So Alicia and I had a great holiday weekend in Boston. We had four whole days together - the first time in 6 months! We had a great time spending our time together and having our first Christmas alone. Though we missed our families, we had a very merry Christmas.
On Saturday, Alicia and I went to see the Christmas Revels at the Sanders Theatre on Harvard's Campus. A great Christmas show that celebrated the winter solstice through folk stories and songs from the Baltic region. A very memorable time for both of us and something that we will definitely do next year as well.
Christmas Eve we took a long walk around Boston through Boston Common and down Newbury St. The city was pretty deserted, but we didn't mind. There was a church playing Christmas carols on their bells that created a very pleasant holiday experience.
Hope that you all had wonderful holidays and have a Happy New Year!
More later....
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 17, 2007
Almost Done and Plant Trek Prep!
So I am almost finished with my Fall semester...just one more exam - Accounting - on Wednesday and I am officially on Winter Vacation. Whew! At that point, I will have finished half of my academic work at MIT. Hard to believe, but true. I've already bid on my Spring courses and will find out next Wednesday what classes I'll be able to take. I will admit to any potential students it is REALLY hard to narrow down the classes that you will want to take while here. It is amazing how every class you hear about is one that you add to your list for consideration. I think that I have a pretty good line up for classes but will fill you in next week on that information.
As far as Plant Tour goes, here is all the information about it that I know. Plant Tour is an LFM-defining event. The entire class (all 47 of us) head out for two weeks during the month of January to travel across the country visiting our partner companies manufacturing facilities.
Our itinerary for the trip is as follows:
Jan 6th - 8th: Austin, TX - Visiting Cisco/Flextronics/Dell
Jan 9th: Reno, NV - Amazon
Jan 10th - 13th: Seattle, WA - Boeing
Jan 14th: Milwaukee, WI - Harley-Davidson
Jan 15th: Chicago, IL - Honeywell
Jan 16th - 19th: Detroit, MI - GM, American Axle, possibly Ford and the North American Auto Show
We are all trying to get ready for our travels home (be they domestic or foreign) for Christmas and then again for our trip. It is a lot of work putting the whole trip together and all the credit goes to my classmates on the Plant Tour Committee. They have done a wonderful job. I'll keep you updated on our trip as best I can. It should be an amazing life experience so I hope that I do it justice.
More later...
As far as Plant Tour goes, here is all the information about it that I know. Plant Tour is an LFM-defining event. The entire class (all 47 of us) head out for two weeks during the month of January to travel across the country visiting our partner companies manufacturing facilities.
Our itinerary for the trip is as follows:
Jan 6th - 8th: Austin, TX - Visiting Cisco/Flextronics/Dell
Jan 9th: Reno, NV - Amazon
Jan 10th - 13th: Seattle, WA - Boeing
Jan 14th: Milwaukee, WI - Harley-Davidson
Jan 15th: Chicago, IL - Honeywell
Jan 16th - 19th: Detroit, MI - GM, American Axle, possibly Ford and the North American Auto Show
We are all trying to get ready for our travels home (be they domestic or foreign) for Christmas and then again for our trip. It is a lot of work putting the whole trip together and all the credit goes to my classmates on the Plant Tour Committee. They have done a wonderful job. I'll keep you updated on our trip as best I can. It should be an amazing life experience so I hope that I do it justice.
More later...
Monday, December 10, 2007
I Forgot! The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Construction Tour
So I totally forgot to post about the tour that the Real Estate Club set up. I am not in the Real Estate Club, but they opened up the tour to non-members as well (which is nice) so I got to join them on a tour of the new Boston Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It is still under construction (opening date is June 20th or so) so we all donned hardhats and got to walk around the construction! I really like seeing how things are put together so this was a great trip for me. We were able to tour the mixed use facility and got to see the hotel floors, the condo floors and the penthouse...a 6,000 sq. ft. unfinished condo that went for $14 million for the raw space. The future owner is supposedly planning to drop another $5 million to finish the condo. Talk about great location though: right next to the Prudential Center, Newbury Street right next door, views of The Charles, Fenway and all of Boston from the floor to ceiling windows - beautiful. When we visited it was getting late so we got to see the sun setting over Boston as we were in the penthouse. Let me just tell you that the future owner will have a lot of great views! Just wanted to drop another line before exam week kicks in!
