69 Necessities for the Road Goddess

So you just got out of the Downtown Women's Club talk and you're also considering a career change to consulting? Here's a conversation starter at the next McK lunch you attend-- travel tips and tricks. Inspired by Tim Ferris's Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less, this one is geared towards consul-chix who need to pass corporate muster Monday-Thursday.

**Disclaimer**

The following may reveal way too much about the author's current/former personal habits. Proceed at your own risk.

Get 2 sets of everything. Only unpack stuff that needs cleaning or replenishing. For luggage makers, Tumi is respectably lux and TravelPro has street cred with the airline service professionals. Black nylon is better than leather (doesn't show as much wear). Bright colors belie potentially poor judgment...

In luggage:

• 3 wrinkle-resistant oxfords or blouses (white, blue, winsome)**


• 3 v-neck t-shirts (layer/sleep/exercise/tool around after hours in)**


• 3 wrinkle-resistant pants/skirts (black OR navy (both=perpetually mismatched hose))-all be tailored to fit same height heel on your uber sensible/comfy shoes**


• belt


• 3 sets matching hose (swap at first sign of hole or hazard snarky comments from TSA)**


• 3 sets skivvies (seamless and as skimpy as you dare to min panty lines and max strut)**


• 1 blazer (executive fire drills)**


• 1 neutral colored sweater (if you sit in the meatlocker)**


• Gym shoes (you will be tempted to leave these at home because you never use them, but lugging them around = incidental exercise)**


• 3 pairs gym socks (anklets, super thin fast drying for worst case scenario sink washing)**


• 2 gym top+shorts combos (1 set to stop traffic, 1 that's nondescript enough to wear multiple times)**


• Accessories (jewelry, scarves, belts, spare shoes, etc. flair tricks people into thinking your rotation is more extensive)

Toiletries** (3oz liquid containers stored in plastic bag regardless of whether luggage is checked for easy unpacking and changes of plans... bonus points if you can hack your plastic bag into a shower caddy)

• toothbrush/paste (in the shower to minimize your prep time)


• shampoo*, conditioner*, face wash*


• razor & shaving cream (tsk tsk, should have done a thorough job Sunday night... skirts on Monday, transition to pants towards Thurs)


• chapstick


• idiot-proof makeup (tinted moisturizer, mascara, lip gloss... anything you'd trust to apply under sketch florescents)


• flat iron (if you're afflicted with Hermione hair)


• tweezers, nail clippers


• hair brush


• extra hair ties/clips (networking device)

In laptop bag

• ultralight laptop with as much battery life and internet connectivity as you can expense


• adaptor**


• cell phone that approaches singularity (web browser, camera, music player, alarm clock, etc)


• phone charger**(should have an outlet and usb option)


• earplugs (blocks noisy passengers)


• bluetooth ear piece & charger


• 3 pens (corporate logo a bonus, but not if it means they fall apart when you fidget with them... never from the lux hotel you're staying at)


• 1 highlighter (you will rarely use this, but it's good for geek cred)


• 1 whiteboard marker (meeting hero)


• 1 pocket sized stapler (see above)


• ultralight umbrella


• pint sized notebook


• moleskine notebook (bonus points for quad rule)


• purse that fits in laptop bag (to avoid the "consolidate" tsa*holes)


• transaction-friendly wallet (does your time and expense require you to produce receipts? make sure you have space to store)


• gum (networking tool)


• pill box-- pain killers, stomach settlers, sleep enhancers (networking tool)


• GPS (if you tango with the rental car)

*hotel's line invariably lacks

**if you're staying a while, leave and launder at hotel or client site; buy on site in larger size

Minimize the Damage of Impractical Shoes

My first few days as a consultant, I would stumble/limp home extremely late extremely drunk. Kicking off the heels I had bled puddles into, I'd scamper off to get ready for bed... Leaving a trail of bloody footprints and no doubt a damaged liver in my wake.

