Juniorbird.com

Life is a series of lessons, often painful and traumatic. It’s at times like these that we need to write down the lessons we learn so that we don’t have to undergo these trials again. Simple, clear lessons can often be distilled from life’s most awful experiences, and set down, for review as we all strive and grow.
Of course, sometimes those lessons come from alcohol, friends, and excessively loud music. Then they’re just fun. Here’s what I learned at the Marshall Halloween party.
20. I can find your name, on one of four lists covering more than 400 people, in just minutes.
19. 1-piece costumes = no bathroom breaks.
18. Man + suit + box + bow = “God’s Gift to Women.”
17. In style: vaguely bondage-ish leatherish outfits. Not in style: bringing you non-MBA-student partner to Marshall parties.
16. Many women will promise to be pirates, but most will, in fact, come as faeries.
15. Business school students will wait in a calm and orderly line outside in the cold, without complaining, until the club gets under capacity.
14. The ad-hoc Devil Costume Union will be incapable of organized action.
13. Asian girls make great Naughty Cops, apparently.
12. Being blasted makes you a better MC, Kim.
11. Not a costume: All the alcohol on the back bar. No matter how much you flash us your panties.
10. Brazilians disappear immediately.
9. If you lose your “Fantanas”:http://fanta.com/index2.jsp, there will be a complete extra set for your convenience. However, one may be male (although he will have the best legs of them all).
8. There is no 8.
7. There will be plenty of Marilyn Monroes, including an Asian one and two men.
6. “Dorothy and Vance”:http://vmac.smugmug.com are exactly Margot and Richie Tenenbaum.
5. If you dress as a stripper pole, women you don’t know will dance on you.
4. Orange hair makes anyone look great.
3. If you’re hot and blonde, “Fantasy Football” is a costume.
2. Only gay boys know recognize Donnie Darko on sight.
1. I need to get out more!

Today was an interesting day, a day that offered me a unique range of the experiences avaialable at business school. Or — in another way to look at it — I got to build up my bad karma, then reap the rewards.
So today Toastmasters had a big outside speaker. I’d done publicity (poorly), planning (well, remarkably), and people were there! And the speaker was there! And the room we’d reserved a month ago was there! And there were people in the room! From Del Monte! To recruit students! And I accidentally told them off! Thus the bad karma.
But I was super-nice to the scheduling people, and we had a new room in fifteen minutes. And the speech was great. Everyone loved it, and they learned from it, and I would have too, except I stepped out to get the speaker’s gift (I was going to get it before the speech, but spent that time trying to find a new room instead), and, when I returned, found myself locked out. I was let back in by a kind savior about 2/3 of the way into the speech.
Then, for the afternoon, I skipped class to write a paper, a paper that should have taken 90 minutes but somehow managed to take 3 hours. Still, I learned a lot writing it.
But my comeuppance was still to, um, come. Remember that class I skipped? Well, there I was, typing away in the courtyard, and along comes the professor. Apparently he saw me and asked my supposed friends “hey, should I go over and talk to him?” They said yes! So he came over, we discussed my absence, I promised to attend next week and participate fully (I usually participate, so I thought I could get a freebie). He seemed skeptical. But I had been punished, at least a little, for yelling at Del Monte.
Actually, I still feel bad about it. I might pass on a message to them through the Career Center. I’m a bad Trojan!

I thought it might be important for you, the two members of my reading public, that I post before I die of what may in fact be the Deadly Avian Flu (certainly, I am regularly exposed to a bird).
Actually, this is a pretty miserable thing I’ve got, whatever it is. Congestion, fever, aches — sounds like a flu of some sort. I can’t believe it so early in the year, I’m usually one of the last people to get the flu. While everyone is getting sick in November and December, I typically last ’til February or even April, when people just think I’m making up this whole “flu” thing.
In college, you could always trace romantic engagements by following the path of various contagious ailments. You’d see flu or strep throat move in a straight line from person A to person F because A kissed B, then B kissed C, C slept with D, and D and E both hooked up with a lucky F at that one party. Not so in Business School, which actually includes a lot more School and a lot less Business.
I’d like to go home and hide under my covers for a while right now, but I can’t. That’s not because I’m worried that my prof will notice I’m not in my 6:30-9:30pm class — although I’m sure she will, since she takes attendance, cold calls, and I sit directly in the middle of the caseroom — it’s because I can’t forfeit in tonight’s cooking competition.
See, my friend Shannon and I compete ever Wednesday night to see who’s brought the tastier food to class. We both cook and we both bring tasty homemade food in and microwave it during the break in the middle of class. After a few weeks of noticing that we both cooked, we started tasting each others’ foods; then, somehow, it naturally turned to competiton. Whose dish is better? It’s a question of how challenging the dish is, how tasty it turns out, and how well-execute it is. So far, I’m 3-0, although I won last week because Shannon burnt her chicken on her brand-new grill; her dish was better than mine and she would’ve won except for the excessive flavor of carbon.
Obviously, I can’t skip out on a chance to redeem myself like tonight. I need to take it home again, and I think I can with my BBQ chicken (homemade sauce, it all has to be homemade) and garlic mashed potatoes. We’ll see at about 8pm! If I can make it that long.

