Fortunately, Kegs, the end of the week social held in the Owen lobby, gave me an opportunity to temporarily forget about studying on the weekend.

The club fair was organized to coincide with Kegs. I must have signed up for all the clubs or something because this morning I got a bunch of emails regarding kick off meetings for such and such club next week. Realistically, I’m only going to fully involve myself in two or three clubs which is probably still a little too ambitious. I’m definitely going to join the Global Business Association (GBA) and Vanderbilt Marketing Association (VMA) and the Extreme Outdoor Adventure Club. The last club is more social than academic, so I’m still looking at getting involved in the Vanderbilt Entrepreneurship Association (VEA) or Operations Club.

I was supposed to go on the golf trip today but because of how long the golf trip would take, I went on the ropes course trip instead. The ropes course is basically one of those outdoor team building activities. We boarded a bus and drove into the hills of Tennessee to do some zip lining, tree climbing, and platform balancing @ Adventure Works. It was a lot of fun and there was a lot of bonding. I took pictures, but I’m going to hold off on them because I might publish them for the school via OwenBloggers. TBD on that one…

So yea, a good first week, but it’s time to shut down the brain because tomorrow is a full day of mastering the time value of money.

* A “mod” is seven weeks. Two mods make a semester, hence a total of four mods equal a school year.

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.