Stanford GSB, Entry 5: The Second Week: Study Groups, Blue Angels, and Russians

We are now two weeks into classes (Two weeks and One Day since I’m posting this on Monday Night) – that means our “pre-term” is almost over (it’s actually only two and half weeks long), and after some wrap-up activities this week, we’ll move into the real “term” next week, when we’ll have grades and everything.

So here are some notes and observations about the second week. I’ve already given an overview of what we’ve learned in Strategy in my posting over the weekend – click on the link to entry 4 to the right if you’re interested in learning more about that class. I’ve promised to do the same for Microeconomics and Managerial Accounting, but I seem to keep getting distracted with reading assignments and study group meetings and what Professor Flanagan, our Economics professor, calls “merriment and diversions” - so will get to it eventually.

Read more!

#1: Our Study Group(s) Finally Seem to be Humming Along.

Each of the study groups seem to have settled into a pattern in the second week (this is good news, since there are only three weeks in the whole pre-term). During the first week, I heard many complaints about Study groups (no, I’m not telling who complained about whom, that’s confidential); By the second week most of the groups had gotten beyond the initial shock of having to negotiate with each other and started plowing through the large amount of reading and started working on the two group assignments we each had to present.

For example, my study group, after some negotiation, agreed to have some evening sessions in addition to the morning sessions, in order to balance the burden between the “night people” and the “morning people” (Yes, this took a little negotiation, and it’s still on-going!). We even ordered pizza in the GSB building at our first evening session – Round Table Pizza (a California chain with California-type prices - it cost us like $60 for two large pizzas – outrageous. It took me like 10 minutes to explain to the guy on the phone that GSB wasn’t an apartment building).

To counteract all the reading, we are assigning individual chapters to group members, who are responsible for creating summaries so that not all of us have to read every single chapter before every single class. (Oh wait-a-minute, our professors might be reading this blog, so what I really meant to say was that each of us is doing all of the readings assigned by our professors before every single class!)

We’ve also gotten to know each others strengths and weaknesses pretty quickly. For example: B. is great at presenting and PowerPoint, but not so experienced at accounting, L. is great at accounting and Excel but doesn’t like presenting so much, V. is really good with IRR and NPV, but likes to “discuss” strategy A LOT and thinks that 1 hour in the morning is not enough to discuss a single strategy case, while P. likes to keep our strategy discussions short and takes great notes on the whiteboard, but doesn’t like to create notes about the econ and accounting reading, J. is a good all around mediating force in the group, and, along with H., is pretty good at economics, and I’m, well, you’ll have to ask them! Though I certainly win the award for showing up late at most early morning study groups. [NOTE: names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent].

We’ve also gotten to know about each other’s personal circumstances - a few of us are married and have kids, while another needed to go out and buy his Porsche the morning of our case presentations (turns out the seller flaked out on him that day so we he was part of the presentation after all - this Porsche, if he buys it, might appear in the blog again this year I'm sure). Two of us (including yours truly) are still entrepreneurs with international businesses while at school (mine is in Pakistan, while the other is in Russia), so we often have to keep u with late night calls to our companies.

Despite all these differences, or perhaps because of them, we’ve all been willing to listen to each other and support each other [for the most part, except for the occasional yelling match like the one which broke out at one of our 7:45 am meetings one day last week – I’m sorry I can’t tell you any much more about that since I was still in bed asleep dreaming about the reading I had done late the night before ].

So the good news is: The Study Groups are finally working!

Now, for the bad news: Now that we’ve all gotten to know each other and have good habits forming in our study group, guess what? The pre-term is about over and we’ll have to form entirely new study groups and will have to go through this entire process again with the new groups starting next week. Doh!

#2: The Pressure is Off, For the Moment.

Each Study Group had to make two presentations based on “cases” – one for Managerial Accounting and one for Microeconomics. These presentations created the only “real” pressure during this pre-term (though there is lots of imagined pressure given all the readings and problems that were assigned to us, believe you me).

My study group did both presentations on Thursday, and since these were the only formal assignments we had to “hand in” during this pre-term, we’re effectively done. If you saw us on campus last weekend, or see us this week, and if we’re looking kind of relaxed, it’s not just the California weather…it’s cause we’ve already handed in our assignments and oh yeah, the pre-term isn’t graded anyways!

In general, the Sloan Fellows are a co-operative group, rather than a competitive one, at least from what we’ve seen so far. The program is designed to encourage a feeling of “we’re all in this together” from study group level up to the level of the entire class of Fellows, including the families and partners. We’ve had (at least) two alumni of the program speak to us thus far – one was a Sloan ’87 graduate who will be teaching the entrepreneur workshop later in the fall, and the other was John Foley ’97 (see the section below titled “I want to Fly Jet’s, Sir!”). They both told us how the class banded together and helped each other out. In John’s case, the class decided as a group that they would have an explicitly defined mission of “leaving no one behind”.

This is probably true of the two-year MBA’s as well, since they also are taught collaboratively to work in study groups (though we'll find out about them soon enough; they're just starting to arrive on campus this week).

But it seems that not all grad schools are like that. I heard a story from a friend of mine about one of the nation's top law schools. He said that many law school students are very competitive, because of their student rankings, and he offered up the following story: A law student that he knew, in his third year, he was ill and missed class one day.

I found this story unbelievable. So I asked him again to make sure I’d heard him right and if it was true. He insisted it was. This seems to me (to put it politely) just plain silly. I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, then: NOTE FROM A GRADUATE BUSINES