A day in the life – spring semester

Along the same line as my post back in July, here’s a running diary of my Friday February 19, 2010:

8:00AM – Wake up after multiple snooze button presses and get ready for the day.  Kerin was up before for work early today so she took care of walking Charlie Murphy.

8:40AM – Walk about 300 yards to the subway station where I catch the train to campus.  I live at the Davis Square stop and MIT is at the Kendall stop.  I can get from my front door to a class in about 20 minutes when the trains are running on time.

9:00AM – Get to the LGO office about an hour before my first class for the day so I have a chance to talk to a few people and restock the LGO store.  The store is a student run alternative to the vending machines around school.  A group of us volunteers every semester to make costco runs to buy snacks, sodas, and other items in bulk.  We then sell them at a small margin and use the proceeds at the end of the year to party.

10:00AM – Friday’s are recitation days for some of my classes.  The system dynamics session today covers some of the topics on the homework that will be due next week.

11:30AM – I grab lunch from the Sloan cafeteria and eat in the LGO office with other people.

12:00PM – I meet with my tiger teams group and an academic advisor.  We’re working with a company called EnerNOC this semester to evaluate and offer improvement ideas for their supply chain.

1:00PM – Marketing Strategy class.  This is my only “official” class that meets on a Friday and it’s only a half semester class so I can deal with it.  Today’s class is a case discussion examining the business strategy differences between Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

2:30PM – Meet with my tiger team again to visit EnerNOC at their corporate offices in downtown Boston.

3:00PM – We arrive at EnerNOC and spend the next hour and a half learning about their current supply chain and asking numerous questions to help us understand what we should spend the semester working on.

4:30PM – I meet up with Kerin downtown because EnerNOC is a few blocks from her office.  We ride the train back to Davis Square.

5:15PM – Davis Square is a great little neighborhood with lots of shops, restaurants, and bars.  We grab a couple of sandwiches at a deli right near the subway station on our walk back to our apartment.

6:15PM – We take the subway to Harvard Square to meet a bunch of other people for a Harvard vs. Cornell hockey game.  There are a couple of Cornell alums in LGO and they wanted to watch the Big Red beat up on Harvard.  Cornell won 3-0 and it wasn’t even that close.

9:00PM – A group of us go back to Davis Square for BBQ at Red Bones.

10:30PM – We walk over to Spirit Bar a few blocks away to hang out and watch some of the Olympics.  Women’s curling was on and everyone in the bar was getting into the match.  I guess beer makes any sporting event more exciting.

1:00AM – We walk home from the bar after a long but fun day.    

Spring classes and waiting for the internship decisions

Two weeks ago was internship fest which has been covered in some of the other LGO blogs, so I won’t rehash it here.  Suffice it to say I did 19 interviews in 3 days.  It was definitely an interesting process.  We ranked our preferences for what jobs we liked last Friday and now we’re all waiting to see what the results of the algorithm will be and who we’ll be working for.  We should know by sometime next week if everything goes smoothly.  I recommended that we reveal the internship matches in a big group with a game show (press your luck) theme, but I’m not sure we’ll get to have that much fun. 

Classes started last week and I’m taking just shy of a full load this semester.  I also front loaded my classes so after spring break I will only be in a classroom nine hours per week.  I should have lots of time to enjoy the weather. 

15.025 – Game Theory – This is primarily a theory based class taught by a professor from UC Berkley.  He covers a variety of types of “games” typically encountered in real life and we discuss how players should and do react.

15.615 – Business Law – Taught by a former lawyer, this has been interesting so far.  Topics cover the basics of things like product liability, fiduciary responsibility, and real life legal cases that have affected businesses and managers.

15.665 – Power and Negotiation – This course is simulation based meaning every week we work in groups to learn from simulated negotiating scenarios.  We are able to try different styles with no risk.  It’s nice to practice negotiating a job offer before it’s the real deal.

15.834 – Strategic Marketing – An all case based class covering topics like quantifying customer service scores to make investment decisions.

15.871 – System Dynamics – One of the most well known topics taught at Sloan because it was invented here.  This is an interesting class about how  to model complex systems.  Our first homework assignment was to build a model that replicated data from the SARS outbreak in Taiwan in 2003.

ESD.267 – Supply Chain Planning – This is an engineering class that many LGOs take (there are 25 of us in the class this semester).  It is a good foundational course for topics like inventory policy, postponement, and supplier management.

