Another month since I wrote last! And, less than 3 weeks until my second semester is over! As you can imagine, life remains hectic (and I apologize to anyone to whom I owe a call or email).
The courses for this term are Finance, Operations Management, Macroeconomics, and a series of Leadership programs. So, I'm still immersed in a lot of math and learning about things I've only ever learned on the fly. Macroeconomics is being taught in a theatrical format (see this link for photos of the concepts of Central Banks lecture:
http://web.mit.edu/rigobon/www/Pictures/PicturesClass2005.htm).The leadership program has definitely captured my imagination. We've done some short leadership dynamics exercises (imagine dividing everyone you work with as Movers, Opposers, Bystanders, or Followers) where some of the best value comes from one-on-one discussions with the amazing people in the class. I've heard about plans to do everything from start another political party, to providing handhelds to attach homeless kids to mentors, to amazing software and business strategies! This week we met Victor Menezes, former Vice Chair of Citigroup (
http://www.iitbombay.org/newyork/bios/VictorMenezesBio.html ). Last week, we did a simulation of a cease-fire in Bosnia where UN, military, and relief agencies were trying to find and relocate refugees in one day. Since I've done a lot of large government logistics, I opted to play the hostile force and learned a lot about that perspective; our primary goals were to stop everyone else's progress and to get to the refugees first. It was a great day and the simulation organizers told my team we were the most creative they had ever seen!Apparently, my class is a higher energy group than usual. They told us summer would be so packed that we would just keep up with the work. In our class, there are already active Entrepreneurship and software groups. I've started arranging activities focused on networking and just hosted the first-ever meeting between Sloan Fellows and two programs that combine engineering and management (all adults and the only people on campus in summer). Yesterday, 60 of my classmates came along for a tour of the Media Lab (links in my last email). We toured the whole building and met a lot of the researchers. We got demos of the concept car (
http://www.media.mit.edu/events/di-2004-10-22/wjm2004-1022.pdf ), cognizant robots (http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/robotsandsims.html), etc.Most of my free time has been spent trying to figure out what I'll focus on in this technical candy-store. This week I met with someone from the World-Wide Web Consortium, the folks who provide a lot of the concepts behind the internet. It sounds like this might be a good match for my recent work and interests. Stay tuned!
