1. Condi Rice is teaching two of my classes this week. I think she just published a bunch of new business school cases and is coming to the GSB to teach them to us in our "Global Context of Management" class. That is pretty cool in my book. I definitely read those cases a bit more closely than I usually do. Don't want to be cold-called out by Condi!
2. Trips were assigned. We had to fill out a ranking and then some algorithm sorted through them to place people. I got a trip in my first choice bucket and am really excited. But troublingly, about 10% of my class was not placed on any trip. There just aren't enough spots and so some people got left out of the mix.
This is unacceptable for several reasons:
a) The GSB promotes these trips aggressively during admit weekend without mentioning that 10% of the class doesn't get one.
b) A "global experience" is required to graduate and while there are other ways to fulfill that requirement, the trips are by far the least time-consuming and the most popular.
c) There is no good reason for there to not be enough trips. Stanford claims that these trips are subsidized and that budget cuts have forced them to reduce the number of trips, but most trips cost $3-6K. How subsidized can they be?!
d) A small number of both second-years and significant others are allowed on the trip. It is non-sensical for tuition-paying MBA1s to be excluded in favor of MBA2s who have already fulfilled their global requirement and significant others of MBA1s.
As one of my classmates said, no algorithm, no matter how "fair", can fix the lack of trip spots!
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