Sloan Core Day 1

The vacation is over! It's back on to work on campus for the fall. However, before the classes get cranked up to full force we have another week long orientation. Today was introductions and high level structure of the MBA core semester. We did a number of "high intensity" ice breakers to get everyone introduced, followed by breaking into our teams. We met both our large cohort of about 60 people, or ocean (I'm Pacific), that we'll take our core classes with and our small teams, of 6-7 people that we'll spend a LOT of time with.

We've only just scratched the surface, but I have a great feeling about my team. If my team is any reflection of the larger population, the Sloan administration certainly put in their time maximizing diversity. We're diverse to say the least, across origins, industries and backgrounds. Speaking of origins we cover Korea, Russia, Columbia, Canada, India and the U.S. For backgrounds we cover the gamut of marketing, investment banking, consulting, operations, computer science and supply chain. We still have a lot of planning to do and expectations to set, but we are on the path to success.

More details to come, it's off to the cohort mixer for me (at the bar)!

The Final Countdown... of Summer

Get your Europe cassettes ready, our summer team Google Site countdown timer says it best:

We're in the home stretch of the summer term. In roughly an hour we have our last exam, Statistics, and then it's off to Raytheon for another plant trek. Only a few more wrap up projects due early next week and we are home free! Well, until early September when we join the rest of the Sloanies for the fall term, the MBA core. More to come on that later, I'd better get back to reviewing hypothesis testing and taguchi designs.

Leadership Reaction Course

Similar to our ropes course back in June, we recently went on a Leadership Reaction Course (LRC) at Camp Edwards (a National Guard base near the cape). A few of the other student bloggers have shared their pictures and perspective and I thought I would add on to the pile.

LRC was a one day event were we broke into teams (different teams than our established summer teams) and took on a number of obstacles. As we did with the ropes course we reflected after each of our obstacles to see how we worked as a team and where we could improve. At LRC, however, we rotated leaders on each event, giving everyone a chance to try out their leadership tactics in a fairly high stress environment. A few of the obstacles were a little more trying at LRC, as we now had about four feet of water drop into if we tripped up.

Luckily we didn't have any of our team members end up in the drink, but some teams weren't so fortunate...

I'd right it off as them being a little bit more aggressive than we were in certain situations. anyway you look at it, LRC was certainly a fun day, a great test of our situational leadership skills and team dynamics.