The Big Decision: MIT, Elsewhere, or Nowhere?

Two years ago, right around this time, I was in the midst of making a huge decision -- one that I knew could alter my future as much as anything I'd done before.  The question was this: Where should I go to school, or should I even go at all?  I suspect some of the readers of this blog are going through the same process now, so I thought it might be useful to share the story of how I ended up at MIT.  In short, it went a little like this: Weeks of anguish over whether or not to go to business school, then weeks of greater anguish over which school to attend, then, before I knew it, I was at MIT, loving life.  In long, it went a little like this:

 

Part I: Should I go to school?

By the time I had decided to apply to schools, I still had not made up my mind about whether or not to leave the working world.  I loved my job and the people I worked with, I had a comfortable life, and things ahead were looking bright.  So, why leave all that behind for a future with few certainties beyond the cash-strapped years I'd endure during and after school?   Well, jeez, when I put it that way...

It really came down to the fact that I wanted to learn How Business Works and couldn’t think of a better way to do that than through an MBA program.  Sure, I could have picked up some things on the job, but I was a scientist, and they generally didn’t let people like me near the real business stuff, so it would have taken years to accumulate as much knowledge as I could pick up in a single business school class.

In the end, there were three things that got me to the edge and nearly convinced me to take the leap:

1. In the course of writing all those essays trying to convince admissions committees why I wanted to go to business school, I had managed to convince myself.  This, I later learned in class, was the result of the “consistency”and “commitment” principles.  I had been deceived because I lacked the very knowledge I sought!
2. After taking the GMAT, writing the applications, and paying to submit everything, I had put a lot of time and money into the process.  I didn’t want this all to go to waste.  These, I later learned in the same class, are known as “sunk costs.”  Another principle.  Another business school trick.
3. I was accepted at the three schools to which I’d applied.  It’s a good feeling to be accepted, a feeling of being wanted, of being appreciated, of being potential a source of funding. 

But what really convinced me was the wisdom of my older colleagues at work.  Many of them expressed regret over not going to business school full-time when they had the chance, and they didn't want to see the same thing happen to me.  I certainly didn't want to be in their position someday, tearfully telling a younger version of myself not to make the same mistakes I made.  So, that was it, I was going to school.

But any relief I'd felt over making that first decision quickly vanished, as I was faced with a new choice that made the first one seem no more daunting than deciding whether to put on my shoes or my socks first.

 

Part II: Where should I go?

From my list of three schools, I was quickly able to narrow my choices down to two – both local, both strong – HBS and MIT Sloan (yes, Harvard and MIT both made the same mistake).  Once I reached that point, I wavered back and forth between the two on a daily basis.  Part of the problem was that, despite both being MBA programs located within a few miles of one another, they each offered something very different.  HBS had the prestige, an amazing campus, a mind-boggling list of alumni, and would give me a chance to broaden myself.  MIT had the great analytical reputation, an incredible connection to the best engineering school in the world, and would give me a chance to focus myself (within the LGO program).  How could I ever choose one and leave the other behind?

A quick aside.  One thing pertinent to this story you should know about me: I am a terrible decision-maker.  I struggle to choose which cereal to eat each morning and am paralyzed by anything bigger than that.  So, to make it through life as a functioning human being, I have had to make some adjustments.  In particular, when making an important decision, I turn everything into numbers and choose the highest scoring option.  (Perhaps this should have been a sign that MIT was in my future.)   

In the case of the HBS vs. MIT decision, here’s how: I came up with a list of a bunch of things I considered important to me in a school (e.g. courses offered, classroom atmosphere, on-campus opportunities, post-graduation potential, etc.) and assigned each a weight based on its relative significance.  Then, I assigned scores, as objectively as possible, for each school across all categories.  Multiplying the scores by the weights and summing them generated overall scores for the two schools.  

Now, here’s the beauty of this approach.  The school with higher score is the winner.  If, however, I am not happy with the way it turns out, then I should choose the other school because it's clearly the one I prefer.  This method never fails.  In my case, this approach told me what I really already knew: MIT was best for me.  

Beautifully drawn chart of my business school
preference over a conflicted two-day period.

Still, after making this decision, I attended the HBS admitted students open house just for the experience.  Over the two days, I ran the full gamut of HBS vs. MIT emotions I'd dealt with over the past few weeks. My decision was so sensitive to all sorts of minor factors I hadn't previously considered or fully understood.  While the open house ultimately solidified my decision to attend MIT, there was a time when it nearly reversed my choice.  Afterwards, I even drew up a quick chart (see right) to show my wife how I close I came to choosing HBS.  