Style has been on my mind lately. I gave a talk in Com lab ranting about suits and backpacks. It was cute... and cheeky, given that I delivered it in an oxford and pants which were missing several buttons. I'm still looking for fashion icons at Sloan. In the interim, I'm stumbling through trial and error.

I have a weakness for heels. The height. The self-assured click-clacking coupled with the slight vulnerability of not totally having a foothold. So maybe I'm a closeted exhibitionist. As you can imagine, I rapidly wreaked havoc on my feet. Before things got quite as bad as the early consulting days, my friend Donna flew in to catch up and help me cut my losses. She was able to produce most of this gear from her laptop bag, which I read as proof positive this strategy works.

• Triage: Epsom salt + warm water soak. Band-aids if necessary.
• Prevention: Moleskin + Bodyglide + petals (if the shoes are 1/2 size too big) + flip flop r&r
• Protection: Ask a cobbler to cover leather soles with rubber soles (saves on tune ups, additional traction, a little more padding)

7 Steps to Heroism

Seems the zeitgeist is strafing towards heroism.

1. Get in touch with your inner child at a Brooklyn Super Hero Supply Shop (tutoring on the side).


2. Still intimidated? Neil Patrick Harris is making superheroism/villainism accessible to us all as viral microdrama protagonist, Dr. Horrible, all the while muddying the distinction between good and evil.


3. To regain your moral compass, turn to Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo's study of the Milgram Experiment outliers and what drove them to do the right thing.


4. Need guidelines more structured? How about the Jedi Religion?


5. So the force is strong but the flesh is weak? Overclock your body with eTech's overview of the numerous new approaches to body hacking.


6. And of course, if you need inspiration for a respectable costume, look no further than the Met's special installation on super heroes' influence on fashion.


7. Lock and load, now choose your challenge: a few ideas from 100^100

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Hideouts

Swap The Harp (noisy singles bar) for Christopher's off Porter Square (*amazing* nachos). If you want hella smart upbeat confederates, try to get an econ grad student to come with (best hunting grounds upstairs comp lab between e51 and 2)

Adventures in Healthcare

Apologies to everyone subjected to my generalized misanthropic irritability these last two days. I figured I'd consolidate the ranting in one place so I don't sound like such a nattering naboob of negativism in RL.

I decided, despite the ominous MIT Medical Q&A session to come in for a meningitis shot. The experience itself was pretty awesome. They were able to make an appointment within a week, they didn't make we don the paper gown, the nurse with the needles was super friendly-- so much so she gave me her cell # and invited me to come up to Natick to exercise ride a retired vet's horses on weekends.

But if you're scheduling, don't forget that shots can cause soreness, secondary fever symptoms, etc. It didn't help I was nursing a gianormous sleep defecit and eating two light meals a day, if that.

• 11:30 PM: shivering violently with a low grade fever/alternatively fantasizing about being "rescued" by my crew (a la Jay's core team bringing homemade chicken noodle soup)
  

*******following day*************

• 7:30 AM: groggy and sore, but veto coffee in lieu of breakfast. Have an Econ problem set to clean up, so don't eat anything.
• 8:30 AM: get heckled by MA for being potentially infectious. Today's discussion: negative externalities focusing on the e.g. coming to class sick. As if I wasn't uncomfortable already. Vaccinations = positive externalities, non?
  
• 10:20 AM: Panicking because not sure I can make it through the day and I loaned my roommate my apartment keys.
• 12:00 PM: Sales Club doesn't post meeting room on their website and it takes me a while to find them. They've run out of food and only seats under the A/C in the nosebleed section are left. My $40 membership dues at work. Thank god Felipe wasn't eating either, there might have been deaths of some salesmen if all of leadership and non-dues paying members were busy scraping their Indian takeout trays clean.
• 1:00 PM: eff Core team meetings, if I don't eat anything today, I'm going to be such a misanthropic mess I'll be impossible to work with. Run to E-52 for emergency soup. Fortunately, I'm only a couple minutes late.
• 2:30 PM: Prof Fernandez = hero for dimming the lights and somewhat assuaging the raging caffeine withdrawal headache I'm nursing. But watching the Milgram experiment wasn't exactly a relaxing experience. AA calls me out for being too quiet. Fair enough, he's right and the ironic Com lab canned framework feedback delivery was just cheeky enough to work, but cut me a break, hon, I'm having a rough day.
• 4:00 PM: There is no way I'm hanging around for the Diversity @ Work thing in this state, plus I'll probably get pressured into the much publicized Japan C-Function immediately after. Head home (forget to pick up List art I won).
• 4:30 PM: sleep/blog....

