Wide-eyed and exhausted. That would pretty much describe me at this point. And things have only just begun.
Before I begin, the pictures of the panic buttons are up with the other columbus pictures.
Also, I'd like to plug the Apple Airport Extreme. Its awesome. We've been having some wireless issues in our apartment- we had a pretty normal $75 netgear wireless router, and it worked pretty well, but it took a while for our machines to connect to the network, and quite often, the network seemed to stall and we would have to reload our webbrowser over and over and over. The Airport extreme: MUCH faster network speeds, much stronger signal strength, and we can plug our USB printer, a USB hard drive, or a USB hub with any number of USB devices into the airport extreme, and it AUTOMATICALLY shares them on our wireless network with our machines. So, thats pretty sweet.
And now for something completely crazy: my life as an MBA student.
Lets recap a bit. I was sick. Then I got better. Neti pot helped. I heard about the neti pot... I forget where. I remember seeing it on Oprah with that Dr. guy... but that wasn't the first time I had seen it. I totally recommend it if you have any sinus issues, or if you get congested/stuffy.
So, after I got better, it was time for a week of orientation. Prior to orientation, we had to do some work with our resumes, take some self-assessment and cultural surveys, and begin reading/prepping for various sessions. The first 2 days were spent in a lecture hall, listening to sessions that talked about the importance of this, and self-awareness that, ethics this, and guest speakers etc. etc. etc. MMMMMmmmm. 9am-5pm of lectures with little participation. GREAT!!! On the 2nd day, after we were done, we had a mix and mingle event with recruiters. The event was held in the University's luxury suite in Ohio Stadium - and let me say - holy shit. It was quite a luxury box- holding over 200 people. I wish I could have been there for a game. :)
Day 3 was all about team building - we were assigned our permanent teams (5 people) for the year, and we spent the day at a ropes course doing team building activities. It was fun, but not nearly as challenging as I expected. Our team breezed through the challenges - maybe because we're awesome. I do have a pretty good team. Of the 5 of us, we have 3 guys and 2 girls. A Bosnian that grew up in Sweden, someone from Tawain, a latina, a 32 year old, a 23 year old, a lesbian, a former member from the OSU marching band, and 3 people with technical backgrounds. We're diverse, and I think we'll have a great year.
Days 4 and 5, they threw us right into a 2 day long simulation - they divided the MBA class (~140 people) into 4 cohorts, and within each cohort, each team of 5 competed against the other teams in that cohort. The challenge: we were each assigned a fictional company that produced DVD players and CD players, (Or just one of the two), with each company having different strengths and weaknesses. We were given the company's data (about 10 pages worth of various pages - balance sheets, inventory reports, etc), and some time to plan our strategy, and then we had to make decisions about how to run our company. Every 1.5 hours, we input the decisions into the simulation program we were using, brought our data set to the simulation headquarters, who then ran the data from each team against each other, and then they gave us the results based on each teams' choices, and it was time to analze the data and make another round of choices. Each time we made the choices, it represented 3 months (1 quarter), and the simulation computer calculated things like number of sales, and stock price. In the end, my team had a lot of fun, and even though we came in 3rd from last, we were confident that we just needed 4 more decisions to be in first place. (We were so far back because it was based on stock price and we were $500,000,000 in debt compared to $300,000,000 in assests - but we made $90,000,000 in profits the last quarter, and had 40% of the market.) We decided to go really big, and unfortunately, it took us to long to get our company on track.
This past week, lots of reading. For instance - we had 2 chapters of econ to read and prepare for our 1st class (wednesday). For our next class (monday), we have 4 chapters to read. Yikes. Pretty much every class has us reading 1-2 chapters and going over some discussion questions for each class. Plus homeworks. Plus team assignments. Then there are TONS of different opportunities for leadership and professional development that they suggest we go to, plus tons of recruiting events... plus opportunities for involvement in clubs, plus networking with my MBA classmates.... and oh yeah - I have a graduate assistantship (I'm a student ambassador, working for the admissions office), and.... I think I'm still married. ;)
The Dean described it very well: its like trying to drink from a firehose.
And I'm waterlogged. My team and I met from 5pm to 7pm tonight. Done for the week, right? No. Then I came back and spent another 2.5 hours reading for next week. Tomorrow morning, same thing. Hopefully I'll have all my reading done by tomorrow night so that I can spend Sunday reviewing, doing homework, and maybe spending some time with Jessica.
Alright. I'm going to bed.
Before I begin, the pictures of the panic buttons are up with the other columbus pictures.
