Owen. Wired.

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

When you get tired of going to the Starbucks across the street, OwenBloggers has you covered.

Dose Coffee & Tea

Website: dosecoffeeandtea.com
Address: 3431 Murphy Road, Nashville, TN 37203
Hours: M-F 6a-7p; Sat 7a-7p; Sun 8a-7p
Seating: Very popular place that fills up quite often, but you can find a seat most days. If not, ask to share a booth or table with someone!
Selected Prices: Medium Coffee: $2.00, Medium Latte: $3.50, Cup of Tea: $2.25
Outlet availability: Ample thanks to several power strips throughout.
Wifi: Yes: Open network, no password required. Always a good connection.
Driving Distance from Owen: 1.8 miles
Parking (Car): Yes, but limited.
Parking (Bike): No.
Food: Cookies, Bagels, Breakfast Sandwiches, Small lunch menu, Treats, etc.
Scene: Mostly a mix of students and professionals. You’ll see lots of laptops open or business meetings being conducted at Dose.
Other Notes: In my opinion, the strongest coffee in Nashville. Great selection of tea. Best smelling coffee shop. Next door to Grand Cru Wine and Spirits who hosts wine tastings in Dose occasionally. I would go here way more if they were open past 7pm. As it stands, it splits time with Crema as my morning/afternoon coffee shop.

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Posted in Doug Midkiff '12, Graduate Life, Nashville | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Queering the MBA

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Dani Piergallini

Editors’ note: It is common for students to attend business school for the purpose of making a major career change, and there are myriad programs and support staff in place to help facilitate this sort of transition. But a second year at Owen, Danielle Piergallini, is undergoing a much more profound change. OwenBloggers is proud to present the first in a series of lifestyle pieces written by Danielle chronicling her experience as a transgender student at a major American business school.

One of the things that surprised me about business school is how applicable a lot of the frameworks we’ve learned are in unpacking and processing a lot of things related to transition. For example, lately I’ve felt that people (mostly strangers) seem to look and/or stare at me a lot more than they did before. Instead of the socially acceptable “I’m going to look at you and then look away,” I get something more along the lines of, ‘wait, what?’ that comes with an apparently instinctive second look that… nags at me. I usually assume it is because they can’t figure out my gender, which surprises/bothers them so much that they briefly forget how their mamas raised them – but being kind of nerdy, I try to figure out what’s going on.

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Excel Tip of the Week: Evaluate Formulas

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

Today’s topic is evaluating formulas.

Last week I covered the Show formula feature, and this week I’ll be covering a feature that helps even more with troubleshooting and understanding formulas.

Formulas in Excel can quickly spin out of control. Take for example this formula that I recently wrote:

IF($AF$37<>P17,0,IF(P56>0,P70*-$N$14,IF(P75<hurdle1,-P72,(FV(hurdle1,P17,,NPV(hurdle1,$N$74:O74)+$M$74)-(P46+(-P58)+(-P69))+($N$14*(P70-(FV(hurdle1,P17,,NPV(hurdle1,$N$74:O74)+$M$74)-(P46+(-P58)+(-P69)))/$N$9))))))

What a mess. I actually ended up finding a simpler solution, so I was able to do away with the above formula. However, before I was able to arrive at a better solution I was stuck working with a very complex formula. This is where Evaluate Formula really came in handy.

Even if you don’t think you’ll ever write something super complex in Excel, it is likely you will have to work in a spreadsheet with someone else’s tricky formulas. When that happens you’ll be glad you have Evaluate Formula in your Excel toolkit.

What the Evaluate Formula feature does is allow you to evaluate each part of a formula individually and see how Excel is calculating a specific piece of the formula. As usual, the best way to learn this is via an example: (Note to Mac users, this feature is not available in your version of Excel.)

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Parenting at Owen

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Owen Bloggers

Guest Blogger Ben Meek, MBA 2012, gives some insights into being a parent while pursuing his MBA. If you’re a parent (or soon-to-be parent) thinking about coming to Owen and want to ask Ben or his wife Katie more about parenting as a student send an e-mail to: benjamin.meek@owen.vanderbilt.edu or reach out to the Owen Partners Association: OPA@owen.vanderbilt.edu

Ben and one of his kiddos

My wife Katie and I took a leap and moved from San Diego to Nashville despite knowing very little about the city. From a family perspective, we could hardly have made a better choice. I can’t weigh in too much on day care and schooling, but here’s what I can tell you about.

Kids – When we arrived, Katie was 6 months pregnant with our second son. We thought we’d be the only couple crazy enough to have a child during business school, but at least a couple of other Owen families did it as well this past year. (Tell you one thing that made that easier—the hospital is about a 5 minute walk from campus.) Our kids have really thrived here. There are plenty of good outdoorsy things to do, including some great hiking trails in Brentwood and elsewhere, and my 3-year old loved his first camping trip. If that’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of good places to take the kids, play groups and the like. We’ve found Nashville to be a stellar family environment with plenty of young families.

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Posted in Graduate Life, Guest & Alumni Bloggers, Partners & Sig-O's | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

#OwenBowl 2012

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Clark Bosslet

Owen had its first ever Super Bowl Twitter Party on Sunday night, using the #OwenBowl hashtag to collect our various musings on the best and worst of the night. It was a fun exercise and collected a nice diversity of thought. For example, after Doug opined that the Cars.com “creepy second head representing the buyer’s confidence” commercial did not exactly warm his heart to the brand, I shared my differing opinion.

While exchanges like this happened all night, they were noteworthy not so much for the quality of their content (in something as subjective as this, we are all amateurs and our opinions are valued as such) but more for the fact that these exchanges were happening at all. And they were, all over the internet. According to Peter Kafka at All Things D, there were somewhere between 11 and 16 million social media comments during the game. While the increasing number of platforms make such estimates increasingly difficult to gauge, all estimates point to a substantial uptick year-over-year. According to Twitter, the final three minutes of the game saw an average of 10,000 tweets per second, peaking at 12,233 and setting a new record for the site.

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Posted in Clark Bosslet '12, Industry Insights, Lifestyle | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment