Wednesday, August 25, 2010

1 Semester Down, 3 to Go!

With 4 projects, 2 presentations, 2 project/simulation write-ups, 3 homework assignments, 1 test, and 1 paper, the last two weeks of the summer semester were pretty hectic to say the least.  But because so much of the work was group work, most teams pushed through the end by resorting to the divide-and-conquer method of completing all of the tasks.  Although it was hectic, the end of the summer was a lot less stressful than I would have imagined.

Following the final class and before our summer barbecue, we had an LGO version of the Oscars, where some of the awards worth mentioning included the Bobble Head Award (person who sleeps the most in class), the Game Show Contestant Award (person who is most likely to raise his/her hand in class), and the 1 Angry Man Award (person who was the most frustrated in class).  All of the winners received a colorful bow-tie in honor of our High Velocity professor, Steven Spear.  It was all in good fun and all of the award-winners were great sports.  :)  

All of the Summer Standouts!

One other thing I wanted to mention about the end of the semester was that we had a visit from the CEO of Flextronics, Mike McNamara, the Monday before school got out.  He was very down-to-earth and honest, and it was very interesting to learn about a company I wasn't familiar with.  The information he shared along with all of the Q and As definitely sparked my interest, and I plan to further look into what the company does.

Once the semester ended, I headed back home to San Diego.  It's been great out here as always - spent with amazing people in amazing weather.  This week is actually Sloan's pre-term week with review sessions on several of the core classes.  Because the LGOs have already taken a few of the core classes and because I wanted to take advantage of my vacation time, I decided to opt out of pre-term week.

As LGOs we went through our own orientation during the first week of June, but now we get to experience the Sloan orientation for about a week starting Monday, August 30th.  For orientation and throughout the Fall semester, the 48 LGOs will be evenly split among the six Sloan cohorts (a.k.a. oceans) and within those oceans we'll be sub-divided into smaller groups and no longer be working in our LGO summer groups.  I think Sloan sets up the groups so that no two LGOs are in the same one.  I'm looking forward to meeting my new classmates and the people in my cohort.  I'm also looking forward to the classes I'll be taking this semester which include:
15.010 Economic Analysis for Business Decisions
15.280 Communication for Leaders
15.311 Organizational Processes (often called Organizational Behavior at other b-schools)
15.516 Corporate Financial Accounting (all Sloanies and most LGOs take 15.515 Financial Accounting, but a few of us LGOs are taking this class instead due to a schedule conflict with an engineering class)
15.810 Marketing Management
15.821 Listening to the Customer (half-term course)
6.341 Discrete-Time Signal Processing

I'll also be taking two seminars:
15.972J Global Operations Leadership Seminar
15.972 Leadership and Ethics
 
It should be a busy semester, but I'm sure balancing the academic and social aspects of the program won't be a problem, as it wasn't over the summer.  Until next time!