It has been a whirlwind ride over the last few weeks. I flew into Boston on the weekend of the 17th October to participate in the MBA Sales Competitionrun by MIT. The competition pits contestants from different business schools in sales role plays. The final two rounds in Boston consisted of a 1-on-1 individual role play and a group role-play, where the representatives from each school sold something together. Unfortunately, my 100% score in the preliminary phone-based cold call round, which got me there, counted for nought.

My individual 1-on-1 roleplay was probably best described as "a bit of a disaster". The roleplay centered around selling private wealth management services. I should have known a request for a for a "verbal pitch" actually meant powerpoint. The important lesson for me was that it is often better to give the illusion of over-preparedness, than to actually be over-prepared. The Group round, during which each school sold SAP to a potential customer, went slightly better.

The organisation of the event was quite impressive, and I was surprised to hear how strong MIT Sloan's offerings are in the sales space. Sales is not something most people would associate with the school, but their sales club is the second biggest on campus, they run a conference, offer training from external partners and off course run this competition. MIT Sloan certainly seems to be building a brand for sales.

Overall, it was a good event and I'm glad to have been lucky enough to participate. The logistics would have been a nightmare to organise, with entrants from almost a dozen schools, but the MIT students did a fantastic job getting the event together. Nevertheless, the Kellogg kids might not have won the sales competition, but I'm sure we've sold some of the Sloanies on the idea of on dropping out and applying for Kellogg class of '12 ;-p.

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I've applied for a grant with the Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge is a contest that awards up to $5 million each year for innovate digital projects that have a geographical or local element. The business idea that I am pursuing fits the bill and, I've estimated, needs less than $200k to get going.

Although the application is very simple - less than 800 words in total - I've spent an inordinate amount of time on it over the last two months. Writing and redrafting, the process was similar to applying to business school. I believe tens of thousands of applications are made each year, from which a dozen to two dozen projects are eventually funded. The odds are not good, but I figure that it's worth a punt.

I debated whether to make my application under the "open" category, so people could view it and make comments on the Knight News Challenge website; ultimately I opted to apply under the "closed" category. Although seeding copy-cat competition is an issue, the main reason I've applied under the closed category is so I can manage my time. If I applied under the "open" category, I would need to undertake a large marketing effort to get it viewed by lots of people, rated highly and get good comments on it. I'm sure the Foundation will disagree, but social proof (or the lack of) is hard to not pay attention to. I feel my time is better invested actually looking for funding - this is after all why I am applying.

If I am successful in winning the funding that I am seeking, my project will be able to follow a utilitarian path - I will be able to concentrate on producing the best product possible, and it might just help improve the distribution of news in local areas. If I am unsuccessful, I will be relying on purely commercial funding and the focus of the product will likely have to focus on the distribution of news and marketing relating to commercial products.

Although it is a very small step, and potentially will not yield anything, I feel like I've taken my first step to starting a business out of business school. I can now concentrate on the next step.

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I entered the MIT Sales Competition as a way of learning something about sales - I'll need to develop this skill if I am to have any success with my entrepreneurial aspirations. I never expected that I could actually progress past the initial phase to the final round - but indeed I have. I head to Boston in two weeks.

The competition consists of two rounds. In the first round, entrants from thirteen different schools participated in a cold-call competition. Each participant cold-called a judge, who evaluated our performance. To this judge, we each attempted to sell supply chain management software; the actual scenario was based on a case we were given. From Kellogg, perhaps ten people participated. The top three scoring individuals from each school progress to the next round in Boston. I am fortunate to be among those three for Kellogg!

My strategy for the cold-call paid off: I spent most of the call asking questions and eliciting concerns so I could "pitch" what I was selling against those concerns. It was a bit clunky in places, but the judge responded favourably to my approach. I'm also sure the fact that I smile a lot (and that people say you can "hear" someone smiling) helped build rapport.

The next round takes place in Boston, on Saturday 17th October. It will consist of a 1-on-1 selling role play, as well as a group selling exercise - where the participants from each school sell something as a group. I hadn't anticipated getting this far, so I'm continuing to view this whole thing as a learning experience. Hopefully my fellow Kelloggians and I do well in representing out school.

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Follwing pre-term, I'm a few weeks into life at Kellogg. Yet, it feels like a lot longer. It feels like we've all been here for several months. The coursework load has started to ramp up. Clubs are recruiting people for leadership positions. The social scene is still lively. I feel like I'm stretching my time as far out as possible and struggling to keep up. Perhaps the problem is simply self discipline - sticking to what I had planned to do and getting things done. By self discipline, what I really mean is motivation. Yet considerable thought and recent experiences have led me to a time-honored simpler answer.