More later...
More later...
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
FINALS!!!
Well, we're not quite to Finals yet, but we are winding down our semester. We've been busy with final presentations and tying up the loose ends of all those semester projects and papers. Its been quite a stressful couple of weeks, but we are all looking forward to our vacations (though ours is cut short by the Plant Trek in January). We'll see how that goes. Some of my fellow LFM's have been doing a great job setting up our itinerary and creating interesting and exciting, not to mention entertaining, events for us on our two week trip! I'll try and post and upload some photos from our trip so you can get an insider's view. Hope that you are all doing well!
Take care and more later...
Take care and more later...
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Upcoming: Sloan Leaders In Service Trek to New Orleans
I applied and have been accepted to work on a Sloan Leaders in Service Trek (SLST) to New Orleans this February. A group of 20 Sloanies will be partnered with New Orleans' entrepreneurs in order to help in their re-development of the City of New Orleans. We will be collaborating with Idea Village in New Orleans to help out. It should be a great trek and one that will be a great experience for everyone involved. You can read more about Idea Village and some of the other projects that have been completed by other MBA's from around the country at http://www.ideavillage.org/ideacorps/about.php. You should all take a quick second to go to this site and read up (they also have a good video about the economic landscape and potential for development). I'll post again soon once we have been partnered with the local entrepreneur.
More later....
More later....
Monday, November 26, 2007
Your Thanksgiving Adventures?
I forgot to ask you all to send in any issues that you had this weekend while traveling home for the holidays. Not only is it a good way to vent, but it also gives us a chance to laugh with you on your misfortunes.
So post your adventures and hope to hear from you soon!
So post your adventures and hope to hear from you soon!
Northwest Needs Some Help
So, Thanksgiving weekend. Flying to Detroit to visit some friends and Alicia's family. 39 million travelers doing the same. What were we thinking?
So our flight from BOS - DTW was scheduled to leave at 7 pm on Thanksgiving Eve. We arrived around 3 pm to be there well in advance of all the crowds. Good plan but where were the people? We checked in and were through security in roughly 30 minutes. Now just 3+ hours to sit and wait for our flight. Around 6 o'clock there was an announcement that our flight would be delayed for an hour and that the new flight time is 8 pm. Okay, no problem. Just getting tired of sitting around the airport. Good thing I brought some homework and a good book. So at 7:45 the plane finally touches down and we are told that we are all going to have to board the plane by 8:25 with the doors closed so that we can "legally" take-off due to the fatigue rules for the pilots. So at 8:15 they start boarding the plane. At 8:30 Alicia and I still have not boarded the plane due to issues with the ticket checkers. At 8:45 the plane is boarded and ready to go. At 8:46 pm the captain gets on the intercom announcing that the flight is canceled due to the legality issues.
What a mess!?! They tell us on the plane that we all need to disembark and retrieve our luggage from the carousels and that we would be put up in the Airport Hilton for the night and that we would need to be back around 6 am the next morning as the flight would leave around 6:30 am but that they would leave "when the last passenger arrives." So, we all disembark and move to the carousels to get our luggage. A couple of irate customers go to "talk" to the customer service reps who say that we won't be able to retrieve our bags as they will stay on the plane overnight. Another round of irate customers go and "talk" to the reps and then another announcement is made that we will in fact be able to get our luggage. So after waiting another 10 minutes we get our bags and walk over to the Hotel where there is a line of roughly 100 people waiting to get their hotel room for the night. Talk about the late-night crunch: 160 frustrated passengers hitting the counter at 10 pm with two or three staff...that will stretch your capabilities. Alicia and I took one look at the line and went to the hotel bar to have a bite to eat and a much needed beer. After we headed in, roughly 50 more Northwest customers decided that that was the right place to be and joined us. So let me just say that watching the bar staff deal with the onslaught of people was much more impressive than both Northwest and Hilton staffs. There was no miscommunication just pure performance. Waiters/managers/kitchen staff all kicked in to help support the 50 new customers. It was pretty impressive to me that a hotel bar could deal with such a huge rush of customers where as the Hotel and the Airline didn't. I know that some of you out there are thinking that only 50 people to deal with shouldn't be that hard and that the airline and hotel had to deal with many more, but I'm willing to argue that the 50 people addition to the bar was a much bigger group to deal with compared to the average number of people that the hotel and airline have to deal with both on a daily basis as well as in the shock occurrence.
