Hello MIT MBA Class of 2011

Tonight I met a very large portion of the MIT MBA Class of 2011 at a pre-orientation Barbeque! As an LGO student, my classmates and I make up a subset of the MBA program. We had all summer to bond and now we have been released into the larger pool of MBA students, most of whom have just arrived in the Boston area and are very excited to be here.

The food was great and the company was better! New faces, new personalities, and new background experience. There was plenty to talk about! I'm looking forward to the semester even more now that I have met some classmates!

Success!

Success presents itself in many ways. Here is my most recent evidence of success... the luggage check tag on the cornhole set as it sits in my apartment in Cambridge, MA.

Sitting at the Gate

The cornhole transportation adventure continues:

I'm currently sitting at my waiting to depart for Boston. During check-in, the boards were under close scrutiny by the airline agent. The official weigh in put them at 52lbs and 70 inches in total length (length + width + height). Both metrics put the boards in the oversized luggage category which requires a $100 fee. At this point, I was certain the boards were going back my parents house. I had my dad circling outside in case I couldn't check them. But then I realized... I had come this far with the work and effort put in to getting these boards to Boston, I wasn't about to give up.

With a little coaxing, mentioning that I'm a (poor) college student, and some story telling about how Boston doesn't know what cornhole is and how I'm gearing up for football season (there might have been a little exaggeration). The breaking point was when I mentioned that I can check a snowboard for free and that was much bigger than these boards. He said "well that's sporting equipment" to which I replied "so is this!!!". I knew he had a soft spot for the game when he said "your are right, it is sporting equipment". He then muttered "go ahead and throw them up here, just don't tell anyone!"

SUCCESS!!!!

Now I can only hope that they make it in one piece.

Goodbye Indiana... for now! Hello Boston and FOOTBALL!

Traveling Corn Hole

I'm currently in the process of packing. I take that back, I'm in the process of procrastinating so that I don't pack. Quite frankly, I'm not ready to go back. I'm here in Indiana with friends, family, no homework, and no real work. The weather has been beautiful! 70-80 degrees, sunny and relatively low humidity. It really doesn't get much better. The hardest part of my day is dragging myself out of bed when I know that I really don't HAVE to get up. I'm sure you don't feel sorry for me, but after the intensity of the end of last semester, I think I deserve a little break.

There is one part of packing that was very exciting! I have decided that with football season coming up, I need to take my favorite tailgate game back to the Boston area.... the game of cornhole (or "bags" if you are uppity and refuse recognize the fact that you are trying to throw a bag of corn through a hole in a board). This is a game you can't step foot on a midwest college campus without seeing, and I've only witnessed one game out east. Get ready Boston!

So here's the "exciting" part (remember, I'm a nerd). I'm going to attempt to get a set of boards checked onto my flight tomorrow. My first concern was weight. I checked online and found the weight limit to be 50 lbs and the size limit to be 60inch. The boards are 48 inches tall so I should be good there, but they are solidly built (like any cornhole set should be) with 3/4 inch plywood. I went to fed-ex/kinkos to check the weight because we don't have a scale in our house and found them to weight 48.75 lb., pre modification. I think I'm close enough that it should slide through the checking process.

But before it's ready to fly, some modifications are necessary to make sure the boards survive not only the plane trip, but the subway rides and walks back to my apartment. That's right, I have to hand carry this all the way from the airport to my apartment along with my other luggage, but that's what wheels are for. I added 2 wheels and some handles to pull the boards behind me like a roll-a-board suitcase. To ensure that the playing surface would stay consistent I added plastic corners for protection. My final touch was a handle on the side in case a baggage handler needed an extra grips. The results are as follows:

2 Wheels for quick and easy maneuvering
3 Handles positioned to maximize comfort and flexibility during transport.
Plastic corners to preserve a consistent playing surface from edge to edge.

And one happy football fan ready to drag these boards over 1000 miles to their new home.