*******following day*************

• 100%
  

Max [Participation] Min [-Externalities]

I think I speak for many of us when I say Communications class is a disappointment. The problem isn't the instructor so much as it is structure. We learn a lot of theory, but let's face it, if everyone in the ocean wanted their 15 mins of fame, we'd be sitting there for 17 and a half hours (and that's not including time for feedback).

Over drinks on Boyleston, I think Ted got it right: We need to be applying Com theory in the myriad incidental opportunities we interact every day. Instead of worrying about quantity of practice, we should focus on quality.

To that end, here's my subject-agnostic list of uncool class communication habits I've noticed and/or perpetrated in the last couple weeks.

• "One Quick Question..." These questions almost always take at least 30 seconds to spit out, are usually tangential comments disguised as questions, and tend to travel in packs (i.e. the same person will ask multiple "quick questions" in one session)


• "I know nothing about this, but..." Spare me the pseudo humility. I'm already bracing myself for something exceedingly esoteric or oversimplified


• "My former employer is a great example..." Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed some really great anecdotes about people's past experiences. It crosses the line when used excessively to describe mundane instances.


• "To build on that..." This isn't so bad because the speaker at least acknowledges they should be reflecting on previous comments. However, so often what comes next has absolutely nothing to do with what was just said.


• "But on page 287 of the reading..." Good job, you prepared so thoroughly you've found discrepancies. Unless they're materially consequential to the class's understanding of the material, skip belaboring them.


• "Uhm... I think uh... like... uh..." Maybe it's the 3 months of New Yorker in me, but if you can't articulate your thought without adding filler every other word, maybe you should have collected your thoughts before raising your hand?


• "I have a question on the previous slide" This is OK sometimes, like when the class is utterly lost and the prof is still muscling through material. But if you're dragging the entire class back to call out some pissant nuance, give it up. If it was important for us to notice, we wouldn't've moved on without mentioning it.


• "What about " Hail, God of Counterfactuals. It's great to find contradictions, but do we really want to spend the majority of class time learning exceptions to the rules?


• "Don't you think that..." Not cool because this is a comment parading as a question *and* there's a high comorbidity with moralizing/philosophizing about things outside of a business' ambit.

There are a lot of great contributors, but Lukas and Danny are my holy grail when it comes to quality class participation. Here's how they roll:

• Driving questions if you got a handout, you know the next slide and the direction the prof wants to take the class. Help the bloke out, yeah?


• Big controversies in your area of expertise if you've got to point out how much you know about a field, you can do it by cutting to the chase and calling out the biggest sources of controversy rather than mind numbing esoterica.
  
• Front load cocktail conversations if you're going to "relate" to the concept with your previous experience, try to at least make it sexy enough that someone would want to follow up and ask more about it in the next hallway conversation.


• Direct comment structure you know that attentional dip we experience during class? I think people experience the same thing at a microlevel during a comment. Try to make your point up front. You need less substantiation than you think, so keep the evidence portion brief.


• Stay on topic this is a feedback loop. If you make targeted comments, you get called on more quickly and what you wanted to say is more likely to be directly relevant. If you devalue your commentary by saying too much or too sloppily, you have to wait longer to get a turn and your comment is less likely to be relevant when you have the floor. So let it go if you didn't get that word in edgewise.

How to Host a Party

141 Charles is not quite as frathouse-esque as I imagined. While 56 River may not be aping their style, here are some best practices across the varied shindigs I've seen thus far.