Having had this experience and thought about the many considerations that go into these types of decisions, I now present to you...

 

Part III: Things to consider in your decision

The most important thing to do when choosing a school to attend (or even to attend one at all) is to gather as much information about the school as possible.  Here's what I recommend:

• Talk to students – past, current, and future.  I am generally bad at this because I don’t like to bother people, but students love talking about their schools and will give you lots of relevant and informative input.  You can also take from these interactions some information about the types of students who attend the school – their personalities, interests, motivation for being there, ambitions, etc. 

One of the main reasons I chose MIT was because of the people I met there.  I simply felt like I would fit in.  There’s an endearing modesty/self-deprecation about many MIT students -- especially among the LGO crowd -- that really appealed to me.  LGO students are also very considerate.  For example, a group I'm in with three other LGOs recently needed a meeting room in the main Sloan building, but all were occupied, some by single students.  Sloan has a policy that groups can ask single students to leave a room if no other rooms are available, and this was the perfect time for us to take advantage...except that none of us wanted to do it.  It just felt too rude.  So, we sucked it up and met instead in the middle of the noisy cafeteria at lunch time.  I thought this experience perfectly captured the classic LGO personality -- selfless, polite, able to get the job done regardless of the circumstances.  This is exactly why I wanted to be part of this program.

• Attend a class (or two!).  While one class is in no way representative of the entire academic experience at a school, it can give you a sense of what you’re getting yourself into.  For instance, I went to a class at HBS, a school with an reputation for unparalleled learning experience, thanks to its mastery of the “Case Method." I wanted to see for myself just how amazing the HBS Case Method is, and to also get a feel for how well I'd fit in this type of learning environment.  Turns out, I hated it.  The professor teaching the course, though legendary, failed to bring the class to his intended conclusion, even apologizing for it at the end of the class.  While I'm sure this doesn't happen in every session, it showed me that this method has its flaws and is itself not reason enough to choose HBS over MIT.

• Read!  There’s a ton of information on the internet and in books about MBA programs, and you can learn a lot about a school by reading as much as possible about it.  Just remember that not everything you read is true, especially when the source is a message board (or a blog!).  I derived a ton of value from the LGO blogs while making my decision.  In fact, they played a huge role in giving me a sense of the LGO students’ personalities, and I hope mine is doing the same for at least a few prospective students out there.

 

Part IV: Was I right?

Absolutely.  Honestly, I could not be happier with my decision.  MIT Sloan has been a great fit, and the LGO program in particular was exactly what I’d hoped it would be.  Here are just a few of the reasons why LGO worked out so well for me:

-          I immediately had ~47 guaranteed friends.  LGO is a very tight group.  This is great if you’re socially awkward and usually have trouble getting to know a group of strangers (not that I would know...someone else told me this).  You get thrown right in with the other LGOs, and real, actual relationships develop quickly.

-          I got the best of both worlds.  In addition to the great business school education I have gotten at MIT, I was also immersed in a bunch of MIT’s world-class engineering courses in some very interesting fields, including energy and biotechnology.  This was a bonus, since I really had gone back to school to learn about business.  It's really an amazing program.

          I got a job.  LGO's tight relationship with its partner companies means that LGO students have an excellent chance of landing a job with one of these companies.  We're also qualified to do lots of other interesting things and seem to be particularly appealing to consulting companies, though most of us have no desire to do that type of work.

          

      In short, LGO has been great.  I highly, highly recommend the program, but you have to make sure it's right for you.  Do your analysis.  Hopefully, the numbers come out in LGO's favor.

-    

LGOggers

I am a runner and have been one for more than fifteen years.  In fact, for most of that time, being a runner is what defined me.  From high school, through college and grad school, and into the workplace, people knew me first as a runner, and second as the gawky, nerdy guy I really am (I prefer “svelte,” but I’m the only one).

Me without running.  So sad.

So, when I started the LGO program in 2010 in the midst of an 18-month knee injury, there was nothing for the real me to hide behind.  To my classmates, I was that gawky, nerdy guy, nothing more.  

