The Integrative Stream

Sloan Startup

Monday was the first official day at the Sloan School of Management, although I was on campus all last week for some optional pre-term activities. Actual coursework doesn’t start until next week, since we’re in orientation mode through Thursday (for the MBA program) and again on Friday (for the Health, Sciences and Technology group). Today is an off-site team building event.

As of right now, there isn’t much to say about the orientation process, particularly since I’m not planning on blogging (at least in any detail) about individual people or conduct in any particular class. I even made sure to disclose this blog when I met my core team members this morning. At MIT, you rely on a small team (six or seven people) for support in most of your first semester classes. My team seems quite promising, and that’s about all I’m going to say on the subject. For one thing, virtually every team apparently suffers some sort of meltdown between now and December, and I have no desire to hasten that along.

The only real observation I’ve made so far is that the culture here seems very much what I expected: very open and collaborative, which fits well with what I’ve seen of MIT in general. I attribute some of this to a wide variety of post-MBA aspirations. We are not all fighting for the same fifteen investment banking jobs, and that shows. The high number of engineering graduates (40%, not counting computer science, which adds about another 15%) gives the place a very practical feeling.