One of the things we do a billion of here in b-school is “informational interviews”:http://cleverbird.com/wiki/InformationalInterviews/InformationalInterviews. The goals of these interviews are typically to learn which skills we need to broadcast in order to get into an industry, as well as make a contact in the industry who can later point us to jobs. I always try to tack on to that a few questions about how I can get the most out of the remainder of my MBA education. The guy I was speaking with on Wednesday had what I’ve come to realize is an excellent insight: there’s not enough time in an MBA to learn everything you’d like, but that first class in an area outside of your concentration will give you a lot more learning than that fifth class inside your concentration.
This stuck to me. I’m a bit disappointed with my Marketing class this term — not because it’s bad, but just because there’s a lot of overlap with what I’ve learned in the past. On the other hand, I learn about fifteen new things in every Valuations or Feasibility Analysis class period. So there’s clearly something to this statement.
Heck, I’m even learning a lot in Business Law. We just had our midterm in that class last night, and boy that test was pages of multiple-choice hypotheticals; it looked like something from the “ex-WG’s”:http://brenditabonita.blogspot.com/ law school study packets (I wouldn’t glorify it by making it sound like a law school test, but my exam was filled with obscure stuff).
I was actually quite relieved by that exam, because I’d done the practice tests in the workbook and had gotten several problems “wrong”. I put “wrong” in quotes because the workbook seems to have serious problems with English language compliance; some of these questions had awful triple or quadruple negations, non-specific pronouns that could refer to either a plaintiff, a defendant, a bystander, or, perhaps, an automobile or the law itself; and, in a remarkable accomplishment, misspelled John Rawls’s name every single time it was mentioned in the chapter on Ethics.
Now Rawls’s name was right in the textbook itself, but other things weren’t. One example: in a long excerpt of the Chinese constitution, the word “Article” was misspelled in every single article heading. That’s “Aritcle” in 32-point type. The textbook and workbook together may have cost $160 but at least I saved money since they clearly didn’t hire an editor.
All that goes to say:
# I’m taking an Operations course next term
# I really hope the text in said course is well-edited, because, if our professors won’t bother to turn out English language-compliant work product, how can we expect our graduates to?
If I were a good b-school student, I’d be able to see the business opportunity in the above sentence. Instead, I’m just going to go out and drink tonight and bemoan the collapse of Western Civilization.

Something sometimes happens in b-school, something that scares me as someone who’s seen it from the outside. In b-school, there’s group projects in every class; and, every now and then, there’s a group member who doesn’t contribute. News of this individual’s worthlessness in a group spreads quickly, and, soon, if you mention that person’s in your team, you get snickers from other hard-working people. Soon, wherever you go, that person is known as a Bad Team Member.
It’s really amazing how quickly this kind of thing spreads, and a little scary. The grapevine is fast and powerful. But it’s good, too. I am in a team with one Bad Team Member, and the grapevine told us that he would be, but we ignored the rumors (to our detriment). I wonder if other large organizations work like this? If I took a job at Intel, would I get to learn who was a hard worker and who was a slacker? And what happens to the individual labeled as a Bad Team Member? Is there a second chance? Is there a way to rehabilitate one’s reputation?
And why am I so worried about the Bad Team Member anyway? Shouldn’t I be glad others are lableled as such, for my convenience? Because it is nice to know — if someone’s not going to produce, I’d rather know up front, so that I don’t have to worry about it and can just go and do their work myself. ‘Cause, let’s face it, I’ll do as much work as you put in front of me. And that, my friend, is my problem.