Final week, Babson Buffoonery

This is our final week of classes in our first year. In a way I am going to miss the class because we will no longer be attending the same class as a group of 55!. Quite a few will choose evening classes.

In this final module, we really had to read a lot. We spent most of our time reading macro economics. Our textbook is written by our professor Prof. Marthinsen. Lot of material to cover but this book has good flow and makes it easy to understand difficult concepts. On the flip side, volume of content to be covered in class gives little room for discussion/questions in classes.

By the way, Asian Business forum elections are getting hotter than our Grad council. One person has created a blog and even registered a domain for campaign. Very interesting!

Babson has a tradition of organizing "Buffoonery" twice a year. 2nd years organize the fall event and we, first years, have ours tomorrow. I am looking forward to the poker tournament prior to the event. There are quite a few clips from previous events in youtube. Here is one for you.

Election Update and preparation for second year

No surprises. I did not win. Well, I did not think I could win in the beginning. Still I joined the fray to communicate my points across. However after my successful pitches, position statement and promotion of this blog to convey my views gave me some hope. There were quite a few friends who supported my bid to contest as well.

Good learning for me from this campaign was that two minute pitches can be quite valuable to communicate one's passion. Many people came to me later and extended their support. I wanted to raise the issue of increased role of GSC. I think I succeeded in my goal.

We have several intensive tracks such as management, high tech, entrepreneurship, etc. There are information sessions run by different departments to promote their tracks. I have not attended any yet. Most likely I would take Technology Intensive Track. One does not need to participate in any such program and can always take courses from different areas.

GSC and second year students have been helpful in collecting student feedback across all courses and about professors and send us a nice spreadsheet by the end of their term. It is very useful information. Otherwise I may have to rely on quantitative/survey analysis run by the graduate school and also it is a very tedious process as I have to search one by one.

Election time - Running for GSC President

The Graduate Student Council (GSC) elections are coming up this week. It has created a buzz and a lot of people have stepped forward to be elected as council members. I am contesting for a key post, president, as well.

Here is my plan

• Transparency in the functioning of the GSC.
  The least a student organization can do, is to be open to all the students and communicate clearly what the council's priorities are.
• Play a bigger role by
  
• reviewing curriculum
  
• working with the office of program management on class scheduling
  
• working with the career development center to bring in services such as interview preparation, resume review, etc.
• having a representative on the campus student council boards to voice our concerns on issues such as the changing of BofA ATMs to Citizens bank ATMs in the middle of the academic year (this was pain to a lot of students living on campus and without a car to access other BofA ATMs) !!!
• proposing an increase in international business cases, so as to reflect the growing importance of global economy, and more importantly the Babson student body, 50% of which is comprised of international students
• introducing a bidding system for the Babson Consulting Alliance Program (BCAP) so that the selection of company/project is left to the students.
• Continue to organize fun activities but with an additional thematic "food & beverage" pub nights.

Apart from the above, I also intend initiating a dialog to offer electives in the first year itself.

We have been asked to submit a position statement and we also get to deliver two pitches.