WP Carey Orientation, Day 2
Day two kicked off the first of our 12-hour+ days. First we had a student services orientation, which was mostly covering stuff like academic dishonesty and other stuff that everyone should know by now, so it was pretty boring.
Oh, I forgot to mention on Day 1 -- at all sorts of random points through this orientation, there are two guys -- one with a sweet digial photo camera, and one with a digital video camera, taking pictures of us. It was like being on a reality TV show, where the camera is always there. You really learn how to ignore it fast.
We had a short coffee break, and they actually had fruit punch to drink. I don't know if you know this, but I am a fruit punch whore. I LOVE fruit punch. If there was a fruit punch tree, my whole back yard would be planted with them.
After that, we had intro to technology, where we learned how to use the blackboard system. Blackboard is an online-classroom system, comprised of several parts. There's a message board for leaving messages for your cohort-members, or just your team members. There's the modules, which are instructional tutorials on class subjects. There's 1 module per week (and the classes are 6 weeks long -- 5 weeks of instruction and 1 week of finals). There's also a quiz and some homework exercises. So we learned how to use all of that stuff, which was easy for someone like me who is computer literate. Even someone who is computer challenged would do okay.
We had lunch in the MU on campus -- they had like 7 restaurants in the MU (including a jamba juice), some of which weren't open. I ate at Schlotschkys (sp?), a (Jewish?) deli sandwich chain. It was pretty decent. The name always reminds me of "Chotchkys" from Office Space.
After lunch, we had our first faculty introduction. Our first class is Managerial Decision Analysis, less affectionately known as statistics. Unlike the stat classes I took at UCD, two things really stood out as being cool:
1) The book we are using uses Excel to do all the calculations, so no more finding the average of fifteen 10-digit numbers
2) The focus of the class is on what statistics are particularily useful to managers, and how to use them. So rather than being derivation based (eg. prove this), it's more practicality based (eg. learning about scatterplots, standard deviation and what it represents, regression analysis, etc...
As a result, rather than dreading statistics, I actually found myself looking forward to class. Weird, huh? Statistics isn't bad when it's not a bunch of gruntwork, and we get to make cool graphs! (yes, I am a dork)
After lunch, we had the team challenge. This was the big event for the day. The big idea here was to get us moving around and interacting with each other, and try and break down some of the barriers between us. In other words, icebreakers. In other words, HUMILIATION. Because humiliation really is the best icebreaker.
They started off with the worst event BY FAR, called monster medley. Basically, the person in charge told us to remember the first concert we ever went to. Then pick a song by that artist. Then pick a line out of that song. So each person in your group has 1 line, and you have 6 group members. Concatinate those lines together, and you have a new song that is 6 lines long. Now, not only did we have to SING our new song in front of the rest of the groups, we had to CHOREOGRAPH it. In about 20 minutes. As you can imagine, they were BAD. Really bad. But everyone had to do it, and afterwords, we were all thoroughly humbled. The rest of the events were more team-building and leadership oriented. As examples, figuring out how to navigate through an invisible maze, and then getting everyone through it. Playing the telephone game (where you pass a message down through a chain of people and see how it gets permuted from it's original meaning at the end). Trying to get everyone balanced on a thin rail. And putting a rubber band over your head so it covers your top lip, and then trying to get it onto your bottom lip without using hands. I can still taste the rubber band. Ick!
All said, it was pretty entertaining, except the monster medley. And, of course, the two camera guys were there the whole time trying to get interesting/funny shots of us. They got one of me with the rubber band in my mouth that was absolutely horrible.
That evening we went out to a local irish pub and had lots of appetizers and some beer. I had a cream ale that poured like a guinness but was much sweeter. It was interesting, and I kind of liked it. I also got a chance to get to know my teammate Matt better, and we struck up somewhat of a friendship. We got back to the hotel at around 8:30 -- for a 12 1/2 hour day. I took some codine and crashed. Hard.
Oh, I forgot to mention on Day 1 -- at all sorts of random points through this orientation, there are two guys -- one with a sweet digial photo camera, and one with a digital video camera, taking pictures of us. It was like being on a reality TV show, where the camera is always there. You really learn how to ignore it fast.
We had a short coffee break, and they actually had fruit punch to drink. I don't know if you know this, but I am a fruit punch whore. I LOVE fruit punch. If there was a fruit punch tree, my whole back yard would be planted with them.
After that, we had intro to technology, where we learned how to use the blackboard system. Blackboard is an online-classroom system, comprised of several parts. There's a message board for leaving messages for your cohort-members, or just your team members. There's the modules, which are instructional tutorials on class subjects. There's 1 module per week (and the classes are 6 weeks long -- 5 weeks of instruction and 1 week of finals). There's also a quiz and some homework exercises. So we learned how to use all of that stuff, which was easy for someone like me who is computer literate. Even someone who is computer challenged would do okay.
We had lunch in the MU on campus -- they had like 7 restaurants in the MU (including a jamba juice), some of which weren't open. I ate at Schlotschkys (sp?), a (Jewish?) deli sandwich chain. It was pretty decent. The name always reminds me of "Chotchkys" from Office Space.
After lunch, we had our first faculty introduction. Our first class is Managerial Decision Analysis, less affectionately known as statistics. Unlike the stat classes I took at UCD, two things really stood out as being cool:
1) The book we are using uses Excel to do all the calculations, so no more finding the average of fifteen 10-digit numbers
2) The focus of the class is on what statistics are particularily useful to managers, and how to use them. So rather than being derivation based (eg. prove this), it's more practicality based (eg. learning about scatterplots, standard deviation and what it represents, regression analysis, etc...
As a result, rather than dreading statistics, I actually found myself looking forward to class. Weird, huh? Statistics isn't bad when it's not a bunch of gruntwork, and we get to make cool graphs! (yes, I am a dork)
After lunch, we had the team challenge. This was the big event for the day. The big idea here was to get us moving around and interacting with each other, and try and break down some of the barriers between us. In other words, icebreakers. In other words, HUMILIATION. Because humiliation really is the best icebreaker.
They started off with the worst event BY FAR, called monster medley. Basically, the person in charge told us to remember the first concert we ever went to. Then pick a song by that artist. Then pick a line out of that song. So each person in your group has 1 line, and you have 6 group members. Concatinate those lines together, and you have a new song that is 6 lines long. Now, not only did we have to SING our new song in front of the rest of the groups, we had to CHOREOGRAPH it. In about 20 minutes. As you can imagine, they were BAD. Really bad. But everyone had to do it, and afterwords, we were all thoroughly humbled. The rest of the events were more team-building and leadership oriented. As examples, figuring out how to navigate through an invisible maze, and then getting everyone through it. Playing the telephone game (where you pass a message down through a chain of people and see how it gets permuted from it's original meaning at the end). Trying to get everyone balanced on a thin rail. And putting a rubber band over your head so it covers your top lip, and then trying to get it onto your bottom lip without using hands. I can still taste the rubber band. Ick!
All said, it was pretty entertaining, except the monster medley. And, of course, the two camera guys were there the whole time trying to get interesting/funny shots of us. They got one of me with the rubber band in my mouth that was absolutely horrible.
That evening we went out to a local irish pub and had lots of appetizers and some beer. I had a cream ale that poured like a guinness but was much sweeter. It was interesting, and I kind of liked it. I also got a chance to get to know my teammate Matt better, and we struck up somewhat of a friendship. We got back to the hotel at around 8:30 -- for a 12 1/2 hour day. I took some codine and crashed. Hard.
posted by Tarindel @ 2:47 PM
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