Stacy Blackman’s B-School Buzz
Each week, we bring you news from the front lines with business school bloggers sounding off on life in the trenches.
Sync (HBS) is gearing up for the official kick-off of recruiting season and feeling slightly cheered by the word from the Career Services office, which says job postings for first years are up 34% this year. Meanwhile, a case discussion about Jack Welch and his 20-year reign as CEO of GE got really interesting when the man himself made an unexpected visit to the classroom. “That, to me, is the power of the case method,” Sync says.
Reflections at LBS has found the silver lining to our current economic woes. In London, this includes lighter traffic on the Tube, improved service–even from traditionally snarky hairdressers, lower prices on everything except rent in posh neighborhoods, cheap theatre tickets, and open tables at the city’s best restaurants.
Not About Jackie (Darden) is still speechless from the results of the 2008 presidential election. In addition to the superlatives on everyone’s lips these days, Jackie tells how great it was to share that evening in the company of her Darden family, as part of a diverse institution where everyone is valued. She says, “I’m glad that I was in the state of Virginia during this historic election and happy to know that my vote counted.”
Paragon2Pieces (McCombs School of Business/UT School of Law), meanwhile, got some of her readers’ danders up when she said she’d save the “anything is possible” and “I’m so proud of my country” comments for the day that an intelligent and credible woman is elected president and discriminatory legislation like Prop 8 is defeated.
Zen Entrepreneur (Stanford) reveals some of the stresses of exam-taking after being out of school for ten years. Stanford is one of the few universities with a formal honor code, meaning teachers don’t proctor exams in the classroom, which for some reason is more unsettling than a more traditional exam type of environment.
Many MBAs have been sweating bullets since the economic meltdown, scrambling to figure out what to do employment-wise come graduation. Iday (Chicago GSB) is one of the lucky few done with recruiting; he’ll be joining Bain & Company next summer.
Tristan Handy can’t get over the abundance of opportunities at Kenan-Flagler. It’s rare for a day to go by without something interesting falling in his lap, he says. Many of these are career-related, the type of opportunities that made Tristan want to come back to school. But many of them aren’t, and they’re every bit as valuable.
A field trip to analize the processes of MicroAire Surgical Instruments helped July Dream (Darden) see the buzzwords of B-school in action. “Everywhere we went, they discussed lean and reductions in waste, movement and inventory,” she says. “We’re not just learning buzzwords here, but the practical application of business practices.”
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