The saying goes that getting an education at MIT is like drinking water from a fire hose..well I was feeling just a little bit drenched the first few days of term, as the water gushed out in terms of loads of super-interesting classes (I wish I could take them all, but there just is not the time, so how do you choose which one is more suitable than the other?) This is a GOOD deliberation to have, after all.
The other thing was I had just moved house and was sleeping on a mattress on the floor... now I feel I am sorting myself out. I have got off the floor and have decided which courses I am taking (I am taking way too many, but hey, I can sleep next year, even though my new bed is very comfy)..and it feels good to be back!
MIT really has a whole new way of thinking and sometimes seems so off the beaten track, but able to widely persuade people it is the right track to be on and that they should pay them huge amounts in consulting fees to join them. The students here are so questioning and so individual as well as being down to earth and really unpretentious. It is beneficial to be a whole university and not just a B-school, I get a lot out of chatting to the chemical and mechanical engineers who live in my dorm. Next door, lives a brain science PhD and an architecture and art Masters student.
This semester is very different to last. We have four classes we have to take and the other three are up to us... in the compulsory classes, there's much less Quant-based subjects, the proof is that I have not had to use my calculator or my ruler so far...We had the formalist subjects last semester, now it's more about applying the thinking to problems in business; how do you innovate in video games and design; there's also coming up with some great ideas for the entrepreneurial/business start-up classes and then there's Leadership where there's emphasis on us and the way we learn, manage, interact with people and how this can improve...
MIT is also a different place now. During the summer there was just really us and the PhD students around..now there's everyone else, including the 700 "other" MBA students (who do the 2-yr program). There's tonnes of activities going on across the whole campus, so I feel pulled in even more ways.
There have been some wonderful parties- especially the Harvard-MIT house party in honour of the little Chinese girl who was not cute enough for the Beijing Olympics. They made t-shirts and stickers with her face on, which we all wore and I got a gold medal for DJing- the crux was playing "Bille Jean"!
We are also taking classes in Strategy, as usual it's very un-formulaic- we are learning to critique Michael Porter's widely accepted view and learn the Hey Delta Model! Here's a dance about it.
There's also Systems Dynamics, a true MIT innovation. This is not normally taught to MBAs, some consultants specialise in it, but in general it's a very expensive and lengthy method to apply to problems. It takes Engineering techniques and uses them in an incredibly powerful way to solve any kind of problem- we looked at the SARS epidemic, the flooding of the Missisippi river, oil prices and now it's forest fires. They are trying to get us to think in new ways- identify our "mental models" and then break down each problem into variables of what could influence it and then look at causality and loops and flows of the variables on each other and on the entire system. We are learning a modelling software called Vensim to do this. It will be really hard with many long nights with my team, luckily they are the very charming Mssrs. Voloe and Michiel. And I really couldn't have chosen two people I'd like to spend more time with (i hope so anyway)....
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