Fortunately, last summer, after months of rest and physical therapy, I was finally able to run again.  It was time to start reclaiming my identity.  In building myself back up, I practiced more patience than anyone should ever have to, going for 3-, 4-, 5-minute runs in those early days.  I could complete my entire workout during the seventh inning stretch of a Mets game.  Sadly, this meant that I was back in time to see the end of the game.

Once I was running continuously, my competitiveness got the better of me.  I have a hard time running for the fun of it; I usually need a goal to shoot for.  Naturally, I decided that my first ever half-marathon would be a good way to end my two-year absence from the racing scene.  So, without really thinking about the consequences, I signed up for the Malibu Half Marathon in November.

I promised them glory and fame.  They got this instead.

You know that saying, “misery loves even more miserable company?”  Well, I decided that I’d enjoy my training more if I had some inexperienced partners.  Fortunately, there were five gullible LGO interns living within 100 feet of me.  After saying things like, “best shape of your life” and “run along the Malibu beaches” and “Charlie Sheen will be watching,” four of the five of them signed up.  And just like that, I felt better.

One of the unanticipated benefits of training with my LGO classmates was building a camaraderie I hadn’t felt since my days running collegiate cross-country and track.  There are few things I’ve experienced that forge stronger bonds between people than suffering together through a tough run.  Together, we scaled mountains (literally), hurdled rattlesnakes, and sprinted from hundreds of mountain lions (or, as it turned out, tiny but noisy lizards).  These are things I’ll never forget -- some of the best experiences of my two years in LGO. 

Anyway, on race day in mid-November, we finally put our training (or lack thereof) to the test.  We started by proudly demonstrating the “just-in-time” concepts learned at MIT: we caught the last bus to the start, found the last porta-potty (thank god), and squeezed into the start corral five seconds before the gun went off.  The folks at Toyota would have been proud.   

The race itself could not have started better.  It was a beautiful sunny day, and we all were running faster than expected for the first few miles.  This is usually a red flag, but I was feeling so good that I thought I just might be able to keep it up.  Little did I know it, but I was falling right into the evil race director's trap.

Not an enjoyable course profile.  Not enjoyable at all.

To punish the overconfident and ensure no runner could walk for the next eight days, the organizers created a course that was flat for the first half and then followed the Thunder Mountain profile for the second.  It was brutal for everyone.  To make matters worse, none of us had even run the race distance during our training, and we were paying for it.  It was everything I could do to put one leg in front of the other for the last four miles.  We all suffered -- separately, but together— through the 13.1 grueling miles. 

Running the flats, looking relaxed.

Near the finish, wanting to die.

Did I mention the water was cold?

Mercifully, the finish line (with NO beach party! what?!) appeared and accepted each of our sweaty, limp bodies into its concrete arms.  We cheered for each other across the line, making sure that no one had actually died on the course, and then rewarded ourselves with a refreshing dip in the frigid Pacific.

As painful as the race was (not to mention the next few days -- I walked around Amgen's offices like I had two peg legs), it was one of the highlights of my six months in California.  And even though I was thrilled to officially end my injury-induced racing drought, it was sharing the experience with the other LGOs that had made the race so special. 

Closing One Chapter, Starting Another

Okay, it’s been awhile.  Too long, really, since my last post.  In that time, I’ve finished up my internship, accepted a job offer, and the LGO site has been overhauled (and is now pretty darn snazzy as a result, though I do miss the old colors...or, rather, two shades and a color).  In this post, I’ll hit on those first two.

Finishing up the Internship

Goodbye, Malibu: A typical view from our road.  

The LGO internship is LOOOONG.  As I described in an earlier post, this is great for a number of reasons.  It also makes finishing it up that much sweeter.  Of course, Amgen didn’t just let us slide on out unnoticed.  Rather, we had to give a final presentation to a group of Operations vice presidents and managers in that last week.  Great exposure, yes, but also stress galore.  Must be what’s causing the hair loss…

My project turned out to be quite interesting, but for reasons I hadn’t anticipated.  There were no big revelations, and I didn’t find a way to save Amgen millions of dollars, but I did have a chance to think about strategies that could change the way Amgen’s Process Development organization works.  There wasn’t a ton of “strategy” in my previous work experience, so this was a nice introduction to that way of thinking.

On another note, while I cannot divulge too much information about the project here, I was amazed by how much potential there is to improve the way things are done at a successful and well-run company.  Turns out, companies like Amgen need people who understand operations and group dynamics and are willing to step in and make changes.  The internship really opened my eyes to the great opportunities (and challenges) that await LGO graduates in the real world.