To make matters worse, on our flight back, we were delayed for the length of our flight (i.e. - we were still sitting on the tarmac when our flight should have arrived at Boston) while we waited for deicing (note that our plane was the only one that waited that long as they had to reload both deicers while they were deicing our plane...in doing so they actually had to deice the plane twice!). To make matters worse, every 20 minutes the co-pilot would get on the intercom and tell us that we would be "on our way in 5 minutes." Talk about frustrating the customers! I think that Northwest lost a lot of future customers on these two flights (more the first than the second).
Just relating this experience to school, I find that you can observe and learn observe many things from completely unrelated fields and apply them. A good example of this is demonstrated in Freakonomics, a great book that I just finished on the plane ride - thanks Northwest!
Hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving!
More later...
So our flight from BOS - DTW was scheduled to leave at 7 pm on Thanksgiving Eve. We arrived around 3 pm to be there well in advance of all the crowds. Good plan but where were the people? We checked in and were through security in roughly 30 minutes. Now just 3+ hours to sit and wait for our flight. Around 6 o'clock there was an announcement that our flight would be delayed for an hour and that the new flight time is 8 pm. Okay, no problem. Just getting tired of sitting around the airport. Good thing I brought some homework and a good book. So at 7:45 the plane finally touches down and we are told that we are all going to have to board the plane by 8:25 with the doors closed so that we can "legally" take-off due to the fatigue rules for the pilots. So at 8:15 they start boarding the plane. At 8:30 Alicia and I still have not boarded the plane due to issues with the ticket checkers. At 8:45 the plane is boarded and ready to go. At 8:46 pm the captain gets on the intercom announcing that the flight is canceled due to the legality issues.
What a mess!?! They tell us on the plane that we all need to disembark and retrieve our luggage from the carousels and that we would be put up in the Airport Hilton for the night and that we would need to be back around 6 am the next morning as the flight would leave around 6:30 am but that they would leave "when the last passenger arrives." So, we all disembark and move to the carousels to get our luggage. A couple of irate customers go to "talk" to the customer service reps who say that we won't be able to retrieve our bags as they will stay on the plane overnight. Another round of irate customers go and "talk" to the reps and then another announcement is made that we will in fact be able to get our luggage. So after waiting another 10 minutes we get our bags and walk over to the Hotel where there is a line of roughly 100 people waiting to get their hotel room for the night. Talk about the late-night crunch: 160 frustrated passengers hitting the counter at 10 pm with two or three staff...that will stretch your capabilities. Alicia and I took one look at the line and went to the hotel bar to have a bite to eat and a much needed beer. After we headed in, roughly 50 more Northwest customers decided that that was the right place to be and joined us. So let me just say that watching the bar staff deal with the onslaught of people was much more impressive than both Northwest and Hilton staffs. There was no miscommunication just pure performance. Waiters/managers/kitchen staff all kicked in to help support the 50 new customers. It was pretty impressive to me that a hotel bar could deal with such a huge rush of customers where as the Hotel and the Airline didn't. I know that some of you out there are thinking that only 50 people to deal with shouldn't be that hard and that the airline and hotel had to deal with many more, but I'm willing to argue that the 50 people addition to the bar was a much bigger group to deal with compared to the average number of people that the hotel and airline have to deal with both on a daily basis as well as in the shock occurrence.
To make matters worse, on our flight back, we were delayed for the length of our flight (i.e. - we were still sitting on the tarmac when our flight should have arrived at Boston) while we waited for deicing (note that our plane was the only one that waited that long as they had to reload both deicers while they were deicing our plane...in doing so they actually had to deice the plane twice!). To make matters worse, every 20 minutes the co-pilot would get on the intercom and tell us that we would be "on our way in 5 minutes." Talk about frustrating the customers! I think that Northwest lost a lot of future customers on these two flights (more the first than the second).
Just relating this experience to school, I find that you can observe and learn observe many things from completely unrelated fields and apply them. A good example of this is demonstrated in Freakonomics, a great book that I just finished on the plane ride - thanks Northwest!
Hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving!
More later...
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