[分享]DARDEN的日子

今天下午参加了DARDEN的开学活动(DARDEN AND SO IT BEGINS)．340多人的CLASS 2008学生济济一堂，好是热闹. 30分钟左右的casual talk让我领教到了这几百人同时说话能制造多大的声音，we have to yell at each other so as to get what other people are talking about, but it was fun......很快我们被分成了几十个Team，开始做一个了解DARDEN的游戏，每个Team都要在一个半小时内完成１０个有关Darden各部门的任务．我的Team八个人，六个老美，加上咱和一个印度同学．虽然是在做游戏，但大家都很投入，在DARDEN的各部门间转换，找线索，完成每个部门的相关任务：在Career Office我们用１０分钟讨论了如何帮某商学院吸引更多公司招聘的案例，在Mr. Darden(Former Virginia Governor) 的题词碑旁我们每个人默背下一句话然后排成一队在二年级学生代表前按顺序朗诵，在一路上还要过由二年级学生和教工组成的有关DARDEN的问题站．．．．咱表现还不错，因为对DARDEN很了解，帮助咱Team回答了大部分问题. 游戏都很简单，但目的很明确：通过团队的力量来解决问题和了解DARDEN．游戏结束后，整个一年级学生排了合影，然后就在DARDEN的草坪上cook out party. 有幸和来自台湾的陈教授（http://www.darden.virginia.edu/faculty/chen.htm）聊了一下，陈教授曾在Columbia和Warton教了１０几年，来DARDEN教Strategy这是第五年了，他说因为Case-teaching要求很高，DARDEN的大部分教授都是曾在其他TOP商学院教的很好以后才被DARDEN请来的；因为DARDEN是以教学为主的商学院，大部分教授首要任务就是教好书，Research是其次的，所以这对ＭＢＡ来说是很实际的．OK, Darden, and so it begins......

谢谢分享!

Really hope you can visit here often and share more. Thanks...

Steven - we can make this post a sharing post and the other as Q&A. Though I don't have much mid-night oil I will still try to share...

Guys - today is exciting day for us since we FINALLY know who is in our learning team. What is learning team? It's a team that you meet almost 3 hours every day. They will be your most close friends in your coming 1 year, and giving the huge amount of cases (average 3 cases/day), you will need to heavily depend on the learning team to acomplish job as a TEAM. And it's a great (if not perfect) way to practise and learn leadership/teamwork.

It's very exciting to know with whom you are going to be in the same learning team room everyday! Mine turned out to be much more than I though. We have very different backgroud: Mkt (me), venture capitcal, banking service, government etc. People are very active but not aggressive (at least in the first sight). Really looking forward to see how things go...

这几天是CASE STUDY开始前的最后时光, 而且大家刚分了SECTION (there are five sections for first year Darden students, and you will be staying in the same section for one semester, and jump to some different section next semester) 和Learning Team, 所以晚上有很多parties and drinking events. For me, I am in the Section A, and we had a Section A social drinking party on Wednesday night, a big party for whole Darden students on Thursday night, and a dinner and drink with my learning team on Friday night. We will also have a BBQ party at Darden this Saturday night for all Darden faculties, students and their families.

For the drinking parties, to be honest, not all the American students are interested in talking to Asian students, because of the language barriers, culture differences....well, because we are different from looking. But this is true for every B-school, I believe, and Chinese students have to expect this negative part of B-school life in the USA, and try to stretch out of their comfort zone. I have some years of living experience in US, so I am not that sensitive anyway, and I still get chance to talk to some second year students who are very friendly and have very interesting background. It is always better to go out to know more people than staying in your own circle.

As for the learning team, it may be too early to say it is "Great", but in our team every one is trying to get a nice start point before we really get into the case study next week. We have dinner together, talking a lot about everyone's personal life, personalities and weakness. We all heard of some team failure stories from second year students, but at least in the first quarter with over 70 cases we will have to try our best to build a strong learning team and get most from it. Then, at the end of the day, even the team breaks, we will still learn some lessons from the failure which we will keep in mind for future team building and work.

All right, I may talk too much now; look forward to tonight's BBQ party.....