September 20
Amazing. I never expected to learn anything from a writing class. However, I both enjoyed and benefitted from a lecture by Bill Haas. He put clips of many students' papers up on the board, and had us critique each other's work. It was fantastic, practical, and eye-opening. I realized the hard way that humor is a no-no in the academic world. I had a talk with a friend who's a professional academic, and he says that the only way to tastefully add humor is with understatement. I thought I did that well, but apparently my last homework assignment lacked taste. At least it gave the class something to laugh about.
October 1
Found a new motivation - I need to succeed so I can come back and join the Sloan Fellows program. They have the most fantastic seminars, with Jack Welch and Dr. Axe, the guy who may have invented Operational Strategy. With what grace, wit, and projection these masters of science speak! A few mloggers snuck into the first sessions, to get a taste of everything that MIT has to offer. This was a fantastic experience, even if there isn't space for us during the rest of the semester. There also wasn't space for me in Sloan's Negotiations class, but that didn't stop me from sneaking into the first session. It was an absolute riot - business students sitting on top of one another in the aisles. I soon found out why. One of the exercises was arm wrestling! In another exercise, we broke into teams and communicated with other teams using numbers over the internet. I was picked to be a delegate of my team, since I was not going to stay in the class, and had few(er) qualms about lying to the other team about our pricing strategy! The other students had to be more cautious, as they had reputations to uphold within their business network. What a riot. I suprised myself by being a shrewd negotiator, and somehow had the upper hand by sticking to an unfavorable position, until the other team gave fantastic concessions. It felt great to be patted on the back by second-year MBA students.
Fortunately there's another negotiations class offered later in the semester, and that is more theory-oriented. Also, there's plenty of space for us in the Sloan Ops Management club. Hearing Jeff Bezos of Amazon speak was thrilling - here's a guy who laughed his way around a million obstacles to become one of the century's greatest tycoons.
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