WP Carey Orientation, Day 4 & 5

I'm going to cover both of these days because day 4 and 5 are so related.

Day 4 started with two more faculty introductions, which by now we were all getting bored of. But it was good information. Around noon, we started in on the case competition. I'd never done a case competition before, so let me explain the idea to you: basically, you're given a real-life business case to analyze, and you have to make a presentation to a set of judges (who are all ex-executives) who grade you on both the content of your presentation and the presentation itself. Our case had to do with the Marriott hotel company, and whether a business proposal they were putting before the board of directors was a good idea. The head judge, who was explaining what to do to us said "basically, your presentation can either be why this is or isn't a good idea, or you can come up with some other idea to fix the problem at hand. Creativity will be rewarded".

We basically were given 9 hours to read a 10-page case summary, followed by 20 pages of financial figures, asset lists, and other assorted material, decide on a course of action, create a powerpoint presentation, and then work on presenting it and make sure we all know enough to answer questions from the judges. 9 hours sounds like a lot of time, and it would be for a single person to do the whole thing -- but when you introduce group deliberation in the mix, things REALLY slow down. My group, after deliberating for about 4 hours finally decided not to support Marriot's proposal, and introduce our own ideas. We hauled balls to get it done, and eeked out our presentation just before 10pm. My portion was a couple of powerpoint slides on the state of the economy and real estate markets around the time period where the case took place, as well as why we decided to reject the proposal and strike out with our own ideas -- It was seriously just like being on the apprentice, where you have a set amount of time to do a very difficult task. Complete with cameras taking pictures of you! We stayed up until midnight working on our presentations, and then we went to bed. We had literally worked for about 14 hours straight.

The next day (day 5) was the competition. We were all very nervous about presenting our case to the judges since only one of our group members had done something like this before. But everyone did a really phenominal job, and our presentation came off really well! I was super nervous, but I pulled it together and did a pretty good job. There were handshakes and hugs all around when we were done. We really felt like, as a team, we had produced, bonded, and done a good job.

Later that day, the judges told us what they liked and didn't like about our presentations, and said they were generally impressed with everyone's work. We asked some of the judges about our presentation in general, and they said they felt it was off-topic -- apparently the head judge had left them with the impression that the case was supposed to be judged on the merits of why we accepted/rejected the proposal Marriot had put forth, and not on our own solutions. We were all pretty mad at that, because the head judge had told us that coming up with our own ideas was a viable, and even highly valued option. But the point of the exercise had been served, which was to bond us and get us working together as a team.

After another happy hour, and a closing dinner, we all went to bed because we were so tired none of us really wanted to party or celebrate. :)

We are old.

All said, the orientation was a really positive experience, but I was ready to come home by the time it ended. I dove into the material for the first class yesterday and it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I'm sure it will ramp up in difficult as the weeks go on... but right now, I am full of energy and optimism about this program and I am ready to kick some ass and get good grades.

Wish me luck!