The Game

This past weekend, we took a road trip up to Boston to watch Yale kick Harvard's butt in "The Game." I don't even remember the final score, but Yale pretty much dominated the entire game. One of the most memorable moments of the day was watching campus security trying to tackle and arrest a nude MIT streaker during the 4th quarter. I've seen many "Big Games" in the bay area, but have never witnessed an actual streaker.

Boston/Cambridge is also a very cool area to visit. I never realized how good new england "clam chowdah" and "chaider (chai + apple cider)" could taste. We also visited HBS and MIT Sloan, and all I can say is that I'm SUPER jealous of HBS. While I think Yale SOM's facilities are nicer than MIT Sloan's, HBS is in a totally different league. Huntsman Hall at Wharton is pretty sweet, but HBS is probably the nicest business school I've ever visited. I hope that the new Yale SOM campus will have that similar "wow" factor when people visit.

On a sadder note, Michigan and Cal lost on Saturday, so the "Go Blue" schools were only 1 for 3. Both schools will still end up decent bowl games, but I really really wanted Cal to go to the Rose Bowl this year.

New Perspective

Its been a couple weeks since my last blog, but business school life has changed since finals week. While the first perspective gave us the traditional MBA tools, this second perspective is giving us a broader view of management. Instead of taking classes like finance, strategy, marketing, we are taking Investor, Competitor, Customer, State & Society, and Negotiations. The coolest part about the new perspectives, is that we are using new Yale SOM cases. Instead of recycling 10 year old HBS cases, our classes use new and relevant material (cases were written in 2006). Even our Dean helped write one of the cases we used in Customer and sat in class with us when we discussed it. Coming to business school, I never expected to sit in class with the Dean of the school.

Since my last blog, some of the things happening around SOM:
-Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, came and spoke at the Pepsi recruiting event
-participated but did not make the finals in the Lufthansa Case Competition
-Application volume for Yale SOM Round 1 is up nearly 50% with applicant average GMAT up 1 point. Combining this with the deferrals from last year, I can tell the class of 2009 is going to be really bright

Upcoming speakers I'm looking forward to:
-Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan
-Fred Smith, CEO of Fed Ex