Posts Tagged Under ‘College’

One More Business-School-Weekend Tale

Here’s a good one for all my NU buds:

One of the career panel discussions featuring Michigan alums had a panelist who had attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergrad. When they opened the panel up for questions, I asked another panelist what he thought about the consulting vs. general management track at Ross, then added a jokey question for the Wisconsin dude in which I asked, as a fellow Big Ten undergrad dealing with similar issues, how it felt to be in a conflicted football-fan state for grad school. My question got a chuckle from the panel and the audience, prompting the panelist to ask me which Big Ten school I attended for undergrad. When I answered “Northwestern”, the whole room laughed at me and at least one dude shouted, “That doesn’t count.”

Go ‘Cats!

Pat’s Going to Michigan

I got the good news on Friday: I’ll be heading this fall to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan to be part of the class of 2010.

I mentioned this fall that application essays were sapping my blogging resolve, so now yinz know what that was about. I’m definitely relieved to hear I was accepted, and more than that, I’m psyched to start grad school. I’m also hoping I don’t revert too much back to undergrad, but I don’t think business school students tend to beard-out quite as much as your average 20-year-old junior. (Note: that photo is of Microsoft’s staff in 1978, but it’s so awesome that I had to link it.)

“But Stack,” you may be saying, “where’d this MBA idea come from? I thought you were a web media guy.” You’re right: I am a web-media guy, and on first glance, it might be confusing. But the longer I’ve been doing what I do, the more I’ve realized an MBA is a solid idea.

I’m all about the success of online media: the format is still new, and media companies are finding their way through the changed climate, so it can be a scary thing for those steering the media to where it needs to be. Good websites are built on three legs — content, technology and business — and having worked a lot on the first two, I knew that strengthening the third one would help me out in the field. There’s a lot of harsh rhetoric on both sides about who’s going to “win” in the new / old media divide, but non-suckas know that it’s a mutually beneficial relationship up in this. Both old and new media need knowledgeable people to help guide the industry along and use the web’s opportunities. That’s where I’m coming from.

Journalists have long believed very strongly in the separation of business and editorial, and I share that opinion. But I think there’s a definite role for website managers who can navigate both sides of the field: an appreciation for the vital democratic role of the media with the ability to keep the site economically thriving is what’s needed here, and in a nutshell, I’m going to b-school to play that role.

And for the record, I’m agnostic on the football question right now. Sure, Michigan will help with future success, but I lived in Columbus from ages zero to one-month, my mom’s family is all over Central Ohio, and I can hardly turn my back on the greatest NU football moment of all time:

Conflicted.

Busch-Swilling Bolsheviks

This one goes out to my senior-year apartment crew.

I was once discussing political philosophy with my dad, and we both agreed that under ideal theoretical conditions, a socialist utopia could be pretty cool: from abilities according to needs and all that lot. (Before someone from the future reads that and declares me a godless pinko, keep going.) But as dad pointed out, the fact that every utopian philosophy throughout history has failed applies just the same to communism, and the millions who were starved, repressed, detained and killed by benevolent guardians of the proletariat like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge indicate that, hey: communism hasn’t had such a great track record.

The conservatives among us argue that socialism fails because human nature is inherently corrupt, and thus people are always out to get theirs no matter what the system. Then they see the wealth generated by capitalist societies, and naturally want it for themselves. The leftist argument states that communism failed because of constant foreign anti-communist interference, and that capitalism’s economic impact on the lower classes has been too effectively degrading for them to rise up in revolution.

Those theories both have some truth to them, but that’s some heavy theory. For a simpler explanation, here’s one from personal experience.

Yeah dude, I’ll get in on that five-year plan next week, for real.

Senior year of college, five friends and I lived in a big apartment just off campus. We had just spent a year living in our fraternity house — still easily claiming the No. 1 spot as the filthiest place I have ever lived — and we thought, “F this, we’re seniors and men with standards: instead of nothing but Busch Light, we’ll now keep Rolling Rock or Miller Genuine Draft in the fridge in addition to the Busch Light. And while we’re at it, we’re going to keep our apartment in great shape. Not only do we deserve a clean living space, but you never know when some fine ladies will be stopping by to be flattered by our well-groomed apartment and Carlo Rossi wine.”

Planning for the glory of this collective effort, we made up a chore wheel that rotated each week so that each person would cycle through bathroom duty, floors, kitchen, trash, etc. We were pumped, we were planned, and we were in full agreement on just what we had to do to achieve our collective goal.

Then the next weekend came along, and that was pretty much the end of that.

There’s no good reason this plan shouldn’t have worked out. We all clearly wanted a clean apartment, and were smart, motivated dudes. The tasks were divided fairly, so that nobody felt an undue burden. This was a big group payoff for a relatively small amount of effort, and yet it still didn’t get done, mostly for a variety of personal reasons. Some of us laxly defined “clean” as only leaving boxers on the bathroom floor for three days instead of a week; others were so stringent about standards of cleanliness (substitute this for “party loyalty”) that several dudes stopped cleaning altogether in protest. Now we had the infamous free-rider problem, and it was back to growths in the refrigerator before you knew it.

Perhaps we could have increased each person’s stake in the outcome somehow and things would have worked. But to me, when you can’t get people to participate in a collective effort on something that is right there, solvable, in front of their freakin’ face every day, how in the hell are they going to do it when the impacts are esoteric and spread among millions? Moral of the story is that planning is one thing, but level of involvement is wildly variable.

And college is awesome.