Transportation tomorrow will consist of a car ride to the airport, a plane to boston, a bus to the red subway line, the red subway line to central square, with a final walk of just over a quarter of a mile. The only thing stopping me at this point are the US Airway ticket agents and their leniency of the 50 lb. luggage rule.

Who Goes to Work!

As I mentioned, I'm currently home... during the week... and everyone else is either at work or school. So what do I do? Go to where I used to work! I worked at Klipsch, a world class speaker company (did I ever mention that I LOVE speakers). For those who wonder, in my opinion, Klipsch makes some of the best speakers in the world... even better than Bose for you non-audio enthusiasts! They also have a outstanding customer loyalty and a huge fan base.

Much of the work that I did at Klipsch involved the headphones and some of the subwoofers. As an audio enthusiast, the job was a dream come true, so naturally I will gravitate back whenever I can. Which brings me to the new front entrance display:

Once again... did I mention that I love speakers?

Here is the latest marketing material for the newest headphone release, the Image S4i and Image S2m. I was lucky enough to work on these projects JUST before leaving for school!

And here is the new entrance to the engineering/marketing area. Our machine shop guru, Jay, made the rusted steel logos hanging from the ceiling. I really like the shadows on the walls.

Once again, another good day in the motherland. It was great to see all of you Klipschies! Take care until next time!

Questions? Just ask!

For those of you who are reading this blog and have any questions regarding the MIT LGO program, living in Boston, or anything else, feel free to leave a comment on a post or email me at bgeswein@mit.edu. I am more than happy to answer your questions.

By the way... I know you are out there!

Home Sweet Home

I'm home. It's nice. Very nice. Although once again, when I leave for college my parents decide to change "my room". This time, the bunk beds are gone. My brother and I have always shared a room, thus the need for bunk beds. My dad built these bunk beds when I was about 4 and I've been sleeping on them since. I remember when I was about 6 year olds telling him that one day I would be too tall to fit on the bunk beds... guess what... I was WRONG!

Anyways, it is nice to wake up at my parents house, look out the kitchen window and see GREEN. It is quite a change from the red brick, grey concrete, and black asphalt that surrounds me in Cambridge, not that Cambridge is ugly, this is just beautiful. See what I mean!

My dad loves his trees and my mom loves her flowers. It works!

I also had the opportunity to visit my grandparents in New Albany, Indiana on my way to Nashville Tennessee for a weekend with my good college buddies. With my grandparents busy social schedules, I was lucky to get all three of them (two on dad's side, one on moms side) together mid day on friday.

We enjoyed a home made chili lunch at my dad's parents house, followed by a tour of their bustling garden and a viewing of my pictures from a summer in Boston. I then sat down at the their computer for a quick computer lesson. Ever since they got a computer we have had the tradition of giving them a lesson with each visit. This visit's lesson... blogging and Pandora. Trust me, it was good... right Grandma?

I then went with my mom's mom to the new New Albany YMCA where she has started a rigorous workout program. Hopefully, the next visit we'll have time to go back so I can try the climbing wall... it was HUGE!!!

Here are my grandparents (from L to R, Grandma Sadtler, Grandma Geswein and Grandpa Geswein) in front of the tall sunflowers in the garden. The tallest flower measures 7.25 feet. Quite impressive!

It was really good to see them and I really appreciate their accommodations to my tight schedule. So far, 4 days into my visit, I have found time to see Indy friends, college friends, grandparents, neighbors, aunts and uncles on mom's side, and my immediate family. I just have work friends and hopefully more Indy friends to go before I return to Boston! Once again, a little planning goes a LONG way!

End of Summer Classes... applause

Classes are over! I'm back home in Indiana, looking ahead at roughly 2.5 weeks of no homework with a huge smile on my face!

Looking back at the end of the semester, most classes did not culminate with a final exam. Instead there were large projects that took the place of the more traditional exam. With this structure, the last meeting for each class was a lecture with closing remarks instead of an exam where individual walk out silently when they are finished. These closing remarks from the professor always automatically stimulated applause from the class. I remember sitting there thinking "wow, I have never ended a class with applause". It felt natural yet strange at the same time. This habit/desire continued as each class came to a close.

