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.

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.

The first picture is a shot of the most prominent building in Downtown Nashville’s skyline, the AT&T building, or as one of my classmates called it, the Batman building. Considering that TN is in the middle of the bible belt, I’m surprised they allowed a building to be built with devil horns. Sin City east?

Speaking of sin, you’ll see in the picture below that there is a lady cradling a big giant penis at a bar. OK maybe it’s not a sin but it’s definitely not child friendly. Oddly enough, this is a common site here to see a group of ladies walking around with some kind of penis paraphernalia because apparently Downtown is the place to throw a bachlorette party.

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.

I’ve been out to the WalMart super center several times the past couple of weeks to buy groceries and other miscellaneous things for the apartment. The super centers in particular attract all kinds of shoppers and the best of the best are captured @ this site: People Of Walmart.

So funny, yet so scary.

Thankfully, the dean reminded us that we’ll have bigger problems than remembering names, namely trying to keep our heads above the water while juggling our academics, career search, and personal life.

The guest speaker, a very accomplished Owen alum, gave some very unconventional yet sage advice. Her advice was, “Don’t network. Build relationships”. I don’t remember what her other nuggets of wisdom were because my back teeth were floating, but that slide stuck.

After lunch, we had a team building exercise conducted by Afterburner Inc. The instructors, a bunch of retired military guys, taught us an organizational model called Flawless Execution. I totally wasn’t expecting to plan a military campaign against “Floribama” so the whole thing was entertaining but cheesy. The only problem with the event, at no fault to the Afterburner guys I’m guessing, was that a lot of people were falling into a food coma because of all that heavy cheese and cream we ate for lunch. And there was no coffee.

At night, we went to a reception at a grill called Cabana. There was more meeting and greeting and more small talk. I think I’ve retained most of the names of the people I met today, but thank goodness for name tags. Oh look, there’s mine.

The food at Cabana looked horrible so I only drank my two free comp’d beers. The international students however really went to town on the springs rolls. I ate dinner at Jackson’s with a classmate I met during Welcome Weekend. The grilled chicken sandwich I got was bombtastic.

And so concludes day one of being a lifelong Owenite.

Orientation starts bright and early at 8am on Monday and officially ends on Thursday night with a reception at Owen. On Friday, there is a golf tournament and on Saturday, there is a biking and hiking event. And there’s probably going to be some partying in between. Classes start next Monday.

There is a lot of anticipation, a lot of excitement, and a lot of unknowns. Time to go iron my slacks and dress shirt and hit the sack. Lets get this thing crackin.

Correction: No golf on Friday. Replace with sessions on Introduction to Excel and Intermediate Excel.

Although I said the drive wasn’t too bad, it was still boring as hell. The drive gave me a chance to walk down memory lane as I listened to all the CDs that I haven’t listened to since freshman year in CD. Man was I such a faux-gangster back in the day. Somewhere in Texas, I think it was Amarillo, I broke down and pulled into a Barnes and Noble and bought an audio book, Malcom Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. Nothing is more stimulating while driving through the open country of north Texas than listening to Gladwell wax on about the differences between ketchup and mustard.

Since my arrival in the Music City, I’ve been setting up my apartment so that it is somewhat comfortable. I was going to go for the cheap, agile, and mobile setup – buying camping chairs, tables, and aerobed from Bass Pro Shop or Wal-Mart – so that I can quickly pick up and move on from here after I graduate. I was quickly convinced that this solution was a bad idea, particularly after a classmate pointed out that a blow up sofa might not be the coolest thing to bring the ladies home to. Touche.

One thing I didn’t expect was how much money I would spend on furnishing the apartment. In my head, I had a general idea of what things would cost. What got me was how things added up so quickly. To Costco and Target: your weclome, you guys are now richer while I am much poorer.

When I’m not doing apartment stuff, I’m doing school stuff. Every other day, there is some kind of get together at a classmate’s place. There are so many people to meet that I’m on name overload right now. Owen, for whatever reason, doesn’t have a “math camp” that I know some other b-schools have so a classmate setup a series of ad-hoc quant review sessions this week. Each day is a different subject and the Owen professor that is teaching that subject comes in for an hour to answer our questions. I think we, the students and professors, are going above and beyond with the reviews, but then that is why we are “Team Awesome”.

So that’s the basic account of what has been going on for the past week. Things are going well and I’m well on my way to settling in. All this is a good way to slowly ramp up to orientation, which is a good ramp up to the madness that is going to be school.

I can’t end this post without commenting on the weather. A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted something about how it didn’t feel that hot or humid in Nashville. I’m eating that tweet this week because it’s been absolutely smoldering. The heat and humidity is worse than I experienced in Singapore or Taiwan. Not only will you sweat from just standing outside, but you’ll continue sweating once you go inside. I went running the other day and I couldn’t stop sweating even after an hour after I stopped running. I look outside and I start sweating. Supposedly, this is just a freakish week. I hope so.

Hat tip to lamdar for pointing me to this wonderful big brother technology.