Getting a Job

If you don’t believe me that I enjoyed my internship, here’s some more proof: I just accepted a full-time job at Amgen.  The position is as a Senior Engineer located in Amgen’s Rhode Island office.  While I do not yet know my exact job duties, I will be in the Global Process Engineering group, helping develop and introduce process monitoring models at sites around Amgen’s global network. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of the positions Amgen offers LGO students is that they are designed to expose us to various areas of operations over our first 4-5 years.  Specifically, we rotate through three 1.5-year positions (the second and third rotations being determined based on our career aspirations and Amgen’s needs), before slotting into a management position, assuming we’ve proven ourselves capable.  I’m excited about the possibilities ahead at Amgen and look forward to getting going this summer.

I’d also like to point out that I wouldn’t have gotten this job if not for the LGO program.  Amgen, like many partner companies, creates positions like this one specifically for LGOs.  Our job search is much less stressful than I imagine it is for the traditional MBA students who don’t have the luxury of the LGO program’s industry connections.  I’ve been thrilled to see so many of my LGO classmates also accepting jobs with partner (and non-partner) companies already.  

On the next episode...

I started a few posts over the last couple of months that I never completed, so get ready for old (but hopefully interesting) stories.  Next up: When Running and Business Collide.

Internship Lessons Learned (Awkwardly, of course)

The LGO internship is unique in the MBA world. In it, we are teamed with a partner company on a project bridging the business and engineering worlds, and the content forms the basis for a Master’s thesis. While these aspects set it apart, the internship is perhaps most distinguished by its 6.5-month length. Having now completed four of the six-and-a-half months, I am beginning to realize the benefits this affords us. The most important of these, in my mind at least, is that we are given the opportunity to manage a complex project from inception to completion. This differs greatly from a typical 2-3 month MBA internship during which students work on a small part of an existing project that more or less serves as a sales pitch to the students for post-graduation employment.

My internship with Amgen has already provided some great experiences. I am leading a team that includes members from process development, engineering, and manufacturing organizations, sitting in on strategy sessions with group leadership, and making presentations to Amgen executives. More importantly, perhaps, I am also learning lessons that I will take with me wherever I end up after LGO.

In the rest of this post, I’ll tell two stories that relate to one such lesson – properly extinguishing a small flame before it becomes a raging fire.

Story 1

At least I have a cubicle in my fortress.

As I mentioned in my last post, I sit at a receptionist desk near the entrance to my building. I see people walk in and out all day, but I’m mostly alone in my own little Fortress of Solitude. For the first month, it was actually quite a peaceful location. This changed, suddenly, after some work to the building’s air handlers over a weekend in July.

As I sat in my chair the following Monday, I noticed that something was awry. The silence was gone, replaced by a horrible rattling sound. This was not the kind of rattling that becomes white noise after a few minutes, but an aggravating, jarring sound that set my insides on fire and made me want to throw things.

The source, it turned out, was the heavy metal fire door five feet from my desk. Somehow, the pressure on the two sides of the door changed rapidly enough to cause the thing to shake back and forth in its frame. If you heard it for a few seconds, you might think there was an earthquake. If you sat in my chair for a day, you might think the world was ending (and I would’ve been ok with that).

MIT engineering at its finest.

Being an MIT engineer, I decided to do something about it. Being a geologist, the thing I did would have placed last at an elementary school science fair -- I tore off a piece of cardboard from a nearby box, inserted it into the strike plate hole in the door frame, and secured it in place with a wad of scotch tape. Miraculously, this actually worked. The sound was almost completely muffled, and I was able to work in peace again. End of story, right? Not quite…

Turns out, someone else took the correct approach and called Facilities to have the noise problem fixed for real. The maintenance guys must have come during the night, because when I arrived the next day, I saw their handiwork. They had installed a rubber seal around the entire door frame to eliminate the little noise that remained after my engineering masterpiece was in place. It did this quite well.  The problem was, it did only this quite well.  As soon as my tape lost its stickiness and the cardboard fell out, the true value of the seal was revealed --and that value was nothing.  The seal didn't do anything.  They might as well have done nothing.  The rattling was back to stay, and it was my fault.