ESD.941 – Tiger Teams – Project based class where teams of 3 to 5 of us work with area businesses on real industry problems.  My team is working with EnerNoc, a company that among other things works to coordinate demand responses during peak energy events.  We will be working to improve the supply chain they use to get monitoring equipment delivered and installed for new clients.

News from the road – plant trek

I’m writing this post from Austin, Texas where our class is spending the weekend after an awesome first week of plant trek.  We started on Monday in Seattle visiting Boeing, went to Phoenix on Wednesday to see Amazon, and LA on Friday to see Amgen.  This coming week we’ll see Dell and Cisco in Austin before flying to Raleigh to see Novartis and then Detroit to see GM and Ford. 

It has been an excellent opportunity to see some world class operations with a bunch of other people who really love this kind of stuff.  We also have Professor Shoji Shiba, a world renowned Total Quality Management expert with experience observing hundreds if not thousands of operations all over the world.  His perspective has helped us all see something knew. 

Here is a run down of what we have seen so far:

Boeing – We had the opportunity to see two Boeing production facilities.  The Everett, Washington facility, which produces the 747, 777, and the new 787 Dreamliner, is simply enormous.  It is very impressive to see a building with assembly lines full of jumbo jets.  We got to walk through in-process planes and see some of the assembly operations up close.  That night we got to tour the Dreamliner Gallery building which was built to help customers make design decisions when ordering a new 787.  We got to take turns sitting in a mock cockpit, and saw all the configuration options for seats, equipment and interior designs.

The next day we went to the Renton, Washington plant where the 737 is assembled.  This building was also very impressive and the operation had more of an assembly line feel.  Site leadership talked to us about their lean journey that started in the 90’s and continues today.  It was amazing for the class to learn that the 737 model has been so popular that the plant has a five year backlog. 

Amazon – We visited a fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona to get a look at Amazon operations.   The building was about 600,000 square feet and very well laid out.  It was obvious that Amazon has taken 5S principles to heart throughout the organization.  We walked through the process while Amazon leadership described their impressive throughput rates and focus on continuous improvement.  I was also surprised to learn that they develop all of their own software internally to enable their process.  The importance that Amazon places on leadership was obvious during our time in Phoenix and our class was grateful that so many operations leaders were able to spend time with us.  Amazon flew in approximately eight senior leaders (many were LGO alumni) to share their stories with us.

Amgen – Our next stop took us to Amgen headquarters in  Thousand Oaks, California which is about forty minutes from Los Angeles.  We toured their large corporate campus where they showed us how operations support the development of new drugs and produce product for clinical trials.  At their headquarters, Amgen has a pilot plant capable of making many different types and batch sizes of test products as well as a fill and finish plant that packages product shipped in from other facilities for use in clinical trials.  We also saw the impressive quality labs and a hand pack and ship operation for delivering product to hospitals performing trials all over the world. 

The other huge benefit of the plant trek trip is how much time we have to hang out together as a class.  We have a number of stories and adventures from the past week including a late night swim in the pacific ocean and a four man epic Las Vegas road trip.  Many others have said plant trek is the high point of the LGO experience and I can definitely see why.       

Plant Trek

I leave tomorrow for what I’m sure will be one of the best experiences of the LGO program – plant trek.  It’s a two week cross country jaunt with visits to eight partner companies in six cities.  Our whole class and a few professors will spend 13 days seeing a variety of operations and hearing from partner company leaders.

We will also have a great time.  One of my classmates took the opportunity to create some awesome heavy metal style tour t-shirts so we can travel in style.  They show all of our tour stops and dates, and have some face melting graphics on the front.  It’s been dubbed the “LGO 2010 Wips and Supply Chains Tour” …get it?

Our first stop is in Seattle to see two Boeing sites where they build some of the largest and most complex machines in the world.      

It’s pronounced ‘Nucular’

Actually, no it isn’t, but if that’s how Homer Simpson wants to say it then it’s okay by me. 

One of the awesome things about LGO is you get to learn about all of the important business stuff from leading big brain business people, but you also get to learn about technical stuff from leading big brain technical people.  No other business school shares a campus with the best engineering school in the world.

One of my classmates (and summer team member) Natallia organized a tour of the MIT nuclear research reactor yesterday and it was pretty amazing.  A group of about 13 of us spent three hours with Ed Lau, the Superintendent of Reactor Operations, who was kind enough to answer all of our questions and show us how the facility works.  We got to see the control room, the process they use to remove spent fuel from the reactor, their medical research setup and a bunch of other stuff. 

