TV’s next season blues

Am eagerly looking forward to the next seasons of:

• Californication: David Duchovny in a totally new avatar with his sardonic dialogue delivery is a must watch
• Lost: only because of the brilliant writing
• Sopranos: wait.. are they over already? I was hoping to learn more about the marginal value of labor, diversification of revenue streams and corporate leadership from the boss of bosses. oh well!

On the topic of comparison

As I re-adjust myself to the change in the timing of ‘prime time television’ in the central time zone (‘Tis one hour early than what it is in the other time zones), I found a few more things unique to chicago compared to san francisco:

• Living in the chicago downtown area, I frequently commute to school via the CTA buses. These buses run on gas and are a major cause of pollution within the city. Compare this with San Francisco’s downtown commute using the MUNI (I traveled in them for nearly three years). The buses are almost pollution-free and run with motors powered by electricity from overhead wires. San Francisco is actively working towards reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by further introducing hybrid buses in the city. Although the sight of hanging overhead wires is a little ugly, the benefits to such a quieter and environment-friendly service more than outweigh the costs of not having one.
• Homelessness is not new to both the metropolitans. SF is very active in REPLATing. REPLATE is a social movement that is nothing more than putting your to-go container (or special replate containers) on top of a garbage can so that a homeless person can eat without searching through the trash. It makes you think twice before you waste the leftovers. However, I don’t get to see such acts in Chicago.
• On the lighter side, the Bank Of America ATMs in Chicago dispense with $50 in cash unlike those in SF (which always dispense in $20 multiples). The bank in Chicago seems to be okay with spending more in overhead for adding the extra denomination in their ATMs.

If you think I have a predilection for SF, …umm maybe but don’t get me wrong. I love chicago..I really do.

Mid-quarter fugue

Its been more than a month since my last post. ‘Busy’ is such an understatement to describe the state of affairs. I am totally unable to believe it. Truly, this post should have been moniker-ed as the ‘Now almost-getting-over quarter fugue‘

So what you will now get are random riffs of what I did the last month+ as I was being baptized into my first mba quarter. With that for preamble, here goes:

Partaking in Career Services events. This has ironically been my first and foremost priority. Not that I am looking for a job right away, but a big part of my my 90k tuition is actually going to be justified by the career services office and how they will help me branch into a totally different industry. Besides, this office has a lot of workshops which are deemed mandatory if one has to participate in OCR (on-campus recruiting) in the upcoming years. I felt the workshops that were organized were very structured and methodical.

The first step was to help self-assess the candidates so they could decide their strong points. There were about 3 tests in total. All of them seem to be rule based tests with some kind of a expert-system that would help come up with enumerated relevant answers. The first one was the Business Career Interest Inventory which helps you define your core business interests, the second one being the Management and Professional Rewards Profile which forces you to identify which elements (viz financial reward, lifestyle, job security, peer recognition, schmoozing on the job for a potential career move etc) are important to you. The last one called the Management and Professional Abilities profile helps you prioritize the above elements. The tests probably seem to be a logic major’s delight, but it just tested my patience. Especially the second test which had about 12 elements and kept comparing one element over another. You could keep your focus but by the end of the 20th question or so (~45 total), every question seemed the same to me. I had trouble reconciling the question and could not remember the relative rankings of the elements, e.g. if the peer recognition element seemed important in the beginning it seemed to inconsistently lose its weight by the end of the test. Suffice to say, i was able to sit for about 45 mins each for the tests and had a report ready documenting my strong skills and what I may be good at. This report matches your skills with the different career paths available.

The workshops offered by the career services office then seemed to build off on the results of the above tests. The “Pursue your Passion” workshop juxtaposed my current skills with my future industry skills. It then went on to highlight how one could bridge the gap by highlighting common skills between the two. I felt this was the motherlode of the workshops, very interesting and insightful. The remaining workshops focussed on how to look for jobs within the internal GSB sites, how to sharpen your correspondence when applying for jobs, writing to alumni for one etc. Then there was the regular resume building and interview preparation workshops.

There were also the different panels that the school hosted inviting speakers to talk about their experiences ranging from how-you-switched-your-career to how-to-approach-OCR-tactfully. Then there were and are the Entrepreneurial workshops and other events from a consulting bootcamp to stock pitching events.

Then there were also my attempts in networking (again, I am not a convert yet but I still feel networking is highly overrated). I reached out to at least 2 local GSB alumni to talk about their experience. However I learnt that I need to improve my ability to meet new people and sustain conversations.

And of course there were the courses that have been consuming so much of my time. The Advanced Micro class that I am taking seem to be taking most of my time. At one point in time in my life, I used to feel I was the authority to talk to people about time management, having gone through the typical corporate soft skill courses and the quintessential franklin covey time management workshop way back when I used to work for a high-tech company in silicon valley. However, it seems like the woe of time scarcity and time management has befallen on me now that I started off my mba with some heavy courses (and off course the move to chicago without getting enough time to settle my previous personal and business projects..etc etc.). However, going through this quarter is like taking another virtual course on managing my time effectively. Now that the quarter is almost coming to an end, I feel that I have learnt more in time management that anything else and hope to improve my balancing act the next quarter and on.

And yes.. surely find time to pen down my banter