Fall review

Following the tradition of year end reviews, I wanted to summarize how things have gone in a semester.

The good stuff:
Babson has been a very good atmosphere with nice classmates willing to help each other. Camaraderie is good.

Integrated curriculum seems to make sense and the modules (Mod I - Creative management in dynamic organization, Mod II - assessing business opportunities) lived up to the general theme.

Creativity stream was really creative and generated lot of enthusiasm among students and interaction among students increased tremendously.

Writing and speech consultants offered valuable feedback to improve respective skills.

Accessibility to faculty is very good and lot of professors are more than willing to discuss with students about anything.

Consulting project was well structured and helped in teamwork. It seemed like a research project similar to that of Forrester's or Gartner's.

There are lot of opportunities to start a venture while at school.

Weather has been great this year. Does not seem like winter at all!

Not good stuff:
Too much emphasis on grades. It was one of the main topics discussed on the orientation day itself! I though fellow students would come out of this consciousness in a semester but even second years continue to give too much importance to grades.

To certain extent, people seem to prefer spoon feeding and hence there is limited interest in exploration.

Very little interaction among students to the benefit of the program as a whole. Graduate student council is busy organizing pub nights and similar events but not collecting students input in developing the program.

Some where in between:
Some clubs are active but not much. I would like to see periodic activities to discuss topics such as business trends, technology, globalization etc. On the positive side, HBS, MIT, Boston Univ etc welcome Babson students to attend their events.

Admission and grad school staff are very co-operative and helpful.

There were quite a few companies conducting info session. But, many of them seem to be region specific. For example, I wish Google or Yahoo coming to campus.

PS: I waited till the last day of my vacation to post this review. It is not complete but stay tuned for updates to this post.