OwenBloggers: Isaac - MBA '08

Mod IV first impressions

I'm going to like this MOD.  I'm really really going to like this MOD. 

So I'm taking Professor Owen's "Managing Innovation", Securities and Portfolios, Survey Design and Analysis (marketing), and Business and The World Economy (macroeconomics). 

My classes are really, really good.  David Owens is my new favorite professor.  His energy in the classroom, the way he engages the students is fantastic. 

I've got my internship all lined up for the summer, I'll be working for a software company performing a range of duties from working on new projects to marketing.  Sounds like a blast.  Now that the worry of finding an internship is past, I feel like I can take a deep breath and really focus on what I want to focus on.

My family is in town this weekend; Kim's mother and father are here for the first time since we've been married.  I'm excited to have them here and the timing couldn't be better, the first week or so of this MOD is a little less aggressive, so I'll have time to take them to Loveless cafe, show them around Owen, and possibly play a little golf (for only the second time in my life...).

Valentine's day... continued...

I'm going to follow up on Justin's post with a quick response to the article on "can your relationship survive B-school?"

I was a little nervous about this same topic before starting school last August.  Kim and I had just gotten married in May and we were just getting used to married life, and along comes the hell that was the first two MOD's.  It was hard, I worked long... long... long nights and didn't get to see her much (especially around exam time).  Weekends were soaked up with group work.  Days were tied up in class.  Kim and I would sometimes go days without seeing each other awake.

So what is my take-away from my experience?  Can your relationship survive?

Looking back it seems like a stupid question.  Business school is just another challenge.  Life is full of them.  If you're sitting back asking yourself if your relationship can survive B-school, ask yourself another question.  Ask yourself if your relationship could survive a big career change.  Ask if it could survive some sort of unforeseen financial stress.  Ask if it could survive having children.

See, these are all just challenges in life--- some bigger, some smaller.  If you're in the right type of relationship, no matter what the challenge is, your relationship will survive.  Business school makes it seem all scary; tests, late nights, hectic schedule, but it's going to be no different than other challenges at other points in your life together. 

If you're in a relationship that you know you can weather the ups and downs of life still come out together... your relationship can survive business school. 

If your relationship does not fit that profile--- you've got bigger issues than figuring out whether or not to get an MBA.  You're going to have bigger, nastier challenges later on in life; those should worry you just as much as a master's degree.

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Dinner: a required part of the MBA learning experience

So I always knew your education extends outside the classroom, but I never stopped to think how far it would go.

So I grew up in middle America, small town, public high-school, the whole nine yards.  Growing up I new maybe a dozen people who weren't your corn-bread, apple pie white people types.  My family was very progressive and always fostered experiences that put me outside my "cultural comfort zone", but being around people from different backgrounds was still an uncommon event.  

As I got older and moved off to college, my world opened up to different cultures; I now knew and interacted with individuals from all over the globe, but these people were mere acquaintances, not really close friends.  You learn about these different cultures, but you don't really get to know the people and how their backgrounds shape who they are and how they approach life. 

Fast forward to business school and now the tables have turned. I'm immersed in other cultures, Asian, European, Indian, Latin.  Everywhere I go, every group I'm in, I get to spend tremendous amounts of time with people whose lives have been so different from mine a times it seems we're from different planets.  You learn so much seeing how others approach problems, how they phrase answers, how they resolve conflicts.  You begin to realize that you've viewed life through this cultural lens, and, lo and behold, there are better ways of looking at things.  There are better ways at approaching problems.  For those of us who can see these differences and learn from them, you start to realize there's a lot more out there that you just don't know. 

What brought this all into perspective for me was a dinner we had at my house last weekend. My wife and I had over 4 of our closest friends; we ate, we told stories, we had a great time.  About halfway through the night I'm sitting there and I realize in our group of 6 we have 4 different nationalities and several different religions.  Yet, we're sitting around a table that must look like something from a UN meeting, and we're talking about the same issues, laughing at the same jokes. I had more in common with these 6 people than I have in common with friends of mine from back home.  You realize for all our differences, we're basically the same people, but, we have so much to learn from each other.  

The first book we all read for Owen was "The world is Flat" by Thomas Friedman.  Yes, Thomas, it is very, very, flat, and through it's flattening you can now see that what you thought you knew before is but a sliver of the world we live in now.