• Cleaning service: Varies based on budget and level of traffic. We have our place cleaned every other week since nothing we throw is too obscene. For larger gatherings, scheduling a special session may be in order.



• Dropcloths: The 141 charles guys covered most of the floor with a combination of tarps and drop cloths. They also papered up hallways, closets, etc. they didn't want folks to access. A little lowbrow, but worth it if you've got renovations to protect.



• Genre: if your apartment is small or you're not so interested in the loud and out set, stick with dinner parties and explicitly exclusive cocktails. Note: there is some value to network effects, so if you cut the sheer quantity, you'll need to offset with additional quality (better alcohol, real wine glasses, better m:f ratio or at least crowd pleasingly strategic attendees... unless you're so Arbiter of Cool you can pull off dinner parties without plates, in which case, you have my vote).



• Channel & Timing: obviously, you want viral to make sure the number and quality of attendees is up to scratch. Things on Thurs-Sunday have a larger attendance coefficient, as do things which don't conflict with other hot events and which have been google/yahoo grouped at least 5 days in advance. If you want to start small, organize something offline last minute on the quality side.



• Reciprocity: ask folks to bring something (nothing says "I'm not flaking out on this event" like whipping up a homemade keylime pie, defrays some of the cost, and hedges concerns you might have about not enough food, booze, etc.)



• Cleanup: the amount of clean up is inversely proportional to the quality of food/utensils and number and availability of female hosts while being directly proportional to start time. Early parties tend to have more concrete end times as folks line up their secondary plans. Yet quality inputs demand good manners and guys tend to be into expediting clean up if it means more offline time with their hostesses... Besides, if they do a good job, the hostesses might be up for joining them at their secondary plans.

In other news... Haircut only noticed by roomies. Vocabularity needs to be dumbed down. Burned ears on an undeground gossip column. Made a hella disparaging comment about the dearth of awesomeness in the dating pool to a dude I actually think is awesome and to top it off, I got embroiled in an SMS battle with a couple guys that quickly deteriorated as text re's began ripping me out of REM. Suppose I should've caveated this post with "parties aren't really my thing."

Case on Point: 5 Step Guide to Case Prep

Case studies can be a time sink. Since it seems that most of them fall 8:30 AM the morning after a BHP blow out, the info recency-retention tradeoff of the last minute cram just isn't working in your favor. Here is my proto 'proach to case studies. Can you add tips and tricks to this mix? Comments appreciated.

1. Look for contextual clues:

• What's the syllabus topic?


• What questions have you been asked to prepare?

2. Skim the case:

• No writing implements- they slow things down, make you a complacent reader, and graffiti your workspace. If you need the data that badly, you can catch it in read #2.


• Set a timer: 3 mins/page. Pause at the end of each paragraph - learn anything new about the major issues?

3. Populate template: (revisiting the case as needed)

• Summarize the problem (sound bite and a conceptual picture)


• What are the major issues?


• What are the options?

4. Populate template 2.0: (you are now allowed to take a break)

• Pros/Cons of each option? (be reasonable with the calc's... if the solution approach is open-ended, no one is going to ask you to share your spreadsheet...)


• What is your recommendation? (Try to make a persuasive contrarian argument, it's easier to get called on in the "anybody have doubts?" lull and lock down those participation points.)

5. Reread and update: depending on how good your recall is-- I try to do this no more than 24 hrs before the course

• Any data you want on hand to support your argument?


• Any connections you can draw between this and prior cases/classwork?


• Any pieces you missed?


• On what grounds would people likely disagree with your recommendation?

Just in... Rules of classroom engagement...

Professional Standards

I don't remember the professional standards point belabored half as much at other schools. Perhaps at MIT where the culture is to act "in the spirit of the rules" rather than "by the book," more time has to be spent inculcating us to get the religion.

Simulation game aside, it was telling how many people left or otherwise checked out during the session. I started debating DMD homework and I was front row with a pilot on the professional standards board! Pretty disrespectful, but it didn't even occur to me in the middle of it to ask folks to take it offline.