To make this story even more tragic, the very day the rattling returned, an actual earthquake struck the area. It wasn’t big, but it was strong enough that most people on campus noticed. Just not me. The sound of the shaking door had overwhelmed my senses, and I missed the telltale signs of the quake – the only significant one to strike California during the internship. If only I’d done the right thing in the first place and called Facilities to fix the problem, this situation could have been properly resolved in a day or two. Instead, I missed an earthquake and have been stuck with replacing the tape on the cardboard every few days.

Story 2

Do you see me out there? Well, somebody does.

In my role as the building’s unofficial receptionist, I greet many people over the course of the day. Most people ignore my near-silent hellos, some smile back, unsure of who I am and why I’m talking, and a few strike up conversation. Most of these are your basic 'what’s going on this weekend?' type of deal, to which I invariably (and sometimes honestly) answer 'nothing.' So, I was surprised one day when a guy walked by and asked me about the soccer game I played in against his team. I politely engaged in a three-minute conversation about our game, and then he went on his way. This might sound perfectly innocuous, but, sadly, it wasn’t. Not only did I not actually play against his soccer team, but I haven’t even stepped on a soccer field since eighth grade. He mistook me for some other gawky-looking guy, and I felt too bad to tell him that he was wrong. I took a gamble that it would never come up in conversation again, but boy was I wrong…

Every time he saw me, which was almost daily, he asked me about my soccer team. 'Did you win your last game?'  'What time are you playing today?'  And on, and on. I wasn’t stupid enough to make up answers to question I clearly didn’t know anything about, so instead I decided to claim that a knee injury had been keeping me off the field. This, plus fake-talking on the phone and averting eye-contact (one of my core competencies) helped me avoid any substantial soccer conversations.

Then, one day, just as abruptly as they had started, the conversations stopped. Now, he was the one looking the other way and fake-talking on the phone. What had happened? Did he play against the bizarro me and realize it wasn’t actually me? I never found out. But what I did learn was that this whole thing didn’t have to happen. If I’d just said, “Oh, sorry, I don’t play soccer,” this would have ended before it had started. I tried to be nice and not hurt his feelings, but really that just made his inevitable discovery of my non-soccer playing even worse.

So, yeah, my experience at Amgen has already provided many valuable real-world lessons – lessons that I might not have learned if I didn’t have an internship long enough to bring out all of my flaws. I look forward to the next chance I have to head-off a potential problem before it starts…just as long as it doesn’t make someone feel bad about themselves!

A Day in the Life of an LGO Intern

The majority of the LGO class of 2012 is one month into the six-month internship that partly defines the program. This is a long enough period to have fallen into a routine and short enough that we are still able to look at things from an outsider’s perspective (it is also short enough that I'm not yet disillusioned, and long enough that I incorrectly think I know what I'm talking about). So, that's the frame of mind from which this post is coming. What follows is a description of a typical day in my first month at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA. Enjoy.

6:20 AM – The alarm goes off. For about 20 seconds, I have no idea where I am (why does it take so long to adjust to a new place?). I look out the window and see the omnipresent morning fog. Ah, yes. Malibu. Where else would I be? (When you think of MIT, you think of Malibu, right? I fit in so well here.)

6:25 AM – I eat my cereal while my four LGO housemates go through their own morning routines in silence. We like each other…just not at this hour. Occasionally, we grunt a good morning, or maybe it's just a grunt for grunting's sake.

6:45 AM – We distribute ourselves between two cars for the 35-minute drive to Thousand Oaks.
The drive includes an 800-ft descent over the course of a mile down our road, a short cruise along the Pacific Coast Highway, a stretch over a mountain pass with sheer drop-offs a few feet from the shoulder, and a race along “The” 101, an eight-lane highway. Conversation is kept to a minimum while we cycle through three static-y NPR stations to catch fragments of the news.

7:25 AM – I enter my building – a relic from Amgen’s more modest days – and walk three feet past the building receptionist’s desk to my desk. This is not an exaggeration. I literally sit next to the receptionist in the building foyer. My hope is that being relegated to this seat is the result of some kind of hiring frenzy that has taken away all of the usual intern spots, and not a
reflection of Amgen's opinion of my potential. Regardless, it has allowed me to fine-tune my greeting and secretarial skills. And all that gossip...

