One more week of the core

Yesterday I attended a roundtable about media and technology. We discussed, among other things, AP considering cracking down on non-subscribers using their headlines and linking to their content. Good luck with that ...

Oddly, it's the third time newspapers have come up at school this week. In Game Theory, we discussed a hypothetical case in which two companies were considering starting up daily newspapers in the same city. Of course, the professor pointed out that this was an outdated example. And at yesterday's debate-team callbacks, one of the topics was whether newspapers should be able to be 501(c)3 nonprofits. Unfortunately, by random selection that was the one topic I had to sit out on ... Instead, my topics had to do with TARP funds and healthcare reform. Not my finest hour, and I didn't make the team. I would've loved to have done it, although I am not sure my training in tit-for-tat high-school debate style was exactly what they were looking for. (Well, that's obvious ...) Maybe I should've been more passionate and bombastic.

Meanwhile, our core classes are winding down. Hard to be believe ... kinda. Classes end a week from today, and then exams begin the following Monday. Although I'm all for learning, I hope we don't cover too much material in econ and accounting over these next couple lectures, because I'm already a little behind as it is. After the core, we start the "organizational perspectives" courses, a cornerstone of Yale SOM's integrated curriculum.

What those multisyllabic words mean is that instead of taking traditional "silo" classes like finance and marketing, we take team-taught courses that each look at business from a particular perspective. So next quarter's classes are Customer, Investor, Competitor, Sourcing & Managing Funds and Intro to Negotiation. So this will be the fun stuff, it seems.

Not that the core hasn't been fun and all ...

I have plans to visit some old college friends this weekend in Providence and Boston. I realize, though, that this would be an ideal weekend to get caught up on studying ... So I'm considering a postponement, although philosophically I feel that to have a life of suitable work-life balance I need to learn how to make those choices now and deal with the consequences. I remember when I was going to undergrad my brother once advised me, when given the choice between staying in and studying and going out and doing something, I should always choose going out, because I'll remember that years down the road, but I won't remember staying in and studying. True ... but I do, like, need to learn accounting and econ and stuff.