One of the first courses you’ll take during Anderson’s MBA program is a statistics class during which, O joy, you’ll learn all the intricacies of confidence intervals. While this topic is more of a conversation killer than anything else, it does have pretty useful applications in real-life. For example, imagine that you want to market a new product, but you are unsure whether it will be well-received by consumers. How many people should you poll until you can be confident that their opinion about your product is representative of, say, the country as a whole? What we learned in class is that solutions to such problems lie in the Student’s distribution, developed by a statistics enthusiast who worked for the Guiness brewery, which of course prompted a "beer: is there anything it can’t do?"
On a completely unrelated topic, I was fortunate enough to participate in a Dinner for Eight event hosted by McKesson last Thursday. Eight students, mostly first-years, had the privilege of being wined and dined by McKesson and, more importantly, asking questions about the company straight to recruiters. McKesson is an enormous healthcare company that specializes, well, in many things actually, such as pharmaceutical distribution and IT solutions for hospital administration. I cannot overemphasize how helpful it is to talk to a recruiter for more than five minutes at the end of a corporate presentation. It is obviously great for networking, but even more invaluable is the insider perspective and the better understanding of the company that I gained.
Speaking of dinner, I was also served at a Dinner for One at Universal Studios last Saturday (see picture below). Every Halloween, Universal Studios throws a horror night, during which the park is taken over by a multitude of ghoulish monsters. Simply put, the goal is to have a good scare, and I must say Universal did a very good job. Of course, many theme parks do the same thing, but what’s great about this one is that many of its monsters are based on its movies, such as Halloween, Child’s Play, and Saw – although shame on Universal for daring to come up with a fifth sequel to Saw! If you’ve never tried this kind of event before, consider going next year.
According to this zombie, I don’t taste that great, so he let me go after a few munches. That’ll teach me for not obeying signs…
–Simon