Also, I'd like to plug the Apple Airport Extreme. Its awesome. We've been having some wireless issues in our apartment- we had a pretty normal $75 netgear wireless router, and it worked pretty well, but it took a while for our machines to connect to the network, and quite often, the network seemed to stall and we would have to reload our webbrowser over and over and over. The Airport extreme: MUCH faster network speeds, much stronger signal strength, and we can plug our USB printer, a USB hard drive, or a USB hub with any number of USB devices into the airport extreme, and it AUTOMATICALLY shares them on our wireless network with our machines. So, thats pretty sweet.
And now for something completely crazy: my life as an MBA student.
Lets recap a bit. I was sick. Then I got better. Neti pot helped. I heard about the neti pot... I forget where. I remember seeing it on Oprah with that Dr. guy... but that wasn't the first time I had seen it. I totally recommend it if you have any sinus issues, or if you get congested/stuffy.
So, after I got better, it was time for a week of orientation. Prior to orientation, we had to do some work with our resumes, take some self-assessment and cultural surveys, and begin reading/prepping for various sessions. The first 2 days were spent in a lecture hall, listening to sessions that talked about the importance of this, and self-awareness that, ethics this, and guest speakers etc. etc. etc. MMMMMmmmm. 9am-5pm of lectures with little participation. GREAT!!! On the 2nd day, after we were done, we had a mix and mingle event with recruiters. The event was held in the University's luxury suite in Ohio Stadium - and let me say - holy shit. It was quite a luxury box- holding over 200 people. I wish I could have been there for a game. :)
Day 3 was all about team building - we were assigned our permanent teams (5 people) for the year, and we spent the day at a ropes course doing team building activities. It was fun, but not nearly as challenging as I expected. Our team breezed through the challenges - maybe because we're awesome. I do have a pretty good team. Of the 5 of us, we have 3 guys and 2 girls. A Bosnian that grew up in Sweden, someone from Tawain, a latina, a 32 year old, a 23 year old, a lesbian, a former member from the OSU marching band, and 3 people with technical backgrounds. We're diverse, and I think we'll have a great year.
Days 4 and 5, they threw us right into a 2 day long simulation - they divided the MBA class (~140 people) into 4 cohorts, and within each cohort, each team of 5 competed against the other teams in that cohort. The challenge: we were each assigned a fictional company that produced DVD players and CD players, (Or just one of the two), with each company having different strengths and weaknesses. We were given the company's data (about 10 pages worth of various pages - balance sheets, inventory reports, etc), and some time to plan our strategy, and then we had to make decisions about how to run our company. Every 1.5 hours, we input the decisions into the simulation program we were using, brought our data set to the simulation headquarters, who then ran the data from each team against each other, and then they gave us the results based on each teams' choices, and it was time to analze the data and make another round of choices. Each time we made the choices, it represented 3 months (1 quarter), and the simulation computer calculated things like number of sales, and stock price. In the end, my team had a lot of fun, and even though we came in 3rd from last, we were confident that we just needed 4 more decisions to be in first place. (We were so far back because it was based on stock price and we were $500,000,000 in debt compared to $300,000,000 in assests - but we made $90,000,000 in profits the last quarter, and had 40% of the market.) We decided to go really big, and unfortunately, it took us to long to get our company on track.
This past week, lots of reading. For instance - we had 2 chapters of econ to read and prepare for our 1st class (wednesday). For our next class (monday), we have 4 chapters to read. Yikes. Pretty much every class has us reading 1-2 chapters and going over some discussion questions for each class. Plus homeworks. Plus team assignments. Then there are TONS of different opportunities for leadership and professional development that they suggest we go to, plus tons of recruiting events... plus opportunities for involvement in clubs, plus networking with my MBA classmates.... and oh yeah - I have a graduate assistantship (I'm a student ambassador, working for the admissions office), and.... I think I'm still married. ;)
The Dean described it very well: its like trying to drink from a firehose.
And I'm waterlogged. My team and I met from 5pm to 7pm tonight. Done for the week, right? No. Then I came back and spent another 2.5 hours reading for next week. Tomorrow morning, same thing. Hopefully I'll have all my reading done by tomorrow night so that I can spend Sunday reviewing, doing homework, and maybe spending some time with Jessica.
Alright. I'm going to bed.
1 Comments:
At 11:53 PM,
Sunshine said…
oh man, can I symphathize with you - I know that waterlogged feeling all too well. Eventually it will smooth out and you'll develop a rhythm so you'll only be slightly drippy. :) I found doing work during the week in the evenings helped free up weekends more to have time to be normal with family and friends. don't forget to stick with your exercise plan - it will help with the stress and student syndrome that will result from all that reading. while you're at it, find a good chiropractor - your neck is going to be hurting very soon! (also, maybe look into getting an Easy Reader book stand - http://www.independentliving.com/prodinfo.asp?number=275798&cid=froogle it really helped hold my textbooks in class and while studying, thus saving my neck) :) good luck, oh studious one!
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