Despite the structure, I believe that much of the applause came from the true appreciation from individual students to the professors and TA's. I've never been in grad school before, so I can only compare it to undergrad, but the teacher/TA to student relationship is vastly different. For example, we typically address professors by their first names (at least the ones so far). The TA's go out of their way to help us out, and even join us on the weekends for social activities. It's a very collaborative, real-world work-like environment that makes learning easy and enjoyable.

Now, with the semester under my belt, I look forward to the fall where we LGO students will have the opportunities to branch out and meet the rest of the MIT Sloan MBA Class of 2011!

One To Go

It's saturday at 12:45pm. My last exam for the summer semester was yesterday. As far as I'm concerned, the semester is over... except for one last assignment. Our High Velocity Organizations class final asignment. So here I am procrastinating just a little before I buckle down and finish the summer.

Laptop out. Dr Pepper in hand. Quiet room... let's get this done!

Hella-Copter

For our statistics class, we have been working hard on a Design of Experiments project that optimizes a paper helicopter with respect to hang time an accuracy of a decent down a stairwell. Basically, we used our statistics material to make a folded piece of paper drop as slowly as possible and land as close to a target as possible. Like many other projects in our classes, this was a class competition and pride was once again on the line.

The competition arena was a stairwell outside of our summer classroom. We were to design a helicopter that would drop 3 stories down within the 2ft gap between flights of stairs. Here's what it looked like:

My first thoughts were... NO WAY! It's a long way down and not a lot of room for error. How could we get a piece of paper to hit the target below. So the team started to prototype and stumbled across a unique design that was simple to build and worked pretty well. We chose it and proceeded with the design of experiments.

In a nutshell, the design of experiments is a statistical method to vary more than one parameter at a time and still understand the effect of each individual parameter. It's very powerful when you have lots of variables (ie. paper type, helicopter blade length, blade width, body height, body width, paperclip weights, etc) and not a lot of time to vary each one individually. If we were to individually change each variable one at a time, we would have made over 256 different helicopters. Instead we built 16, tested them, and got a feel for which variables were most important. We then focused on these important variables for design improvement through further testing and optimization.

All in all, we spent many hours on this project building around 100 different helicopters. Our final design seemed to work pretty well, assuming the AC wasn't blowing in the stairwell like it did during some of our testing. Here's what it looked like, complete with a paint job and intimidatingly named the "Hella-Copter":

Competition day came and everyone crowded in the stairwell to watch.

A near miss of the target by the competition!
More people in the stairwell.

We knew that our design was the best of what we had built, but we weren't sure how it would compare to the class's (and we really weren't sure if the AC would be on). Teammate Robert dropped the Hella-Copter and we watched anxiously as it slowly descended upon the target. It wobbled a bit, grazed the railings, and landed within a few inches of the target causing lots of "oohs" and "aaahs" from the spectators.

It landed with a time of roughly 16.5 seconds combined with the closeness to the target for an overall rank of 1st in the class! My first "win" for the summer! I now have some bragging rights! Other teams may be better at playing the Beer Game or running a simulated production facility, but my team built the best paper helicopter! Talk about real life skills... I should add this to my resume.

The End is Near

We are coming close to the end of the semester. The official count is 7 class days left. In those seven class days, we have the following to complete: a system optimization project, paper, and presentation; a statistical design of experiments project and competition; an operations management business case deep dive presentation; a high velocity organization project; a statistics homework assignment; and a statistics exam. Not too bad for 7 days!!!

What I find most interesting about the end of the semester is the mixing of the classes. First a little background information. Our classes this summer have been:

System Optimization - a mathematical class focusing on the optimization of business processes

Operations Management - case studies, inventory, utilization, queuing theory, etc

Probability and Statistic - enough said

High Velocity Organizations - lean/six sigma approaches to get ahead and stay ahead

Leadership - focuses on the theories, applications, and practices of leadership

Now that we are finishing up, I find myself looking at Probability and Statistics notes to complete System Optimization homework. I find High Velocity Organizations lessons and Leadership theory needed to complete the Operations Management deep dive. It almost seems like all of the classes have melded into one big blob of school.

