Classes and Committees

We've now completed our 5th day of class after the leadership module The Universe Within concluded.  In those five days we've had sessions for:

15.064 Engineering Probability and Statistics
Turns out this is our most hilarious class so far...no joke.  I will post quotes soon :-)

15.066 Systems Optimization
(aka linear programming plus a few more advanced things)
Looks like it will be very applicable to real company issues and might be useful for an internship - how to make the most of what you've got of minimize costs of making/buying what you don't.

15.317 Organizational Leadership and Change
Our first session was three hours back to back.  I think all of us understand that this will be valuable, but it's hard to go for that long talking about it in theory.  I spoke with a number of people who'd rather less class time and them maybe report about how we're doing for real in our committee and team meetings.  Jury is out on how it will go.

ESD.60 High Velocity Organizations
Makes sense to see examples of what and how companies or other types of organizations do well and also to identify what is "wrong" - we talked today about the importance of not normalizing deviance.

We're still waiting to have a class for ESD.930 Module on Lean 6-Sigma Methods, but that will be tomorrow.  ESD.930 and The Universe Within are referred to as modules, I guess, because they are not full credit classes.  In total, this summer, we will take six differently named courses with the total work load of around five classes.  That's still plenty to do.

In addition to our work for classes, last Friday, the 10th, we signed up for the committees that we will be a part of this year.  Students are representatives on committees ranging from recruiting new students and partner companies to planning our "plant treks" (a series of company visits we will do in January and over spring break) and facilitating visits with CLGO (our Chinese program counterpart - you think American universities are competitve - just think about a country of 1 billion people - these students are top notch).  They told us that we can sign up for as many as we'd like but that we'll probably significantly contribute our time to two of them.  They waste no time in getting us going.  I have not had any committee meetings yet, though.  Probably will have them soon.

The Committees I've signed up for are:

New Student Recruiting
Getting a quality group of students to apply to the Class of 2014 and beyond, we'll be blogging, and setting up events I enjoyed like Ambassador Day in the fall for students to meet people in person and find out more about the program, InterviewFest, when the first round of callbacks occurs in the application process and Open House after everyone knows whether they've been admitted or not.  We'll be running these events and making presentations and being incoming students' points of contact.

Communications
Very closely tied to new student recruiting, they work on not only getting the word out about LGO to potential applicants but also to other schools, companies, etc.

New Partners
Working with the program staff to contact other companies who we'd like to become partners.  Partners sponsor internships, offer employment after graduation and visit us periodically to present cases and get to know us.  More partner companies can enable us to have a greater range of internships, and related to that a possible greater diversity or number of admitted students.  Also, some partner companies have been with us forever, but others have come and gone so we always need to be ready to fill gaps as needed.


I'm looking forward to seeing how this all plays out, but right now waking up around 6:15, getting to Sloan by 7:45 to start class at 8 and go til 2:30+ to possibly go to a committee meeting or a partner company reception to go home and do homework and maybe eat or sleep or something is a long day.  My goal, if I'm waking up that early, is to be in bed around 10:30 or 11, but it's hard sometimes.  Tonight some of our summer team (yeah Team 7!) is going to have a probability/hockey party and try and do work while watching the Bruins vs. the Canucks in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup.  I don't exactly know the odds of how much work we'll get done, but I'm sure it will be fun.