Marquis' Weblog

You've got to love lazy weekends, right?

Ahh, yet another weekend is here and I've got another ton of work to get done before Monday. It's getting harder to be productive with every day that passes, but it's even scarier that the end of my MBA experience is coming up fast. In 5 months, I'll be finished here and I'm going to be wishing that I had more of this school work to do at the GSB.

One of the course that has really surprised me this quarter has been "Interpersonal Dynamics" (also known as "Touchy Feely"). This class is supposed to be one of the legendary ones at the GSB that is supposed to be life-changing and is claimed to alter the way that one sees himself an others. When it came time to rank our class preferences for the Wintger quarter, I'd put this as my #1 choice because I'd heard so much and was on Cloud 9 when I got it. My enthusiasm faded a little when the class began and I felt like it was overhyped. The biggest learning tool in the class is a weekly three-hour meeting where teams of 12 students (called a T-group) meet to talk about anything under the sun. I'd heard stories about how T-group meetings were supposed to be filled with drama and arguments and great learnings, resulting from those conflicts, so I had certain expectations about them. At first, I wondered if I'd get the "legendary" level of learning from mine now I'm starting to see what all the hype was about. I can't go into details, but I've been pushed past the bounds of what I'd usually feel comfortable with so far and I can see it going much further over the course of the quarter. Something tells me that this won't be the last time I write about this class in a blog entry.

As you know, I've been trying to help some of the first-year students here prepare for their internship interviews and it's getting to crunch time for them because the On Campus Recruiting process (OCR) starts for them on Monday. It's sort of scary seeing how much these kids are prepping for their case interviews because I wonder if they're even able to get their school work done, but, amazingly, they're holding it all together pretty well. I'm trying to do my part to help them out, but i'm finding that many of the students I'm doing mock cases with don't need my help at all...these kids are SO on point with their case game. Despite that, repetition is a great way to get better, so I'm steadily running through cases with as many kids as possible. I did a few with people earlier this week, did some cases with two guys this morning, and have three on my schedule for tomorrow. I can't wait until these folks jump into the process and show these companies what they've got.

I know that a lot of first-year students are preparing for their internship interviews at other schools right now, so I thought I'd offer some help. For anyone interested, the presentation that I gave to the group of MBA1's here last week can be viewed at:

http://www.boomspeed.com/marquis930/MBA1CaseInterviewPrepSlides.pdf

I'm not promising that it'll help you get a consulting gig for the summer, but some of the tips in it might be useful as you get ready to throw down in your interviews. I've been told that it's serving the attendees as a pretty good guide, so, being a man of the people, I wanted to make it available to even more folks.

Onto other topics...I don't know if any of you are into the theatre, but, if you are, you HAVE to see the on-stage version of "The Lion King". I caught it last night at the Performing Arts Center in San Jose and it was an amazing show. They cut out a lot of the content from the movie version, but the actors and sets were great and the costumes and choreography were outstanding. I was never really that "cultured cat" before coming to the GSB, but, now that I'm around all these worldly folks, I'm learning that I've got to get my culture game up. Also, it's a great way to get my "grown man" on before going back into the real world. If you're not on the theatre thing yet, think about getting on it because going to a play is a better experience than just watching TV in your house :-)

Time for me to get to doing some of the studying that I should have been doing much earlier this morning. Take care and have a great weekend.

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By the way, are any of you guys on Facebook.com yet? If not, y'all need to jump on that joint. I swear it's one of the most addictive things on the Internet right now.

Also, if you didn't jump on it last time I posted about it, you've got to try out Meebo.com's instant messenger interface. That thing will allow you to use any number of IM programs (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk, etc.) simultaneously through a web browser without actually having to have the actual IM programs installed on your machine. The Meebo team has put a bunch of new features into it and I use it exclusively to access my AIM friends nowadays because the AOL Instane Messenger program is janky as hell. Don't miss the bandwagon on Meebo, y'all.

Posted by marquis930 at January 29, 2006 03:36 AM