Two Inspiring Events

Oh, boy! This has been a really insane week of trauma and trouble on Wall Street, the presidential debates, and all sorts of concerns over a certain vice presidential candidate.

Despite all of that national drama, things at the Johnson School are still clicking along. I just want to highlight my day yesterday, and a couple of things that made me feel great about where I am right now. Let me first say that I'd been fighting a general malaise since returning to school -- some form of inertia had taken hold, no doubt due to a successful summer of work and the realization that second year is a lot more relaxed than first. I admit I'd been throttling back on my effort, especially as far as my extracurricular involvement has gone.

Then, yesterday, the Park Fellows held the first of our semi-annual volunteer days at local farm Compos Mentis which doubles as a non-profit benefiting adults with mental health issues. The Compos Mentis program aims to get people back on their feet, and back into school or the workforce.

Last year, I remember what a pleasure it was to get out of the classrooms and breakout rooms of Sage Hall and do some manual labor for the benefit of others. This year was no different, and having the chance to hang out with some of the first-year Park Fellows, like Tyler Baier, a former champion wrestler and dairy farmer from Wisconsin, made this year's volunteer experience even better.

The other event that reinforced my desire to stay involved and work hard for the benefit of others was the (newly-formed, formerly known as Net Impact) SGE Club meeting. It took place at The Big Red Barn, a nice space reserved for Cornell graduate students, not far from Sage Hall. I just have to hand it to the leadership of the club, including Bailey Stoler, Kevin Johnson, Ryan Kelley, Andrea Findley, Kate Capossela, Britta Von Oessen, Casey Ryan and others for taking what was a largely untapped mass of potential energy and figuring out how to put it to work; it's really a testament to what good organizational design can do.

Instead of maintaining the club as it previously existed -- an umbrella organization for students interested in all things associated with sustainability -- the club's leadership put its collective heads together and took a look at how it could become more relevant. What they came up with is a system where members form affinity groups, based on their more specific interests, within the larger club. For instance, I'd been involved last year in attempting to start a class based on Creative Design for Affordability, a concept popularized by IDEO and the Stanford Design School. By the end of last semester, when I spent a lot of alone time beating down doors of administration and trying to build interest, I was left frustrated and prepared to let the idea die.



But thanks to this new system, an Accelerated MBA student, Charles Lo, began an affinity group based on this very concept. With another student so inspired by these ideas, I'm finding myself reenergized to achieve our goals of organizing the creative energy around Cornell to help business school students get their hands dirty designing new products, and also excited and proud to be a part of the larger SGE Club.

Cornell has been selected to host next year's national Net Impact conference, and it's amazing to see the school leadership focused on innovating and leading the way on how to organize and make a real impact at school, and in the world.

Stepping Way Outside of Sage Hall

I had originally planned to devote my second blog entry of the year to trumpeting how wonderful it is to take classes at different schools all over Cornell's campus. And it certainly is a uniquely advantageous attribute of this largest of Ivy League universities to be founded on the premise that any student should be able to study any subject of his or her choosing. But it's also tough to make that entry when I ended up dropping the very course I had planned to tout so vocally.

A little background: this summer, I took up stone sculpting (think hammer and chisel -- about as old-school as you can get) and thought it would be fun -- not to mention a nice release from the business school world -- to continue my artistic education at Cornell. In retrospect, the decision to sign up for an extra 3-credit, six hour per week class does seem a bit ambitious. I guess I supposed I'd fit it in somewhere between team meetings, job hunting, and running the business school's newspaper.

Let's just say that a story like mine, brief though it was, could probably only happen at Cornell. During the add-drop period, I enrolled in Introductory Sculpture in the art school (most don't even know Cornell has an art school). But there I was -- just me and a class of about 25 first-years. Now, I'm not talking first-year grad students; I'm talking about college freshmen -- 18 years old and about 3 weeks removed from living in their parents' house, eating home-cooked meals and daydreaming about mind expansion and no curfew. I admit I revelled for a class or two in my honorary status as class "old guy." But alas! In the end, spending 8-11 A.M. on Tuesday and Thursday constructing a full-sized human head out of clay proved too much for me.

Despite the fact that I am now an honorary art school dropout, I'm still eager to promote the ability of students at the Johnson School to immerse themselves in any subject of their choosing; I'm proud of the simple fact that I was able to have the experience I did. Though most of my classmates prefer to take classes in subjects like Hotel Management, Human Resources, and Energy Economics, I hope that my own brief sojourn into the undergrad art school will somehow make me a better -- or at least more well-rounded -- manager.