Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Beginning my b-school adventure

although i haven't even officially started school, the past couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy for me. to be fair, a sizable chunk of time has been for social activities ("networking") with my new classmates, but this is still without assignments, projects, tests, or student orgs. this busyness results in very little free time to do things, such as blogging. i prob won't have time to update regularly, but hope to do some more "meaty" ones every now and then. so... some highlights from these past couple of weeks:

two weekends ago i went on a pre-term "E-trek" for white water rafting with some other '09 Sloanies. at the last minute, we were informed that no second year ('08) Sloanie could go with us, so they were looking for first years to volunteer to lead the trip. Raphael and I offered to co-lead the trip and, for better or worse, we did. :) we went on the Kennebec River which had class 3-4 rapids. it was seriously a lot of fun, though i wish there were more rapids to take on. despite the cold and at times rainy weather, the trip was a lot of fun and a great bonding experience. a lot of my closer friends now are still the ones i spent time with on the trip.

another notable thing is that i ate lobster 3 times in 9 days. these lobsters were full lobsters (except for the amputee lobster i got during the Sloan Orientation Clam Bake) and so i'm rather experienced now at eating lobsters. :P i don't plan to keep this up though.

in addition to the white water rafting, i also learned to sail last Sunday. went with Nita and David and now are allowed to take out the 'tech dinghy' boats by ourselves. it wasn't too bad, except for when the boat started tipping severely and fear of being submersed in the Charles River crept into mind. i definitely would like to sail more and get certified to take out larger boats, but am guessing it won't fall high enough on my priority of activities.

yesterday, as part of Orientation, i went out to the Warren Center and did a bunch of great team building exercises. so as not to spoil this for future Sloanies, i won't comment much about it, but it was a great time and a great way to bond with my core team.

we ended Orientation activities today by playing the Beer Game. no beer is actually involved in playing the beer game (beer is just the chosen product). again, won't say too much about the specifics; however, i will say that of the 43 teams there were, the team i was on (Sloan Adams) came in first place! was fun/exciting/unexpected to have done as well as we did, although the professor was quick to remind us that our performance was still far from optimal. :P

now on to the many other things left on my to do list as i go into labor day weekend (a four day weekend for me) before classes commence.

3 comments:

Tyler said...

w0000 sailing!!!! And hey, there is nothing wrong with capsizing... its a valuable learning experience.

Dan Hsiao said...

yes. but i'm guessing the waters you sail in are cleaner than the muddy charles... :)

you still sailing all the time?

chris said...

of all the things you've experienced these past few weeks, i really wish you'd have elaborated more on the amputee crustacean. like, what part was missing? when did the loss of limb occur? did it taste different? do you have a picture?