Orienteering

Perhaps my classmates read the part on the McCombs 2012 website called What Orientation Is Going To Be Like, but I had little idea of what to expect during orientation. Turns out it was basically more or less like speed dating and economics had a love child.

Although many events during the first week were sit-down-in-a-giant-auditorium-and-pretend-to-listen-while-actually-checking-your-iphone, most of the first week felt like one giant meet-and-greet. We had dinners with the entire MBA program (including Houston and Dallas and executive program members here), a welcome dinner with Red McCombs as the guest speaker (awesome guy; he reminds you of your backwoods uncle who appears to be crass and dull but is secretly brilliant), wild crazy dance parties at Salt Lick (supposedly a restaurant, but felt more like a wedding reception), and plenty of nights out on the town.

The economics lessons were not in the pre-term classes, but in the long lines where we learned to do cost-benefit analyses like "do I want to stay in line for maybe another hour to have my photo taken or go to get cocktails and dinner and not have my photo in the facebook?" We continuously had 1 line for all 250 of us, for dinners (usually buffet-style, like we do it in Texas), drinks, sign-ups, etc. Maybe someday we'll all split up into different clubs, concentrations, and cliques. But for now, we all want to Lemming it up and do everything together.

Oh, and to stay true to the title of this blog post, we did actually do some orienteering during orientation. Our 65-person cohort was broken into groups of 8 based on supposedly random variables (but really handedness-like traits) such as "which arm do you cross over the other" and "which leg do you put up first on a ladder." Our group of 5 (don't ask) nicknamed ourselves the Dream Team and figured we'd be quick and nimble at low level ropes course tasks that we were assured of doing. We also had a guy who worked at Mission Control in NASA, so we figured we'd be able to handle the GPS-guided orienteering task.

As it turned out, we finished in dead last in the competition because our 5-person team didn't have the breadth of knowledge to figure out what ended up being a big chunk of the competition: word game clues and trivia questions. And we got lost on the GPS task and had to use iPhones to find our way back (seriously).

But it was a good time. And that's what Orientation was about - yeah, sure we learned how to connect to wireless, what would be expected of us in class, who everybody was in the administration, etc. I'm not saying that wasn't valuable. But the main thing I wanted to get out of Orientation was a clear idea that the people I was going to spend the next two years with were going to be worth spending time with. And with apologies to my NASA friend, Mission Accomplished.