Team Efficiency

Team dinner at Katsuya in Brentwood

 One of the most important things that happened during orientation was our placement into "learning teams."  These groups of 5-6 students work together throughout the fall quarter on all group assignments and for studying purposes.  The groups were picked for us in a way that was supposed to create diversity (previous work experience and general demographics) so that everyone could contribute in different ways and could learn from one another.  Our team, for example, has two students who were born in Asia (including one who had never been to America before orientation started), and half the team had a more quantitative/financial background while the other half had more of a qualitative/marketing background. 

One of our many team study sessions after class

Anyway, I feel that I really lucked out with my group.  The six of us all have pretty laid back and easy going personalities, and seem like genuinely nice people, so we all get along real well.  It is a little unusual in a business school setting where there are so many A-Type personalities that there is no real headstrong, need-to-take-control members on our team.  In certain group situations that might be a bad thing, but for us the personalities have clicked well.  Even though none of us are too overly obsessed with grades, we've been really good at getting things done quickly and at a high level, which is where our self-given nickname Team Efficiency, came from.

The team dynamic is definitely important since so much time is spent together.  For the first few weeks of the quarter we were routinely meeting for a couple hours after classes 2-3 times a week.  Occasionally, when a lot of assignments were due at once, longer sessions became necessary or meeting up on weekends were advised.  The strength of our group became more evident as we continued to hear horror stories of other teams as the quarter went on, ranging from groups routinely meeting for 6 hours in a day to complete a single assignment, group imposed penalties for people showing up late to meetings, too many fiery personalities in one group leading to a lot of disagreements, or just a general dislike for other group members. Unfortunately the teams switch up each quarter, but for now its all good.  Last week to celebrate our awesomeness and a solid first month we organized a team dinner at a very tasty sushi restaurant in LA (pictured above).

Orientation (aka Camp Anderson)

Section A group shot on Game Day

So I had actually started this post a long time ago but hadn't gotten around to finishing it and then publishing it.

80s party pre-party

I have no idea how it compares to other business schools, but orientation at UCLA Anderson definitely was an interesting experience.  It was a bit of a marathon, lasting 2 and a half weeks with every day spanning from 8-5, and several days lasting a few hours longer into the evening. Amongst other activities, the orientation included icebreakers,  role-playing activities, computer simulations, presentations with Legos, section chant preparations, improv lessons, outdoors adventures, a Section Cup competition including a full day of outdoor games, a luau with lots of pie throwing, skits performances, teaching elementary school children about finances, beach days, free breakfast and lunches, and finally an 80s themed party.  Especially as we started to think about former coworkers who were slaving away in a cubicle while we played dodgeball, trying to win the coveted Section Cup, we wondered are we preparing for business school right now or are we at summer camp?

There is definitely something unusual about a group of 370 adults performing all the aforementioned activities, but oddly I think it all actually accomplished what the school intended it to.  Once the fall quarter starts we will mostly only be exposed to our section (the class is divided into 5 sections of approximately 75 students each who we take all of our fall classes with), so the mix of activities in orientation was a good way to build up section pride but also interact with students in other sections.  Every day's lunch had a different seating assignment to purposely mix us with different classmates, so that we had shared a meal with a large portion of the class by the end of the 2.5 weeks.  The other goal was to get us used to group work and to try to get us more comfortable when working out of our comfort zone (if that makes sense), and through plenty of activities that put us in the spotlight, I think it helped accomplish that too.

I really want to summarize the list of activities that I mentioned in the opening paragraph, but that would take way too much time and space, so I'll just add a few additional details to a couple of the highlights:

Odyssey - This was the outdoors adventure day.  One activity involved climbing up a narrow 3 story pole.  Climbing was easy, but pulling ourselves up to stand on top of it was really difficult.  Once at the top, we had to rotate 180 degrees on this rickety pole with nothing to hold on to and then finally jump off of it on to a trapeze suspended  above the ground.  Yes, we were harnessed in to avoid any real injury, but it was definitely a difficult and intimidating activity. 

Junior Achievement - This was our "volunteer" day where we were assigned an inner city elementary school to teach money lessons to.  Two of my classmates and I were assigned the pre-k class and we taught them about saving money.  It was actually a lot of fun and felt pretty rewarding to work with the kids.  Especially while I ran around with them (in business casual attire) during their recess period, it fondly reminded me of my old Crestwood days.

I haven't even discussed the fact that there was a 5-day, 2-credit class of Leadership Foundations mixed in here.  Our professor was actually really awesome (literally one of the funniest people I have ever met, and a great instructor as well).  Some of the group activities mentioned earlier were actually incorporated as part of this class and there was a lot of case study preparation and discussions too, which we'll be using in Anderson a lot.  Am I better leader because of it?  I'm not sure, but it was pretty fun 2.5 weeks either way.

80s party w/ one of the guys from my study group

The Return of the Blog

I said in the previous post that I had heard that "once business school starts it's a complete whirlwind," and the fact that it took me a month and a half to make this next post I guess that proves that correct.  

I really only advertised this to friends/family as a road trip blog, so with that in mind, and especially with the time elapsed since the last post, I would imagine that my audience has completely disappeared.  But that's alright, because as I said in my very first post back in July, I wanted to start this blog mostly for myself to chronicle the significant changes in lifestyle from my life as an east coast 9-5er to a west coast grad student.  My goal is to keep up the writing so I have something resembling more of a complete work to look back on years from now.  I know I'm going to continue to be super busy with schoolwork and other obligations, so if that means only adding a post a couple times a quarter, so be it.  It might lose some of its effectiveness because the posting won't be immediately after the actual events, but I still think that's better than nothing.

I think that's enough of a service announcement.  I have a month and a half of recapping to do!