Spring Break blogging

As I sit here in my comfortable apartment, enjoying some Spring Break, there's just one thing missing -- Spring. I just got back from a weekend in Atlantic City and New York (my brother's bachelor party), and it's amazing how quickly the climate can change. In AC, the evening had a comfortable temperature to it, like a jacket was optional. And yesterday on the ride up, the countryside was bathed in warm (looking) sunshine. But arriving at home, I flipped on the Weather Channel, and sure enough, it said Ithaca's temperature is holding steady at 30 degrees!

But this all plays into my own personal philosophy about the merits of living in a cold climate. Officially, Spring is still a week or so away. And though I have this yearning for the weather to make its change, I know in my mind that Ithaca won't give up her cold weather until sometime in April. But somewhere during that time of hoping for Spring and when it comes, the desire for warm weather, barbecues, and sunset walks in short sleeves will get so unbearable that the final reward becomes that much sweeter.

I write this from experience, mind you. I did my undergrad in Vermont, which has a similarly long winter but also a period of about a month on the cusp of Spring when you can't walk on the grass, affectionately(?) known as "mud season."

Enough about weather. That's not what my millions of readers want to hear about. They want to hear about how business school is going to help them land a great job and make lots of money. Well, there's just one small thing about that... Seems every time I go to school, I'm kind of on the wrong end of an economic cycle. When I graduated from college in 2001, the dot-com bubble had sprung a tiny leak. My job search that year was a short one, and I was happy to land in a year of national service with AmeriCorps in San Diego (could be worse, right?).

Funny how this blog post began with the dragging winter, then discussed the current economic downturn, but has progressed to sunnier pastures! It's also funny how my wife and me are talking about another sojourn to California after school. Of course, that's not set in stone. And as my native Ithacan friend, who also did undergrad and grad school here at Cornell has said, "I wonder how many decisions to move to California have been made in the depth of an Ithaca winter..." At least a few, I'd say. But probably more than a few of those have been overturned when the fresh vegetables start to appear in the Ithaca Farmers Market, and icy walks to school are replaced with dips in showering waterfalls.

Did I mention I'm on Spring Break? And my wife is out of town? Translation: a lot of time on my hands to think and write about things like the above.

About the beginning of the second quarter. I'm delighted that my HR class will continue for the remainder of Spring semester. As I've related in earlier posts, the pace of the semester-long class is so much more placid and enjoyable after the core; it's one of the pleasures of taking classes outside the Johnson School once in a while.

I'm also taking the final core class, Managing and Leading Organizations, which covers topics of great interest to me like leadership development, HR, and aligning those with strategy. Oral Communication seems like a great (and surprisingly rigorous) course as well. The final one (and the one I'll be glad I took like a nice long gulp of cough medicine) is financial modeling. Luckily, the professor in modeling, Julia D'Souza, seems the right blend of patient and tough.

Other activities on the docket for Spring are finishing my Big Red Incubator project -- that includes a final presentation to our client company and doing a thorough market entry plan for them.

And there's the Cornell Business Journal, which has become the best business experience of my time here... I believe I've touched on this in previous posts, but to reiterate -- the CBJ is an independent organization (i.e. not a formal Johnson School club), so we don't have access to school funds. We do this to maintain our journalistic integrity as perhaps the only potentially dissenting voice at the school (which we haven't used very much so far). As an independent entity, we operate like any other newspaper, relying on advertising to stay afloat. Inheriting the paper from last year's team, my team and I want to build on what they did -- editorially and on the business side -- so, we've begun an initiative to go after advertisers and pay sellers a 10% commission to do so. For me, it's exciting to be leading a "turnaround," and the thought of having the paper be a really fun group to be a part of -- funding parties and events -- makes it worthwhile.

One final thing I'll be up to this spring -- the Park fellowship requires that all fellows complete a service project to benefit the school or the community. Our proposal is due May 1, and for mine, I've set out to create a new class which would pair engineers and business school students to design radically affordable products for populations in the developing world. I've had my first couple of conversations with faculty and staff, and I can see that it will be a major challenge to bring the course to fruition in a form resembling my own vision. But I'll use this forum as a way to document my progress.

After a long hiatus

Sheesh. It's been a while since I last blogged, and a lot has happened.

One, I found an internship. Those of you who have read this blog from the beginning have borne witness to the many twists and turns that my mental projections of my career path have taken. I started out wanting to start a world-changing company, then I was sure I'd work for a start-up in clean tech, or maybe for GE, or the New York Times, or in education. But after much thought and a rather intuitive approach to the job search, I eventually settled on a dark horse candidate: Dun and Bradstreet. I'll be a part of their Winning Culture team for the summer, which is their department that handles HR strategy, leadership development, and organizational change issues. I'll be working under some amazing folks, who showed me a great time when I went down to their recruiting event a couple weeks ago.

Another thing that's happened is I've actually enjoyed my first quarter of second semester. The decision to do a customized immersion was the best I've made all year. I love the Sustainable Global Enterprise elective course, and HR is awesome. Those are probably my highlights, along with Strategic Alliances and Operations. Managerial Spreadsheet Modeling is the thorn in my side, not because it isn't a great class (I actually recommend it), but because it's a challenge for me personally. I had never used Excel before business school, and even though the level of proficiency required for the MBA program is even lower than I had expected, it is clear that those that have an edge in Excel are better off in the business world -- or at least freer from the curse that is busy work and data entry. After all, we're here to become managers, right?

We've also hosted two of the Park Finalist weekends, and I've enjoyed bowling with many prospective students who have read this very blog. That's probably the biggest motivation for me to pick up the proverbial pen again and blog -- I keep running into people who read my posts. But, I do want to remark on the quality of the applicants I've met, whether they are Park Finalists or not. A lot of really intelligent and interesting folks have been through Ithaca this year, and I look forward to greeting next year's class.

What else? Oh, my Cornell Business Journal team and I have put out two issues of the paper, and I'm proud of the work we've done so far. We've gotten positive feedback, which makes me feel great about the hard work I put in.

That's it for now. I better get outside and enjoy the warmest day in months -- it's about 60 and sunny out there.