8:00 AM – 12:00 PM – I pick up where I left off on my internship project. Currently, I am mapping out the process development and manufacturing processes, along with the equipment used and data collected, for the four departments across four sites that work with Amgen’s drug product. The goal is to identify gaps between these areas and then come up with strategies for closing these gaps. So far, there seems to be a decent mix of engineering (assessing manufacturing processes and the design and function of the equipment) and management (developing business processes that include strategic and economic components).

12:00-12:30(ish) – Lunch. Amgen’s campus is part corporate headquarters, part country club, part sculpture garden. It has roughly one decorative fountain per employee. In short, it is amazing, and so we try to take advantage of this by eating lunch outside every day. The weather tends to cooperate -- I don't think there's been an afternoon in Thousand Oaks without a cloudless sky.

12:30-5:15 PM – I try to finish up my work for the day. There are occasional meetings with my boss or his boss, or with one of the project’s many stakeholders, but I mostly just sit at my desk and read/type for eight hours. This part of the project is not exactly riveting (I sometimes resort to memorizing the nutritional facts on my snack food or looking for additional flaws in the headshot on my Amgen badge just to break up the monotony), but I know that the excitement of using this information in strategic and awesome ways awaits me in the near future.

4:00 PM – We hit the "AmGym" (get it: Amgen + Gym = AmGym!!) for our daily workout. The place is incredible for an onsite company gym -- two stories, tons of weights and machines, yoga, pilates, and spinning classes, and free fresh fruit. We've actually all been pretty dedicated to working out thus far and are getting really beefed up as a result. Okay, I'm still as scrawny as ever and have to hide in a dark corner of the gym when using the 10-lb dumbbells, but I'm still enjoying it!

5:15 PM - We reassemble at the cars for the trip home. The afternoon car ride conversations are typically a little lighter and more relaxed. After all, we made it through another tough day at the office.

6:00-8:00 PM – Arriving home, we disperse into the evening for the next part of our routines. This includes running, surfing, climbing, eating, or just plain relaxing (this is what you're apparently supposed to do in California).

8:00-10:00 PM – Having finished dinner, we clean ourselves up, lament the end of another day, play a couple of games of backgammon (really), and go to sleep, dreaming sweet dreams of the adventures tomorrow's edition of the daily routine will surely bring.

School Sports

Most of my previous posts have focused on the academic side of the LGO program, but to leave it at that would be to describe only part of the LGO experience. LGOs actually have quite a bit going on in the extracurricular world, too. There are clubs, social events, music, sports, and who knows what else. This post will look at just one of these -- the world of the LGO athlete. I'll touch on what I consider to be the four pillars of LGO sports, starting with the most important...

• Intramural Sports - There is no better way to bond with your classmates (and to find out their true personalities). During the current academic year, the LGO program has had/will have teams or players in at least eight sports: flag football, hockey (more on this in a minute), basketball, softball, water polo, table tennis, real tennis, and volleyball. The existence of most of these LGO teams has been the direct result of one or two overly enthusiastic students (different ones for each sport), who are able to motivate an unsuspecting group of LGOs to play a sport in which they have no experience or skill. Such is the case with this spring's Water Polo team, which I was foolishly tricked into joining by being shown totally cool pictures like the one on the left. There is one sport, though, that has become something of a tradition among the LGO classes: Hockey.
  
  LGO hockey is one of those "perks" of being in the program you hear about as a prospective student. You are told great tales of epic games between utterly terrible teams, and you think to yourself, "I might not know how to skate yet, but I bet I could be the star of that team." At least, that's what I thought around this time last year. Then, upon lacing up the skates and trying to do something -- anything -- with the puck, you suddenly realize, "I'm actually really bad."
  
  True to tradition, the LGO '12 team was mostly dreadful at the start of the season. Our two players who had played previously looked like NHL stars skating around with a bunch of 3-year-olds on the ice for the first time. It would take some players about five minutes just to skate to the faceoff circle. It reminded me of watching Bambi try to walk on the ice, legs splaying in all directions. Fortunately, we played our six-game season in the MIT D-League, which should tell you something about the skill level we were up against. As bad as we were, we still managed to win a couple of games and come very close in a few others, including a tie against the LGO '11 team that had annihilated us in our first meeting. It was fun to watch everyone improve, and we left excited for next year and our match-ups with the LGO '13 team.
  
  [Note: Hockey was not all fun and games. As the picture on the left shows, the learning curve was not without its bumps. This is me, after I fell while practicing and broke my face. I now have some really nice titanium plates and a lot of people who think I'm an ultimate fighter.]
  
