Farmhand - Stanford GSB 2008

An insiders view of the Stanford GSB class of 2008

Name:
Location: Stanford, United States

hitching a ride across the galaxy with my towel

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Stanford Pre-Term

Coming back to college @ Stanford was a very strange experience. Going back to the same place, but older (and definitely not wiser) was extremely strange. The undergrads seemed to have gotten younger than I remembered them to be. Going into Schwab (the residential housing complex for MBAs) was strange. I would always cycle past Schwab and we would treat it like the fortress in the Stanford citadel. It signified the elite of Stanford, and suddenly now I was in this fort, and guess what, it did not seem all that elite as I made it out to be.

The Stanford pre-term lasts for a week, in which we are taught various things. I am going to highlight a few of them

1) The first team / group building workshop

This felt like attending one of those self- help workshops. 379 of us in an indoor basketball stadium, sitting in benches (sometimes a bit too close for comfort) and one super psyched dude running up and down taking names, insisting that I speak to people ahead and behind me, almost making me want to stand up and go hallaluyah ! We did lots of interesting group building exercise. However, in the end, we were divided into team and each team had to produce a product. It was a bike assembly thingie. We took it rather lightly, and though we did it in the allotted time, it was definitely not upto the technical / engineering standards that I am used to. Next we know, the customers of our products walk in. They are high school kids from various counties in the area, selected by the local YMCA chapter, brought in to collect their product. Gosh, you should have seen us scramble for those spanners then, to make sure that every nut and bolt was tightened (we found out later that they would be checked by professional mechanics ofcourse). The joy on the face of those kids, as we handed them the bikes, along with a helmet and a lock, made it sooo worth it. It was an incredible feeling, to watch 65 kids walk out of that room, each with a bike in their hand and a BIG GRIN on their face !

2) The Derrick Bolton presentation

This man is absolutely the most dedicated man that ever, and I repeat, that EVER existed. His level of commitment to the program is awesome. Hours before he was off to Mumbai, to interview a bunch of folks there, he gave the new class of admits, some very interesting information about the statistics of admits, interesting facts about our admits, and funny letters of recommendations about them (some not so positive, so makes me wonder, why we sweat so much over all those things) Almost, all of us got an indirect mention in that speech (no name, just references like, one of your classmates aspires to be the attorney general of Israel, the only problem, his wife, also a fellow admit, has the same aspiration). This man had us on split ends. I don’t want to reveal more about the contents of his speech, because I think it would deprive those individuals who join this college later, of an incredible first DB experience.

3) The organizational behaviour class

We had our first OB class with Prof. Margaret Neale. This woman is awesome. This was a five day course, on teams and group dynamics. We did lots of interesting exercises in and out of the class (again, I would prefer not to disclose the contents of these exercises). These OB folks normally know what they are talking about. Learnt more than I wanted to in this class.

4) The San Francisco scavenger hunt

After parties almost every night (including disco bowling + 80s party), the last event was a scavenger hunt in SF followed by a huge dinner with lots of drinks. We were running around the city, and boy we have some pictures, that I hope, remain in the GSB and never come out of the college….awesome drinking and partying

So…that what first week at stanford. It does sound awesome, but it was exhausting as hell. I was so tired after the pre-term week. Next blog post: the nightmare from hell – preparing for cases, first week of classes….uggghhh

Ash

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

No biggie, but just because people are obsessive about these things, I just want to point out that Derrick was almost certainly going to Mumbai to give a presentation on Stanford, not to interview people. For one thing, it's not yet time for interviews, but for another, Derrick doesn't do any interviews. All interviews are conducted by alums. Just to be clear.

8:24 AM  
Blogger Ash said...

u know what anonymous...you are right about the interviewing thing!
:)
-A

9:22 AM  

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