The end is near...
As I approach the end of the first Term and face the looming specter of final exams (wow...when's the last time I took finals?!), I thought I would just reflect back on the first term and what I have learned inside and outside the classroom so far:
1. The answer is "It depends." As we got further along into the term, the right answers seemed to become more elusive and more complex. I suppose this happens to some degree in any discipline, that the phrase "the more we know, the less we understand" (as sung by Don Henly) takes on more meaning. I just didn't expect it would become so uncertain so soon! In the sciences, you have at least 2-3 years of "by-the-book memorization" before you can start to explore the boundaries of that knowledge. In our last statistics case study, there seemed to be about as many regression models as there were teams.
2. We are "branded." I mean this in the total sense of the word - from the stuff they do to cows to the stuff that P&G does for soap. The nametags and tent cards we are issued from the first day of class gives us two brand identities - our name and our company's name. An interesting thing happens in the first term - if no other traits supercede, we default to our corporate brand identity - e.g., "that's Tom from Bank of America," or "Sheila from IBM," etc. This personal branding is limiting in the sense that we are labeled by our affiliations (and if the company is a start-up no one has heard of, like BioResource International (yet!), you really have no brand equity to leverage). On the flip side, brands are useful in the sense that it helps to place us each into a broader context on the business playing field, if you will.
Well, that's about enough pontification for now - it is time to cram for finals!
As I approach the end of the first Term and face the looming specter of final exams (wow...when's the last time I took finals?!), I thought I would just reflect back on the first term and what I have learned inside and outside the classroom so far:
1. The answer is "It depends." As we got further along into the term, the right answers seemed to become more elusive and more complex. I suppose this happens to some degree in any discipline, that the phrase "the more we know, the less we understand" (as sung by Don Henly) takes on more meaning. I just didn't expect it would become so uncertain so soon! In the sciences, you have at least 2-3 years of "by-the-book memorization" before you can start to explore the boundaries of that knowledge. In our last statistics case study, there seemed to be about as many regression models as there were teams.
2. We are "branded." I mean this in the total sense of the word - from the stuff they do to cows to the stuff that P&G does for soap. The nametags and tent cards we are issued from the first day of class gives us two brand identities - our name and our company's name. An interesting thing happens in the first term - if no other traits supercede, we default to our corporate brand identity - e.g., "that's Tom from Bank of America," or "Sheila from IBM," etc. This personal branding is limiting in the sense that we are labeled by our affiliations (and if the company is a start-up no one has heard of, like BioResource International (yet!), you really have no brand equity to leverage). On the flip side, brands are useful in the sense that it helps to place us each into a broader context on the business playing field, if you will.
Well, that's about enough pontification for now - it is time to cram for finals!
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