  
  
  
  
• Working Out - The LGOs are a generally fit group of people, and we are fortunate to have some great indoor and outdoor options for keeping up our impressive physiques (see water polo picture above for accurate representation of LGO bodies). On campus, there's an older gym and pool relatively close to Sloan, and this is where many of us go to lift or swim. We we are feeling especially enthusiastic, we sometimes venture to the Z-Center on the other side of campus (see picture on right for mostly useless view of the exterior). The Z-Center is where the ice rink, indoor and outdoor tracks, an amazing swimming pool, squash courts, basketball courts, tennis courts, etc. are located. All of these facilities are free to students and are really quite impressive.
  
  MIT also offers a huge number of phys ed classes and fitness programs for very low prices. I've been thinking of taking the massage class just so I can get a back rub for half of the class time.
  
  Off-campus there are a bunch of other options. Running along the Charles is extremely popular, and for good reason. The scenery is beautiful, the paths are easy on the legs, and it's right off the MIT campus. Many of my classmates also take short excursions to do indoor and outdoor rock climbing. We're also not too far from great skiing and hiking in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, and kayaking/sailing in the Charles or off the coast is always fun when the weather is nice.
  
  
• The Boston Sports Scene - As a New Yorker, I can't even pretend to root for the Boston sports teams. In fact, I dislike the teams even more after being surrounded by their fans for the past few years. However, I have to admit that this city has a passion for their teams unlike anything I've ever seen, and it is enjoyable to be in that atmosphere. The MIT campus has a great location for local sports fans, as it is within walking distance of the TD Garden, where the Bruins and Celtics play, as well as Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.
  
  College sports are also pretty big in Boston (though not really at MIT), and we're right down the road from BU, BC, and Harvard.
  
  
• Fantasy Sports - I couldn't write about the sports in my life without including the ones that aren't real. It might sound strange, but the LGO '12 fantasy football league was actually a great bonding experience for the subset of us that played, and I'm sure it will be a nice way to keep in touch while we're away on our internships next fall.
  

As busy as we are with school, taking the time to be active, especially when doing it with my classmates, has proved to be some of the most valuable time I've spent during this first year. Expect some short updates this spring as the Softball, Water Polo, Volleyball, and Table Tennis seasons get underway. And no matter how bad we are at any of them, at least they're not on ice!

Back to School

We are now a month into the Spring semester, so it's about time I talk about my classes. Since I never did this for the Fall semester, I'll add on some comments about those classes at the end of the post.

The Spring semester is the only semester that we, as LGOs, have full control over our schedules. For indecisive students, this means weeks of agonizing over possible combinations of classes. It took me about ten iterations of my schedule before I was satisfied (i.e., ran out of time). What I ended up with is six classes, totaling 59 credits. [Note: credits at MIT are different than credits at any other school, as far as I know. They include hours in class, lab, and doing outside-of-class work. So, my 59-credit load means that I should expect to do 59 hours of class-related stuff per week this semester. This is down from last semester's 64 credits.]

This semester, my classes are heavier on the Engineering end than on the Business end. In fact, I'm taking only two classes at Sloan: Finance I and Managerial Accounting. Here's my take on each so far:

• Finance I: We have the option of taking this or Marketing, and I think that most people take Finance; this is particularly true of the LGOs. Also true is that most people take it during the Fall semester, since Finance II -- the next class in the series -- is a prerequisite for most of the interesting finance classes. As a result, the students taking Finance I this spring tend to be less-than-interested in going any further than they have to in finance. This is good news for us finance newbies, since there likely aren't any finance-whiz curve-busters in the class, as there were during the Fall semester. In terms of class material, Finance I is a lot of basic math and some slightly confusing concepts that get more intuitive once you see them enough. I am a big fan of addition and multiplication, so I think I'll end up liking this class.
• Managerial Accounting: As the professor said, this class is not designed to make us into accountants, it's designed to help us avoid being made to feel stupid by the accountants we will eventually interact with. This is a class where the concepts are simple and math is even simpler. It seems like my grade for the class will be a function of the number of stupid mistakes I make, which, based on past experience, will be many. The professor is bizarre and hilarious, and he makes the potentially boring material a little less so. I am glad I'm enjoying this class, since we were told multiple times last semester by our Financial Accounting professor how critical the material in this class is for LGO students and anyone else interested in going into operations or general management.
  

