Sunday, January 24, 2010

Wake up. Shower. Class. Lunch. Class. Study. Home. Sleep. Repeat.


While the first week seemed to last a lifetime, the second week flew by, mostly because we were constantly going. (Dinner became an item I considered to be a luxury.) While it was busy and I was only averaging six hours of sleep a night, I was very surprised by how much pure FUN I was having. I guess I’d forgotten how enjoyable it is to learn when you’re surrounded by fantastic people who are your intellectual peers.

Monday morning it was back to work. We were put in new groups and started on a new project, the Industry Analysis, as part of our Economics class with Ralf Boscheck. My group was assigned to look at Disease Management in the Healthcare industry. After much (sometimes “intense”) discussion we decided to focus on the obesity problem in the United States, although we spent a lot of time hashing out the details to make sure it could be profitable.

That Wednesday morning we had our first Entrepreneurship class with Professor Benoit Leleux. Benoit has two master’s degrees from Catholic University in Belgium, an MBA from Virginia Tech, and his PhD from INSEAD, where he was also a professor before coming to IMD. He told us he picked INSEAD for his PhD because the brochure looked nice (and they promised to be close to Paris, ha!). He said that during his interview he went on about his excitement for entrepreneurship until one of the interviewers stopped him and told him that eventually he’d have to do something “serious” with his life, and that since he had been an engineer he should pick “Finance”, which is how he found himself with a doctorate in Corporate Finance.

That Wednesday afternoon we had our first Leadership class with Professor Jack Wood. Jack got his first degree in government, then followed it with a master’s in social psychology from Syracuse University, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in organizational behavior from Yale. His classes focused on the interpersonal and group relationships that form in the workplace and aimed to make us recognize why we react in certain ways. He encouraged us to say whatever was on our mind, no matter how outlandish, and to challenge each other during class discussion, and his classes were for sure the most emotionally charged. During the second Leadership class, we broke off into our 8-person teams and debated through an hour-long group project while being videotaped. Then we had to review the videotape together within our groups to analyze our interactions and reactions during times of heated conversation. It was pretty uncomfortable to watch ourselves on video, but the conversation we had afterwards was fascinating, as we dissected minute changes in body language and what they might mean.



Case studies.

My new group.

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