What was notably missing for me amongst all the integrity soap boxing was respect towards the MIT community at large. Going through the Organization Perspectives homework, we learn that 2 of the 3 (or myriad) lenses we can analyze a problem with are the political and cultural lenses. It seemed apparent to me that the political bleeds into the cultural in a lot of respects.

For instance, on MIT's campus, I suspect that despite lauds for being uber collaborative, we may be marginalizing the more mainstream MIT culture. Sloan's political clout allows it to do things differently (be it attributes we value in MBA candidates, registration procedures, fund raising, building locations on campus, technology support, faculty compensation, the list goes on). As a result, I wonder if we as a class are disrespectful and disparaging of geek chic of MIT at large.

Power differentials begin to mainfest in cultural norms about Sloanies. Gamit's index calls them "someone who can't do math," and judging by the level of pedantry in DMD, I'm inclined to believe this jibe is taken somewhat seriously. Similarly, many of our orientation activities are scheduled over GSC events, so we seldom commune with the campus at large. In RA work, I've learned it's more expedient to not mention Sloan affiliations when asking for help. Yet I still deign to call Leland's physicist friends at The Muddy a sausage party. That can't look good. (Sorry Leland!). They say only Sloanies [and Caltech cannons] wear their brass rats conspicuously...

What can be done to remedy the situation? I think we have some decent organizational infrastructure in place with the E-Center with its $100K competitions, ELabs, etc. I think market forces are working in our favor-- the burgeoning enrollment and the heretofore unbuilt E62 force us into closer proximity with the rest of MIT. I think we have an inclusive collaborative culture, so much so that many have commented on how reluctant we are to form cliques based solely by ocean/bird/etc. designation and our reputation for being significant other friendly. So the responsibility lies with us to make a more concerted effort to disregard the typical MBA handbook of furious intraclass networking and act more in the spirit by learning how to interact, lead, and work for a truly diverse population of MIT.

Bootcamp: the First 2+ Weeks

They warn us that our experience at MIT will be like Gartner's Hypecycle... This is where we have to put our heads down, get our hands dirty, and earn our eudaimonia. But I guess there's nothing stopping us from early nostalgia.

Trek: Kennebec River Rafting

• Spend less time worrying about the (almost nonexistant) rapids
• Spend more time coaxing people into being real- hanging out on the "beach" making up stories and skipping rocks with Patrick was probably the most genuine thing I did
• Recruit confederates: Ted was joking about turning 2 man kayaking into a proof of concept for joint venture partnerships, but there's some truth to it... at least if your camping or boating figures into your venture...

Preterm

• Hang out in overflow: your beverage and laptop are welcome and both are necessary to muddle through econ
• Pick and choose: within one day, it was apparent that one of the courses was being taught at too high of a level... Stupidest thing I did was stick around to complete the set.
• Socialize, but don't bff anyone into codependency-- they may not end up in your ocean *tear*

Orientation

• Plan your wardrobe. Business casual plus a raft of bruises from moving, treks, preterm, orientation, and pub crawls can get ugly... Build in time on weekends to build out whichever sector got deprioritized in working life (outdoorsy, casual, business casual, business, etc.). $460 shoes that fit without fuss are worth it... haircuts in the same price range? not so much...

Soirees

• Host some at your place. Minimizes commute and ensures your favorites will always be on tap... Sloan goodwill will minimize post-party cleanup but may land you a perpetual fridge full of cheap beer.
• Add texture. Size of gatherings, focal activities (drinking, eating, cooking), degree of formality/informality. Keeps things interesting.
• Attend around twice as many events as you organize. Karma. :)
• Don't stake your happiness on a single person (be they gf, crush, aspiration figure, train wreck, etc.) going, look for collectives that are good company.

Weekend updates

Try to do something cool with your time (here's what our collective apartment has been up to)

• Sail
• Bike
• Run
• Duckboat
• See a movie
• Martha's Vinyard