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NOVEMBER 2000 MBA JOURNAL:PRE-TERM/ORIENTATION Michele Davies: Preterm/Orientation - Preparing for B-School "The college orientation was made up of such civilized activities as having champagne with the warden [college president] before the fancy, formal dinner in Hall that concluded with some of Keble College's famously good port."
Gardens and groves! your presence overpowers - William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Oxford, May 30, 1820 I'm still getting used to the fact that I'm living in a place Wordsworth wrote poetry about. Every morning on my way to lectures I walk down a little cobblestone lane that comes out near the pub where C. S. Lewis used to go for a pint. There are windy, little medieval alleyways, people wearing academic gowns (we have to wear them every night to dinner), dreamy spires, and cloistered colleges with big wooden gates that close at night, shutting out the rest of the world, not to mention the rowing crews on the Thames and competitive croquet teams. Because of the structure of Oxford, all of the MBA students have had, in essence, two orientations, one to the business school and one to our colleges. Oxford is made up of thirty-some colleges, which are how one is affiliated to the university. Even professors must belong to a college. The colleges provide housing, social programming, tutoring, athletic teams, and a dining hall for graduate and undergraduate students. The university then organizes the professors into faculties. The Said Business School (SBS) is one of the faculties within the university. I am a member of Keble College, which was built in 1870, and in its high Victorian brick architecture contrasts with older, better-known, limestone colleges such as Trinity, University, and Baliol. It is a large college, with about 500 students. The members of the Middle Common Room, i.e., the graduate students, are highly international and very interesting. I think I may have only met about four British graduate students in my college. The others range from a South African Rhodes Scholar doing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering to a Canadian investigating the transmission of Chaucerian texts. Having attended graduate school in the U.S., where it is very difficult to meet people outside of your department, I am very pleased with the Oxford system of throwing graduate students of different disciplines together. My college includes nine MBA students as well, which makes up a significant portion of the class total of 97. This is only the fifth intake of MBA students for the Said Business School, so there is still very much a sense of this as an evolving and dynamic institution. There is a lot of excitement amongst the faculty and administration about the new building, which is scheduled to be completed by June 2001. Mine will be the last class to use the facilities in The Old Radcliffe Infirmary. That sounds romantic and quaint, right? In fact, it is a fully functioning hospital, complete with wheelchairs lined up in the corridor and signs pointing to the x-ray facilities. We are in our own self-contained center on the second floor, so we don't have to be terribly aware of the medical excitement around us. I imagine, however, that my class will be able to regard future classes with a certain smugness that we were some of the pioneers, not housed in the cushy, award-winning architecture of a new school closer to the center of town as they will be. The college orientation was made up of such civilized activities as having champagne with the warden (college president) before the fancy, formal dinner in Hall that concluded with some of Keble College's famously good port. Because graduate students are well integrated into the life of the colleges and university, we also had a fair to sign up for everything from the Africa Society to the Gliding Club to the Salsa Society. The Said orientation was a more structured affair. We started off with a day of team-building exercises centered on the subject of group work and how to work in teams. We had filled out personality-type tests before arriving, and it was during this first day that I discovered that I tend to be a "Monitor-Evaluator" in group situations, according to the Belbin Team Roles test. Apparently, this means that I am the practical one who can think of what the roadblocks to a certain course of action will be. This team-building day was meant to introduce us to about a third of the class, as well as to explicitly tackle the issues of group work and group dynamics that we will need to put into practice in our study groups, and the two major group projects that we will have during the course of the year. For example, the first major group project is the New Business Development project, which will take place during the winter term, and involve four people working either on an entrepreneurial idea of their own or one sponsored by a corporate sponsor. These involve taking an idea from the inception stage to a business plan in the space of three months. Knowing what kind of role you tend to play in groups is vital. If all four people are wonderful at coming up with ideas, but bad at follow-through, the project will suffer significantly. The next two days were more standard introductory information sessions. There are welcomes by the director of the MBA program, an economist with a fabulous lecturing style, and by a panel of outgoing students, some headed off to investment banking or consulting jobs and others making a go of turning their New Business Development projects into real businesses. We also get coffee and tea, introductions to the library and career services, and a fancy evening reception sponsored by McKinsey. Besides the shock of realizing that I had been talking to recruiters on my second day of business school, two themes stand out in my mind from these days. The first is the dynamic nature of this young and growing school, especially as it contrasts with the 800-year history of the University of Oxford. The second was that in a short 12 months, I would know all 97 of the strangers sitting around me, and no doubt come to treasure some of them. This class of fewer than 100 students is made up of people from over 30 countries, with the largest group being about a dozen from the U.S. The rest come from such far-flung places as India, Kenya, and Brazil, and those closer to home from Sweden, France, and Ireland. Yes, there are even a few British in the crowd. For instance, the MBA students in my college consist of two Chinese, a Singaporean, an Indian, three Americans, a Greek Cypriot, and a South African, who have come from backgrounds of publishing, accounting, advertising, the military, power generation, trading, and computer manufacturing. I expect that I am going to work hard, play hard, and learn a lot. Because the course lasts only one year, the schedule is going to be packed, and I imagine that finding a balance among studying, figuring out a career aim, and having fun is going to be a challenge.  Michele Davies  | | Learn about your online education options |
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