What a great evening!
Really enjoyed the night with my wife. Great cause, great entertainment, great networking, great organization!
The event was held at the House of Sweden, on the Potomac waterfront in Georgetown. There were celebratory speeches, acknowledgement of this year’s recipient of Distinguished Alumni Award, hors d’oeuvre, open bar (take a note, if you ever have to attend an event at this venue – no red wine is permitted, apparently for the sake of the floors), and performances by current students and alumna.
I was really surprised and pleased by the quality of the band that comprised GWSB MBA students. The guys were really amazing. My personal favorite was their rendition of the Beatles songs, though they had more in their repertoire, including American classics.
This reception reminded me about another event I attended with my wife in my first year of part-time program – MBA Gala. No contest here – Business Gives Back night was hands down a much more rewarding experience.
Other than enjoying the music and dancing, I was glad to catch up with a bunch of people I met before in my elective classes, as well as meet quite a few new faces – mostly the first-year full-time Global MBAs.
I even met the guy who almost dismantled me from the dubious position of being the oldest student in full-time and part-time MBA programs at GWSB 
. He is still a couple of years younger than me. But he nevertheless beat me in one regard – he started full-time program, not part-time, at the age just over 40. Kudos!
To learn more about the event, read this more official report on the evening, and my original post about it.
If there were one thing I personally could do differently – I should have skipped the after party at the nearby bar .
I just bought two tickets for me and my wife to the 2-nd Annual Business Gives Back event that will take place this coming Saturday. If you are in the GWSB community and somehow missed multiple prompts and invitations to this event in the busyness of your days, you still have a chance to register and buy tickets online till tomorrow. Here are just a few highlights of this event from the invitation flyer and other promotional materials:
- In line with the George Washington School of Business pillars: “Act Responsibly, Lead Passionately, Think Globally,” Business Gives Back is a student-led initiative celebrating a commitment to responsible business and social change.
- Three student-led initiatives will be selected by a student panel to compete for the funds raised at the event. The initiatives showcased must be nascent nonprofits or community service groups founded or led by current GWSB students that, as a reflection of the GWSB pillars, make a positive impact within the D.C. and global communities.
- An evening of music and fellowship recognizing community initiatives led by George Washington University School of Business students and alumni.
- The evening will feature musical performances by current GWSB graduate students. Cocktails and refreshments will be served.
- Remarks by Dean Guthrie and Dean Riddle
I hope to take a few pictures and have a brief report on the event afterwards. For me, in addition to supporting a good cause, it will be another opportunity to network with my fellow MBA, and undergrad students, as I acknowledged before the lack of such opportunities for part-time MBA students due to busy schedules.
See you there!
This post is just a brief introduction to the article I am preparing for publishing tomorrow. I am planning to have stories from the GWSB MBA alumni published on this site. Basically, I am interested to hear from them about:
- why they decided to pursue MBA in the first place, why part-time, why GWSB
- their overall experience with the part-time MBA program at George Washington University School of Business
- what value they were able to extract from the program (if any)
- how/whether the program helped them in their post-MBA career, or other goals they had set for themselves
- whether the program met their expectations
- whether they got the expected ROI for their MBA degree
- any positive highlights
- any grievances they might have
- any advice they could give to current and prospective MBA students
These are just general guidelines I will request them to consider in order to help them formulate their posts, not a rigid format. So far I reached out to one of my classmates, Brian Fitzgerald, with whom I had one class together – Consultative Processes – in Fall 2010 term. We also worked with him on a group project in that class. Brian has graciously agreed to write about his experience and tomorrow you will have a chance to read the first guest post on this blog. Hopefully, I will be able to invite more of my classmates to participate in this new project at my blog, and Brian’s post will be the first in the series of alumni stories. I am actually also going to ask some of the students from the full-time MBA, called Global MBA at GWSB, and see if any of them would be interested to share their stories. I hope these stories will be interesting not only for me, but for all readers of my blog who are considering the MBA degree in general, and part-time MBA option in particular, whether it is in GWU School of Business or any other Business School.
Today was my first day of classes in the final term of part-time MBA program at George Washington University School of Business. I had two classes piggy-backed from 4.30 PM to 9.40 PM. I don’t have classes for the rest of the week in the first Spring Module, so it seems like a reasonable workload. But in the second module I will have two more classes added during the week. At that time it will be very much like taking an equivalent of a full-time MBA student load for seven weeks. The only consolation is that by mid-May it will all be over – I will become one of about a hundred thousand freshly-minted MBAs graduating this year in the USA alone. Huge company!
The classes I had today are Organizational Processes and Change Management and Global Corporate Responsibility. Both are 3-credit classes full-term long. In my post Rate My Professors – Validated! I mentioned that all my electives for this final term I selected strictly on the ratings of professors at ratemyprofessor.com. Of course, I am interested in the subject matter itself. But if it was not for a good instructor I would choose different class of my interest. I also got additional endorsements from some of the classmates who had already taken these classes. My rationale was that for the final term, when I do have a choice, I wanted to have the best professors I could get, so I could enjoy the classes and enjoy myself in those classes.
So far I am very happy about my choices. Though the classes will require quite a lot of work, I am OK with it, because both professors are very knowledgeable and well-qualified for their respective subjects. And what is even more important, they are very passionate about their subjects and seem to care a lot about students. Also, both classes were very engaging and interactive, inviting a lot of interactions between everyone in the classroom.
Aside from academics, I was glad to see and briefly chat with about five of my classmates from previous classes and other engagements, including a guy I met earlier through this blog. All in all, I am excited to be back on campus and am looking forward to a great Spring term ahead.