I would once wake up in the morning and lie in bed for an extra hour. These days, that hour has chopped down to a few minutes. I think this is what is necessary to operate in the business school environment - greater and greater self control of your urges. I'm realising that this is one of the things I need to really master. There is probably just enough time to keep up with only the readings and coursework for classes. Adding clubs, career pursuits, socialising and everything else means there is less and less time for procrastination and distractions. Yet, I find it difficult to not let my mind drift to other things - especially while reading dense text that was probably designed to test your reading stamina. If I am to achieve everything I want in these two years - self discipline will surely be key.

Yet, self-discipline does not have to feel like self-discipline if there is motivation. The stronger the motivation, the quicker things happen and the less procrastination there is. I expect to finish writing this blog post within 30 minutes, for example, simply because I am motivated to keep writing and also motivated to get back to dealing with the rest of the stress of business school. Yet, when it comes to completing assignments for some classes - the motivation is not there: minutes become hours. Soon, I'm already behind and scrambling to keep myself interested to keep going. So beyond self-discipline, if I am to achieve everything I want to out of business school, I need to learn to motivate myself to do those really hard things - those things that are easy to put off. I need to be motivated enough to complete them quickly and move on.

For all this talk of self-control and motivation, I have to admit, though, that there is a simpler device that has been getting me through everything: coffee. I'd been off coffee for several years, but I've picked up the habit again. It seems like such an easy way to stretch out the day. Perhaps this is the simple answer to all my worries? Perhaps with a bit more coffee in my blood, I won't need self-discipline or motivation? Or perhaps I am delusional - I hear that happens when you're body is running only on...

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CIM Week, and pre-term with it, have finished. So in theory I've now got some more time to myself. In reality, it's the first day of class and I'm finding I'm still struggling to keep up with everything. Here is what we have going on at the moment...

Group work: The Leadership and Organisations course (aka MORS) that we had packed into pre-term has a group coursework outstanding. Each of us in our groups of six has to interview a top leader to ultimately produce an analysis of how these leaders use their social networks. I'm looking forward to getting some insights from these leaders. My only gripe is getting time with top leaders to talk to interview them about this. If we all can, this could be a really interesting project.

Social scene: The social scene at Kellogg is very active. Thus far, people seem to be hitting the bars quite regularly. Some people seem to be focused entirely on "networking" - I come across too often at every event I frequent. What I've also found interesting is how quickly stories spread across the student body. Any story of any kind of incident spreads like wild fire.

Reading: Pretty much all the courses have reading that they require. There is far more reading to do for courses than there is time to do them. Some of the reading is quite fascinating, while other parts of it are dry and put me to sleep. Not all the professors seem to use the readings to the same extent. At this stage, I'm still trying to figure out how to best go about tackling the readings.

Extra-curricular: All the clubs at Kellogg have started emailing the students about their events and kick-off meetings. They are keen to recruit first years to leadership positions. On an aside, I've signed up for the MIT Sales competition as a way of developing my sales skills.

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CIM has been compared to an army bootcamp, where you are "broken down" and your behaviours retrained to survive in new environments. At business school, this new environment seems to consist of frantic team bonding, late night drinking and then struggling through classes afterwards. ©

I felt myself gasping and clutching my seat. It was the first day of business school. The 2nd year leaders of our 72 person first year group had just uttered some words to unleash hell, "you need to come up with five cheerable chants among you; you guys can organise yourselves to do this". The sudden vacuum in leadership among 72 A-types opened the doors to a sudden gigantic wave of chaos. Rather than repeat Shobit's summary of CIM, Kellogg's orientation progam (official details here), I'll provide some anecdotes of my experiences.

Who could have thought that so many blatantly idiotic activities could inspire so much passion and energy? From a battle to produce the best chants, to treasure-hunt style races and "the name game", every 72-ish person "section" that the class of 2011 is broken down into competes during CIM to win various competitions. One girl called it genius - "we're forced to bond with each other super-quickly!"... Personally, I've been awed by how many people want to lead something - anything: even competitions as weird and meaningless as these. Perhaps more interesting is the joint realisation by everyone that chaos is a lose-lose situation for all. Eventually, people learned to rally around the people who spoke with the most common sense and enthusiasm. The cry of another person, "we can't all be leaders", captured the essence of the situation.

