Exam success

The first two exams are over!

I studied all weekend to cram the stuff in my head that I had missed during the past few weeks. It would be fair to call it a 28 hour study marathon...

And guess what, it payed off!

Ok, I don't have results yet, but I felt very comfortable at the exams (Managerial Accounting and Operations Management). And even having two exams on the same day turned out to be much less tiring than I had feared.

On a side note: After winning the Littlefield competition, I actually managed to screw up the Littlefield-related question on the Operations Management exam. It doesn't get much more embarrasing than that one might think...

But actually it does. Right after the exam, the school hosted a little celebration party where our Littlefield victory was duly recognized by the dean. Including free beer for everyone. A very smart move, considering that we have another exam tomorrow morning. I bet the school never got away that cheaply beer-wise with any other party they ever hosted!

#1 world-wide

For the last few days I was part of a team that competed in an Operations Management challange hosted by MIT.

With the damn thing running 24x7, I'm kind of sleep deprived by now, since we had to come up with decisions and implement measures 'round the clock. I probably slept a total 12-16 hours during the past 4 days.

However, the whole thing is finally over, and after catching up on some sleep, I'm happy to report that my team finished first, before teams from UCLA Anderson, MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School, Wharton, INSEAD and many other well-known business schools. In fact, three teams from CEIBS finished among the top ten. So we really are the world-wide elite, it seems ;-)

It was an absolutely fantastic experience. Our team, consisting of one student each from China, Denmark, India, Malaysia and Switzerland, was absolutely fabulous and we worked together as smoothly as you could possibly imagine.

But the best part was yesterday night, when we took our Operations Management professor out to celebrate and got him drunk as hell...

Party, Party, Party

Pweeh! Student life can be really tiring...

A few days ago was Rod's birthday. So we all met in a Korean restaurant for a great dinner and then headed downtown to Richy to party.

Yesterday Dani hosted a party in his apartment. Nice place, great crowd, loads of alcohol...

Gosh, how I hate does drinking games! Ever tried Jenga with a Whisky shot penalty for toppling the tower? It's the perfect example of a downward spiral. The more you drink, the more you overestimate your abilities, the more you gotta drink. The really bad thing, however, is that we run out of Whisky pretty soon, and then had to move to Vodka, then Tequila, then Gin and finally red wine. Do not ask about the next morning, please!

Turn's out we trashed the place quite a bit... Sorry dude, but I'm sure the bed would have broken anyway, so you better be grateful that we preemptied a possibly embarrasing situation in your future love life!

This Friday will be a party at "Terence & the girls". This lucky bastard shares an apartment with three girls. The only drawback? For each threesome, there's one jealous girl ;-)

It's raining cats and dogs

Well, not literally, but the weather really is rather shitty right now!

However, Chinese people seem to be very inventive dealing with the situation (and their pets)...

Tonight we had the farewell dinner for the MBA 2006 class. It was a great event hosted in the Ramada hotel. As part of the show they screened a 10 minute movie called the MBATRIX.

Essentially it was a short version of The Matrix re-staged with many personalities of CEIBS. Absolutely hilarious! Eleven out of ten for this one!

They re-did all the special effects and people rolled on the floor laughing when they had canteen personell turn into agents. The famous scene where Morpheous shows Neo the "real world" accurately reframed canteen food and in the end our statistics professor was cast as "the architect".

It's gonna be very hard to top this one on our own farewell party.

Swiss Cheese Fondue

Tonight we (Eric and me) hosted a Swiss fondue dinner for all interested students. Overall we were more than 40 people.

We had to improvise quite a bit. Instead of Swiss Caquelons, we used the ceramic pots and heating-sets used for Chinese Hot-Pot. It worked very well and we got many helping hands from other students, although crowd control turned out to be a real challenge at some point...

We brought the Cheese to China after the christmas holiday.
"I believe it was more than 10 Kg in total and it's a miracle that they didn't stop me with that stuff which resembles plastic explosives in its consistency" commented Eric who travelled though London and Hongkong.

The evening showed once more the huge potential for innvoation that lies hidden within the CEIBS student body: Some groups "optimized" their fondue by adding Swiss choccolate, which made me sceam NOOOOOO! just in time to save at least one of the pots from being ruined. Most Chinese are used to adding a little bit of sugar while cooking and they thought it actually improved the fondue's overall taste (no comment here).

Yet others (the Westerners to be exact) added enough Kirsch so that the fondue could have been easily classified as biofuel, while yet another (Chinese) group ordered dumplings to see whether these could be dunked into the cheese as well...

Let's see how they will handle the smell which is bound to persist in the canteen for another few days ;-)

Why it pays to have your own apartment

9.11.07

Subject: heaters in the dorm rooms
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 09:07:36 +0800
From: CEIBS Logistics
To: All MBA Students

Dear All,

Some of you want to know when the heaters will be turned on in the dorm rooms, now the official comment is that the heaters will be turned on when the lowest temperature drops below 10 degrees Celsius. Thanks.

Best Regards,
<Undisclosed>
Logistic Department


little more than an hour later...

---

From: <Undisclosed Exchange Student>
To: CEIBS Logistics

Dear <Undisclosed> and CEIBS Logistics,

Thank you for the email. Can you explain to me the reasoning behind the 10 degrees Celsius benchmark? Why this number and not 15C? Or 17C? I don't want to be rude, but don't you think 10C is a little cold?

From my understanding of basic thermodynamics, if the outside temperature is 10C, via equilibrium, one can expect that the temperature in our rooms will also be approximately 10C. Note: my analysis does not take into account the assumed heat generated from our moving bodies and running computers. However, the internationally accepted room temperature is around 18C to 23C (see below for room temperature definition).

<Email followed by a rather large excerpt from Wikipedia, defining room temperature as being between 18-23 degrees>


three days and a surge in enraged email traffic later...

---

Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2007 15:25:58 +0800
From: Students Committee
To: All MBA Students

Dear fellow students,

I want to thank you all for your trust in the Student Committee and your contribution on the BBS thread.

As you know, under the current policy, heating on campus will be activated when the minimum temperature drops below 10 grades. Thanks to the intervention and great effort of <Undisclosed>, the school is ready to provide additional heating in the dorm between 8PM-8AM when the min. temp drops below 12. Below is the official web site of Shanghai Government, it’s used as the standard measure for our heating application:

http://www.smb.gov.cn/PortalQXJ/ForecastWeather.aspx?cate=159 (this is in Chinese, there’s a link English version but the data in English is not updated)

According to the forecast, the min. temp. might reach 11 grades tomorrow (10/Nov). If that happens we will have the heating turned on during this weekend.

CNN Filming

Today was the filming of the CNN series "The boardroom master class". This is the one event that we had been drilled for in last week's business writing class.

The CNN crew shot footage for about 90 minutes, using a lot of (5-6) cameras.

Although it will be broadcast next weekend only, it felt like a live recording. They didn't stage anything nor repeat any shots that might have been not-ideal.

The interview was actually quite interesting, as were the two business ideas presented by CEIBS students.

On a side note: It was an interesting case in organizational behaviour studies, too. At the beginning, the CNN head of filming said that they would announce two short breaks during the filming (to cut in commercials in the final broadcast). She also said that these breaks would last only a couple minutes and that she would like us to remain seated during that time. Sure enough, as soon as the first break was announced, people jumped up from their seats an started to rush out of the auditorium. So much for the half-life of human data retention...

I'm looking forward to seeing the result on TV next weekend.

(This post courtesy of in-classroom wifi networking)