On the engineering side, my classes are all pretty similar. That is, three of them are related to sustainability, while the other is on energy policy. Here are some more details:

• Industrial Ecology: I had no idea what Industrial Ecology was until about the third class meeting. Turns out, IE is a way of thinking about industry using the frameworks normally applied to ecology. In ecology, one organism's waste is another's fuel; in industry this is rarely the case, and, as a result, we have an inefficient industrial world (lots of useless waste, pollution, emissions, etc.). This class helps us understand how to create processes and products that are more sustainable than the ones that are already out in the world.
• Energy, Materials, and Manufacturing: This class has a ton of overlap with Industrial Ecology, but is a bit more general in its approach. The bulk of our grade for the class comes from our final project, for which most students perform a Life Cycle Assessment of two products or processes (e.g. using hand towels or a hand drier in the restroom) to compare the relative impacts of each on the environment.
  
• Strategic Sourcing: This is a procurement class that normally should have little to do with the previous two classes, except that I was assigned to a project dealing with helping a food company assess the greenhouse gas emissions of their suppliers and products. Fortunately, the material I'm learning in the other two classes will help immensely with this project.
  
• Energy Policy for a Sustainable Future: Probably (and unexpectedly) my favorite class of the semester so far. It's a small class, where we have a ton of great speakers who work on local, state, or national energy policy. The material is all new to me, while many of the other students have worked in policy previously, so I feel somewhat disadvantaged, but it's also helping me learn more quickly.
  

All in all, I'm satisfied with my course selections this semester. I've left myself with a hole to dig out of next semester in terms of my business school class requirements, but I will also have completely met my engineering course requirements by the end of this semester, so I should have a fairly normal course load next semester.

Now, as promised earlier, I'll quickly write about my Fall semester courses, most of which were required as part of the MBA first-year curriculum. Those required classes were:

• Communication for Managers: One of the two "soft" classes of the Fall. A lot of the analytical-minded students despise classes like this, but I actually enjoyed it. It gave me many opportunities to practice doing something I normally hate doing -- talking in front of a large group of really smart people -- and forced me to get comfortable in those situations. There were some useful writing exercises that I found beneficial, as well.
• Organizational Processes: The other "soft" class. The material was very similar to the things I had learned in an undergraduate Social Psychology class I took many years ago, but with a business-oriented spin on it. Most of the workload for the course was in our consulting project we did in our groups with a local company of our choosing. The projects allowed us to assess a change or initiative at the company using the three organizational "lenses" we were taught in class. It was a rewarding experience for my team, and I think many other teams felt similarly.
• Financial Accounting: My favorite class of the semester. The material wasn't exactly riveting, but the professor was great and kept us all awake with his frequent cold-calls. I think I got cold-called every class for a period of about five weeks, until I finally pre-empted the calls by actually raising my hand (I guess that was the professor's goal). The class gave us experience reading financial statements and interpreting the information inside, something I had absolutely no experience doing before this.
• Economic Analysis for Decision Making: This class, also known as Microeconomics, had a lot of potential because of its interesting material, but the professor was young and inexperienced, and he wasn't able to convey things as clearly as we needed him to. Many of my classmates ended up hating the class, but I guess my stupid optimism allowed me to see past the professor's flaws and enjoy the material.
  

I also took two elective engineering courses:

• Sustainable Energy: A great class that covered just about every basic topic within the field of sustainable (and unsustainable) energy. The best part was that the professor didn't try to teach all of the material himself. Instead, he deferred to MIT's many experts in the various fields we covered. We heard from MIT's solar guy, wind gal, energy storage guru, etc. It was the perfect class for someone like me who is interested in energy but didn't have a lot of the necessary background knowledge. It was not good for anyone looking for a class on advanced energy topics, including one of my LGO classmates.
• Modeling of Electric Power Systems: As you might guess from its name, this was my hardest class of the semester. We used an unfamiliar (to me) programming language to build optimization models to simulate electricity generation and distribution decisions at various time scales. I learned a ton about the electric grid, but I was in the class with a bunch of Ph.D. students who are writing their dissertations on this stuff, so I was the dumb kid in the class. I get the impression that this happens to almost all LGOs at some point during their time at MIT; I was just hoping that I'd make it through my two years without having this experience.

That's it for this post. In upcoming posts I'll cover the LGO sports scene and admitted student decision-time.