GSB Mennonite

LOE Pictures 2

Oh and by the way, one of my LOE facilitators posted a bunch of pictures online from our LOE days. Check them out here. He's got some very cool pictures of the high ropes course! [Disclaimer: Downloading my take a bit of time if you're on dial-up].

Campus Visits

By the way, if any of you are visiting campus for any reason drop me a line before you arrive...I'm usually hanging out in the Winter Garden a good portion of the day (it's generally where everyone meets to talk and hang out between classes). In other words, the Winter Garden is not the center of academic productivity - check out the Study Lounge for that.

More Classes & Repetition

I had two more classes today: financial accounting (basic) and regression. Both interesting in their own rights, and as always professors tend to vary thanks to their own uniqueness. :)

I just can't get over the new Hyde Park Center (HPC). I find myself just walking around looking around at the building...it really is amazing. I know, I know, I'm babbling - but just wait until you see it!

Comments

Someone posted a couple comments a few days ago asking if personal information would be revealed if they posted...I assumed it was spam and I removed it (only after getting no response from the site listed in the comment).

If however, it was sincere please accept my apologies. I do not reveal personal information on the site (in fact I don't require any info to comment - at least I don't think so).

Privacy is very important - particularly if you're thinking about applying and have specific questions or concerns. I'll attempt to answer anything I can in this forum...and even moreso via email.

Homework

With balance sheets, income statements and retained earnings floating in my head...I'm finally ready to call it a night. With hours of accounting homework behind me (due for the first class meeting tomorrow) I'm glad I at least started the evening before it was due! :)

It's good to be back in this mode.

Hyde Park Center

For those of you who are really really interested in the new Hyde Park Center, check out the official brochure. Warning: This is a very large PDF file [30+ MB], containing all the floor plans.

Also, check out a GSB 2nd Year's blog.

Industry Immersion

I failed to write about this last week, and I saw an excellent summary on most of what I attended at the daily travails...so be sure to read another GSB student's take on the events.

Mozilla

Does anyone know why Mozilla doesn't have the icon links in the New Entry screen within MovableType? I'm forced to use IE to make new entries...

If anyone knows the magic to make Mozilla work, please share the wealth. :)

Classes

Excellent first class today with Prof. Murphy. Turbo looks to be a lot of fun and Prof Murphy seems to have a wonderful balance of concern for learning and also challenge. When a student uses too much lingo, Prof. Murphy will challenge to use non-econ language to explain an idea or term. Excellent approach as it pushes people to think beyond a term what an idea or term *really* means.

First Day of Class

Today is the first day of classes...I have 'Turbo' Micro[economics] this morning and no classes tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Shedd Aquarium

Saturday night was a Chicago GSB event at the Shedd Aquarium. Partners/spouses were invited so it was a fun evening of meeting many of them throughout the evening. The Shedd Aquarium was amazing; it was a beautiful place and the animals were great. It was also a lot of fun to be at a place like that for a 'private event.' Lots of great food and conversation.

Amazing!

The new Hyde Park GSB building is absolutely amazing. I was in awe during my visit today. I stopped by to pick up my ID and locker assignment. There is a bit of finish work to be done yet - plants, file signs, etc - but the building is just amazing. The amount of light throughout the building (thanks to the Winter Garden) is wonderful!

I want to say a big THANK YOU to all the alumni and non-alumni donors and every one else that worked to make it a reality. I believe it's going to be an incredible two years here!

To prospective students, I must say that seeing pictures will never do justice to the place. Definitely plan on checking it out in person...

LOE Pictures

One LOE activity I forgot to mention yesterday was a pickup 'learning' game of cricket. It was a lot of fun, and we had many excellent teachers in our class. :) Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it, but here are a couple others I took of the surroundings. The one major downside of the Treo 600 is the low resolution camera. I hear the next generation of it will have a much better camera, screen, and built-in Bluetooth.

And here is one from last week of Rockefeller Chapel.

LOE, Part 2

To summarize what I heard from other students (and what I concur with) LOE was better than I expected. You never really know what to expect when you go off to 'camp' for a few days of 'outdoor experience.' It really was a lot of fun; I've got a scratchy throat from sitting outside and talking until 12:30 AM last night.

LOE took place at Lake Lawn Resort - a very nice and expansive complex in Wisconsin. Check out the overview of the resort if you're interested. What I thought was most intriguing was the long indoor walkways between each of the buildings, apparently in order to host events while completely snowed in. Actually it'd be an awesome place to be snowed in...

