Pre-term is kind of like an iceberg…

By Conor | August 26th, 2008 | No Comments

We are just days away from the end of NYU Stern Pre-Term, and I gotta tell you, it is pretty much a blur at this point. The day is mostly constructed of various presentations. These presentations have, in my opinion, gotten more practical as the days have gone on. Interestingly, however, there may not be a direct correlation between the utility of the presentation and class attendance to these presentations.

Now, I may be speaking out of turn here, but if you ask me, which you didn’t, the secret to ensuring that people show up to these presentations is making them – and I quote – “optional.”

Oh man, that gets people curious. I’ll be you’re curious right now. Optional, you say? And I’d be willing to bet you’re mentally penning it in your calendar. Why? Because optional somehow implies that there may be limited availability. And limited availability makes people want in on it.

The other side of that coin, of course, is the Mandatory Presentation. And let’s face it – we already know what the mandatory presentations are all about: they are opportunities for speakers to use more iceberg analogies.

I don’t want to be unfair – I really do enjoy the presentations. But you can pretty much set your watch to the iceberg analogies. Inevitably, about four minutes in, the speaker will use the analogy of an iceberg to describe their field/program/department/iceberg.

And I think by now I understand that analogy. Let me take a stab at it: a lot is hidden below the surface, and sometimes the part that is hidden below the surface is really important and is, in point of fact, the wonderful part of that particular field or program or department. The analogy usually fails to extend to the terror of that same iceberg ripping the hull off your ocean liner, but no matter – we have already moved onto the next analogy, perhaps about a different kind of iceberg.

The optional sessions, on the other hand, often involve NYU Stern alumni from different fields talking about what they do in their particular field. These sessions tend to be gloriously practical to those of us who have little idea of what we are going to be doing after business school.

I sometimes wonder what percentage of the class is in that same boat. Certainly in my application to b-school, there was no indication that I may NOT have had a clear vision of my career. In my application, I talked a big game. I had laser focus in my application. I had the next five years charted out in high resolution, with the subsequent twenty mapped out with what I would consider a high degree of confidence.

On this point, I will now concede, I may have been exaggerating.

Certainly I do want to do the things I mapped out – they involved building Next Generation Nepal – but there is something about coming into these sessions and hearing about all these other jobs out there that gives you pause. I have been in non-profit for so many years and loved it dearly – truly I have – but what I love even more dearly is my family and knowing that when I graduate I’ll be able to support them with actual paychecks. I’m just sayin’. So these presentations have been particularly useful to me.

There has been more to Pre-Term than presentations, however.

We were treated to a Mets game last week that I thought rocked, for example, despite the fact that hot dogs at Shea are now up to ninety-six dollars. The wonder of the game was not the fact that the Mets crushed the Braves, but rather it was seeing several hundred of my classmates in identical t-shirts. I know that sounds kind of dorky, and maybe it was, but I secretly thought it was really cool.

Except, of course, when Alan and I were the last ones on the subway on the way home.

We went very quickly from Team Stern! to just two dudes wearing matching baby-blue shirts. That was pretty lame. The women across from us whispered loudly that we probably worked for Johnson and Johnson, whose logo appeared on the shirt. And I don’t know much about J and J, but I’m pretty sure their employees aren’t required to wear matching t-shirts.

Making that particular situation a little more uncomfortable, I had made the fatal mistake of receiving a small t-shirt and forgetting to trade up to a larger size. I swear, I almost didn’t even go to the game. I had visions of this thing coming down only to my naval, like I taken the shirt off a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Mercifully, it extended below the belt and I didn’t feel like a complete moron, though the sleeves were tight enough to greatly reduce the circulation to my extremities, so at the game my hands must have looked like I was wearing a couple of those gigantic “We’re #1” foam fingers. My wife had to cut the thing off me when I got home.

Good times.

Two days left of Pre-Term, my friends. Two days.