I was intrigued by a form of cancer research established as a joint program between MIT and Harvard.  From the website explaining how the process works:

Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is a binary form of cancer therapy which uses a boron-containing compound that preferentially concentrates in tumor sites. The tumor site is then irradiated by a neutron beam. The neutrons in the beam interact with the boron in the tumor to cause the boron atom to split into an alpha particle and lithium nucleus. Both of these particles have a very short range (about one cellular diameter) and cause significant damage to the cell in which it is contained. In this way, damage is done to the tumor cell, while largely sparing healthy tissue.

Seemed pretty amazing and then they showed us their diagram of how the reactor and the patient interact:

I could just imagine sitting in a room with a doctor as he (or she) explained to me that they were going to aim a nuclear reactor at my head.

Walking home it made me realize how fortunate I am to have the opportunity to participate in LGO.  I can’t think of another place in the world with so many innovative thinkers, cutting edge facilities, and interesting visitors.  I really do learn something new everyday. 

Fall semester home stretch

Word on the LGO street is that the first two semesters (summer, fall) of the program are the most difficult.  My opinion won’t count until I’ve actually made it through all the semesters so I’ll reserve judgment for now.  I’ve been a pretty crappy blogger for the past few months but in an attempt to redeem myself here’s an overview of what fall has been like for me:

Classes

MBA Core – All LGOs take these classes with Sloan students to give us the foundation for the rest of our MBA degree.  Core includes Economics, Accounting, Communication for Managers, and Organizational Processes.  This is a great introduction to a broad range of topics.  As my Economics professor put it “We’re going to cover three courses of material in the next six lectures so come to class on time.” 

Sloan Electives – As the name implies, this is the elective part of my MBA coursework.  After the MBA core you can take just about anything else you want in the business school to fulfill your degree requirements.  I haven’t counted them but I believe there are over 150 electives to choose from.  I’m taking Finance Theory  this fall as my only business elective, but my next two semesters will be all electives for MBA classes.

Engineering – I’m taking two engineering classes this semester which will leave me with only two more to take to complete my requirements.  Logistic Systems is a class that covers a number of topics that were briefly discussed in the summer Operations Management course but in much more detail.  Integrating the Lean Enterprise covers examples of  companies that have reshaped themselves in order to transition to a lean organization and a methodology to apply the concepts to other firms.  

Other – A fun thing about MIT is when you reach the credit limit (and you will) in a single semester you can audit classes as long as the class isn’t at capacity.  This means you attend lectures and in some cases do coursework but don’t receive a grade.  I am auditing two speaking series: Professional Seminar which is a series of industry leaders, generally from partner companies, who come to campus to speak to the LGO class and Leadership and Ethics taught by two long time supporters of LGO who were in executive roles before retirement. 

The last few weeks of the semester are pretty full with major team projects due in most classes and preparation for finals.  On the bright side, winter break at MIT is incredibly long.  My last exam is December 16th and I don’t start spring classes until February 2nd!  With that much time off I might remember how to play video games.

The application process

Some (or many) of you are reading this looking for advice on applying to the LGO program.  At this time last year I was checking the 2010 and 2009 blogs for the same reason.  Here are some thoughts that will hopefully help:

• Have a plan - Read the website and make sure you create a timeline that allows you to get everything (essays, recommendations, cover letter, resume, GMAT or GRE test) done in time for the December 12th deadline.
• Get some help – I relied on friends and family to review my essays and resume to make sure my ideas were clear and concise.  I think I rewrote one of my essays at least six times, but the final draft was much better than what I started with.  It helped to have people with no experience in the type of work I did look at my materials so I didn’t get too technical or specific.
• Play to your strengths – Make sure you understand why you think you’re a good fit for the LGO program and state it in your application materials.  I knew I wasn’t as strong academically as some others who would be applying last year but I felt I had a lot of relevant leadership experience.  I was candid about both points in my application essays and my interview.
• Get as much information as you can – There are a lot of places to get your questions answered.  Feel free to email me, or any of the other student bloggers.  There is still time to visit campus before the application deadline to visit a class, meet faculty, hang out with students and check out Boston.

Above all else don’t stress out about the process and best of luck if you decide to apply.