Work days are getting longer, nights are getting shorter, and weekends have less time for fun... but I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Heads are held high and we're marching forward as a class. August break... here we come!

Leadership Reaction Course

There is a strong distinction between the LGO program and most other MBA dual degree or just plain MBA programs. That would be the Leadership portion of the experience. While leadership can't be taught, students can be given the tools and opportunities to learn leadership. Leadership comes from experience, and we get it by the bunches. Today was no different!

It was another field trip day... see, here's the bus! Unfortunately, no yellow twinkies for us college kids (for those who are not aware, yellow twinky is slang for school bus).

After some stretching lead by Karla (not pictured)...

Some instruction from Ben...

And a (semi) group picture...

We set out for the course! It was a challenging day getting equipment and people from one end of the obstacle to the other. Just to be clear... anything painted red was off limits. If you touch the red zone, you had to start over.

And to add to the fun and challenge, some of the task had water traps. The water, as you can see, was a beautiful shade of green and full of tadpoles!

Here's Rob after climbing out of the "tadpole juice". Like him, many of us fell in, some of us even jumped in. I did neither!

The day ended with an "All Star Challenge". Each team chose a single member to join the Allstar team to attempt a challenge in front of the entire class. I reluctantly accepted my nomination, knowing that I would most likely get wet.

So the team started with a brief. Our mission was to carry ammo over a cliff. The entire team must get the ammo to its designated location. We don't know what is beyond the cliff.

The cliff was a wall, so we started by scaling the wall, unsure of what was next. Once on top of the wall, we saw this (I'm in the light blue on the left). You can tell by our body, we think it's pretty tough.

Green water!

So we try to lower someone down:

And another:

And another:

Here's the ammo coming across (I'm doing a good job of watching).

My turn to drop down:

And just about across:

We completed the task, with a few minutes left on our clock. Although just before completion, Devon had a brush with the water. He was the last one on the chains and when trying to jump to the landing, he almost completely fell into the water. Luckily Barry swooped in an saved the day!

Fun day. Enough said.

Field Trip

I must say, it has been years since I've been on a field trip. When applying for the program, the concept of a field trip was furthest from my mind. But here I am and we're going on field trips. The more collegiate or professional term is "plant trek" but I prefer to call them what they are... field trips. It's a day where the class gets on a bus and goes somewhere together to learn and explore new ideas.

Now this is not the freshman high school trip to the Zoo (yes - our entire freshman class had a field trip to the zoo, no - it was not a good idea to send freshman boys in herds to the zoo, yes - our school was asked never to return). Instead we are going to leading LGO partner companies who are on the cutting edge of manufacturing in their discipline.

Our first trip was to Pratt and Whitney, a jet engine manufacturer. My experience in manufacturing has been mostly consumer electronics, and I must say, this was quite a difference. Imagine how big a jet engine is... now imaging how big the machines that make the jet engine have to be. It was amazing! There were so many parts that had to be put in just the right location with incredibly tight tolerances.

One aspect that hit me with surprise was their concern for keeping track of foreign objects... foreign objects in the sense of things that don't belong in the engine. For example, if I leave my pen somewhere in the factory and then someone comes along and accidentally knocks it into the jet engine. The pen could cause some serious issues when the engine is attached to a plane, and then started up. Imagine a plane crash because of a pen I left in a factory. Highly unlikely, but possible. To avoid foreign objects they keep track of every tool, nut, bold, and screw to ensure the highest quality of a product.

The field trip reminded me of these pictures. These were taken out the window of a Boeing 747 over the north pole on my way to Beijing China from Chicago. You can see the plane engines and the polar ice cap. Pretty amazing to see!