LOE activities were mostly with our cohort of 55-60 people and also within our squads of 7-8 people or combinations of squads. Lots of team activities, problem solving, and challenges throughout the two days - all the kinds of things that help teams understand communication, leadership, planning, etc.

We also went to a high and low ropes course nearby. I climbed the 60 foot climbing wall and then zip-lined off the top. The first few second or so is basically a free fall! And I was the first to make the 'leap of faith' jumping off a small platform 30 feet off the group and grabbing a bar hanging out in the middle of now where off the front of the platform. It's interesting to think about how irrational it is to throw yourself off the end of a platform 'hoping' that you make it. I thought the name of the event was appropriate. Faith can be a similarly fearful process, but like my jump, when you reach the point of understanding/safety it's well worth the apprehension.

Played a little table tennis and mini golf and the two days were filled with great food. I was plesantly surprised by the food and ate up! :)

LOE

After a weekend away (probably the last weekend away for quite some time) I'm packing and getting ready for the LEAD Outdoor Experience (LOE). If that's not the correct acronym, it's close enough. We leave here at 6:00 AM tomorrow morning, which is brutal enough... We don't get back until Wednesday so I won't have the option to update things here until then.

I also picked up the needed items I forgot at home including the wireless router and 3-ring binders. Hopefully my laptop project can finally get completed this week.

Had a good trip back to Goshen this weekend and got to visit with a high school friend of mine. Was just thinking on the way home that this kind of experience would be a blast with him... Reminds me of some of the guys I worked with a lot at Rose-Hulman. Hope to find more of that here on the academic front. Actually I don't really have a bifurcated view of academics/social life. Most of my social life revolved near my academic life and vice versa at Rose-Hulman, and I assume it'll be similiar here.

First Days

Yesterday was the first day of programming and already I feel behind, which is actually a comfortable feeling since it may be one of the more effective motivational techniques for some of the more mundane things - email, etc.

Things got kicked off with a great message from Dean Synder. Thus far we've been learning a lot about the program, academics, bidding process, policies, with a ton of informal and organized events for socializing. Tomorrow is financial aid and career services.

There are some great people here and it's been fun to meet a lot of people - definitely an environment where you realize how amazing some of their experience has been. But around the time you start feeling overwhelmed and intimidated you realize that everyone also had a significant motivation to leave whatever they were doing in order to do something else - which pretty much means we all like our work well enough to want to go through the application process and live on loans for two years. ;) Seriously though, the entire MBA experience is a highly personalized two-years and everyone here has their own stories.

The Chicago program is probably one of the most flexible...as they say, we have enough rope to hang ourselves with the academic freedom here. I just hope I don't bite off so much rope that I choke on it! :) Looking forward to classes starting...

Facebook

The Student Facebook is now called the Student Directory. I thought it might be valuable to have the entire list of the Class of 2006 in my Treo, so yesterday evening I started down a lengthy path of exploring contacts and the Facebook.

It wasn't too difficult to capture the entire Class of 2006 thanks to the download option in the Facebook and then import into Outlook for syncing to the Treo. I did have to mess with the 15 category limit for a bit though...

Then I thought it might be interesting to have the Facebook images included in the Outlook contact files in the contact picture area... I spent some time figuring out the html structure in the Facebook pages (unfortunately it only displays 20 people at a time, so the use of mouse macros came in handy).

Ahh, I must say this was an interesting project and I'm pleased with the results, but because I don't want to incriminate myself I'll just end it here. I may bring this up as an 'idea' to the Dean's Office and see what the response is. Unfortunately I'm a little concerned about possible legal obstacles to what would be the most logical use of the information.

Family Visit

We had a great visit by my parents and sister yesterday afternoon/evening. We checked out the Summit Club and the Bergen Gardens and then took a walk down to Promontory Point. Had a wonderful dinner that Pa'lee and I prepared (mostly Pa'lee) and then got ice cream and watched Whalerider (a good movie if you haven't seen it...very complex with many themes).

Students

I've had a great first week meeting students here at Chicago GSB. Last Wednesday I went to a social event organized my the Chicago Alumni group - not many alumni there but lots of incoming students.

I've also enjoyed running into some many people in Regents Park. You meet people outside, in the elevators, and of course at the Summit Club. I've put the billiards table to good use this past week.

Names are a bit rough yet, but I'm hoping to learn a couple every day.

Treo 600

I know I haven't posted for a while, but my Treo arrived last week and I've been playing with it since then. It's great!

A Room with a View

A friend from DC recently asked about the view...here is a merged image of the view (apologies for the distortions). Click the smaller image for a slightly larger version...

Click here for a much larger image (4976 x 800).