Between the chaotic team bonding, first year Kellogg students also partake in a pre-term class: Leadership in Organisations. Each class is a massive learning itself, requiring a lot of reflection to really appreciate. For example, a recent class broke up into small teams of 3 that paired up with other teams of 3 to negotiate. One of the teams got completely whitewashed! Perhaps most amazing was that the team that got whitewashed thought that they had a good deal until they came back to the classroom and found the options each of the teams really had to negotiate with. One of the negotiators on the rival team was revealed to be an expert: start negotiating from a really ambitious target price: the wider the gap between your target price and your "reserve price" (your lowest price), the more room you have to negotiate with. The professor summed it up: what matters is how much negotiation you do - the more the other party feels like they've had to work for it, the better they will feel - even if really they got a bad deal (.... because they don't know it - they think they've done great because they worked so hard for it). This also means that if someone offers you a really great initial price, you should not accept it - if you do, they'll think "damn, I could have got a better price". Instead, making them work for an even better deal makes them feel they got a good deal and you get an even better deal.

The last component of CIM, beyond crazy competitions and classes, is the socialising. There are Kellogg people out every night, though only the hard-core are out every single night. In a town in which everyone lives four blocks from each other, the same five or six bars become the places that everyone is at. Socialising becomes very easy. Doing so in wacky costumes makes socialising even easier. I was out one night, when my glittering green wig caught the attention of not only every passer-by, but also the locals in one of the bars that Kellogg students frequent. After much banter, it materialised that one of the old gentleman at the bar, a little removed from the social chatter elsewhere among Kellogg students, was a the owner of a chain of restaurants around Chicago. Who'd have thought networking could be this easy?

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I've been in Evanston for two weeks now. Already the American culture is slightly tiring me. So, yesterday's inspiring opening welcome to international students by the Interim Dean, Prof Sunil Chopra, could not have come at a better time. It's a shame the general opening welcome to all students today was not as eye opening.

While I spent my first week in Evanston setting my apartment up, I did manage to get out on some of the evenings to meet some fellow students. One of my 2011 classmates organised two events for people to meet before the official school activities began; I attended the second of these events - staged in a strange bar based within a cinema theatre complex. Several hundred students attended and I was not prepared for my first impressions:

hoards of guys chasing after cute girls - sometimes these girls would be circled by several men

people actually complaining that one of their fellow students had taken the initiative to organise these events; they'd say things like, "what does this guy want from me?!".

everyone going through the same motion of "what do you do? where are you from?", only to forget five seconds later and only for the same conversation to restart when the next new person joined each conversation

In hindsight, I was naive to not be more prepared for these things - to be more prepared for the way things are in American business schools.

The last point on "what do you do? where are you from?" was addressed in a unique way during my second week at Kellogg. KWEST is a week long trip that students in groups of 25 go on around the world: a sort of a team bonding activity. On these trips, everyone is instructed not to reveal anything about themselves to others on the trip until the near the end - when there is a "big reveal". The idea of this game is to enable people to get to know each other beyond the stero-types that people perceive of others. In this environment, I noticed that

People grappled for something - anything - to talk about. Often this meant talking about films, TV shows and music. Inadvertently, I think this made if difficult for anyone not familiar with some of the American culture to relate to some conversations.

Some personailties were able to attract more attention than others. American rowdiness and cheer was more amenable to social interactions than I expected.

For me, the "big reveal" game prevented me really getting to know people. It came too late in the week, by which point I almost no longer had the energy to delve deeper into getting to know people

The trip was great, the people were fantastic, but I personally feel that I did not engage as well as I could have done - again I misjudged the culture of American business school students.

For me, the welcome to international students by Interim Dean, Prof Sunil Chopra, came at the right time. He spoke about research done at Kellogg showing that the most successful people are those who can connect different "small worlds". People live in "small worlds" of people they are connected to - people who know each other. This could be the community of industry experts in a field or students from a similar country at school. Those who are successful are those who can reach beyond these small worlds. Coming to a different country, as international students are, it can be intimidating and easy to crawl back into the circle of friends and culture we already know. However, we should challenge ourselves to become connectors - to become people who can inhabit several of these different small worlds. If we are able to do this, we will find that we are able to do more - innovation, for example, comes most easily when different small worlds connect.

While Prof Sunil Chopra's speech to international students yesterday seemed to emphasise the connections that we made as being the most important asset of business school, the proceedings today, the first proper day of school, were the expected dull welcome introductions to the academics.

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