Stern Preview Weekend

So, despite my somewhat inebrieted state, I made it to and through the Stern Preview Weekend, and managed to have a lot of fun in the process. The activities started on Sunday afternoon and ended Monday evening.

Day1:

The first session kicked off with a series of welcome speeches (one standard, two entertaining and one slightly lame). One of the interesting "exercises" in the course of the first session was for each student from NY (there were a LOT of us) to find someone who wasn't from NY and discover something (preferably something fun/cute/witty) they had in common in the course of a 90-sec conversation. The Top10 responses were very creative (unfortunately, I happened to be sitting in a group consisting mainly of NY-ers, so by the time I walked halfway across the auditorium to find a non-NY-er, all we could get to was "um, do you tapdance? did you run with the masaimara in africa, by any chance? hey! we both like zadie smith!")

The second session was the "Block Experience" where we were divvied up into blocks (60 students) and within the block into "study groups" and given a pretty entertaining assignment. This one was a lot of fun, and in the process, we got to know our individual groups pretty well.

The next session was pretty glitzy - a cocktail reception at the NY Stock Exchange. This is the first time I've been to the NYSE, and my first reaction was pretty geeky ("wow! checkout all those computers!"). The reception was a great opportunity to meet current students, some alumnae, professors and of course, a lot of my potential classmates. The people I met were extremely diverse in their cultural backgrounds, pretty smart overall, and mostly down-to-earth (there's always a couple of arrogant pricks at any gathering). While the professional backgrounds were diverse enough, I still found that a lot of people came from a finance background. I guess this was to be somewhat expected given the reputation of the school.

After an evening of wine and dainty finger food, we proceeded to the unofficial part of the weekend - an evening of beer and greasy barfood with current students at a bar near union sq (can't remember the name now). About an hour into the proceedings, my lack of sleep caught up with me and I had to leave somewhat reluctantly. I believe the party went on till the wee hours of the morning.

Day2:

After guzzling a grande latte, I made my way down to W.4th street for another day of meeting and greeting. I skipped a couple of optional events (housing tour and breakfast) and headed for something called the "Torch Expo", which was a great opportunity to talk to students in specific industries and figure out what the do, how they landed the job etc.

Lunch was another fun round of socializing with future classmates. Dean Cooley addressed the crowd with a short speech. The Keynote speaker was the President of Liz Claiborne International. The theme of his speech was, as is to be expected, about Stern's impact on his career, and his career story. Pretty impressive, I thought. The only disappointment was the food.

Post lunch, we headed into classes of our choice. Apparently, I had picked (I don't remember doing this) a Strategy class. I attended the "Strategy and Game Theory" class by Professor Adam Brandenberger (ex-HBS). Call me a nerd, but for me, this was the best part of the weekend. The professor was witty and the class was pretty entertaining, in addition to being informative. And not just that, he correlated the major topics he covered in the class with real-world business situations for each of those. The students were very interactive and the class was simply awesome! Can't wait to start school!

Class was followed by a workshop specific to your selected industry. I decided to go with the Consulting workshop since it sounded like more fun than the fin one. We got to work on a sample case study and come up with an elevator pitch at the end of it. I think, in both the group exercises, I ended up with the most fun, laid-back and kooky team. We had a lot of fun doing the case and also coming up with a somewhat bizarre elevator pitch.

The last event of the weekend was "International Passport Day". This was a LOT OF FUN. The students had set up a huge tent outside the Kaufman Mgmt Center, within which the event was held. It was basically a food fest featuring food from around 20 countries!! Finally some YUM food!! Alongwith the food, there were dance/music/martial arts performances by students from some (each?) of these countries! The DESI MBAs put on a KICKASS dance performance - BHANGRA ROCKS!!! So, after mingling some more and stuffing myself silly with everything from lamingtons to samosas to paella to barbecue to sushi, it was finally time to head home and get some sleep.

On the whole, the event was a great way to meet people, and a good introduction to the hectic mba-student lifestyle. After this weekend, I'm not praying for Columbia as fervently as I was before :-).