Here is a unique twist: I have a class this quarter that encourages us students to use our mobile phones during class.
The class is called Brand Management and is taught by Professor Sanjay Sood and co-taught by Jim Stengel, the former Global Marketing Officer of Proctor & Gamble. It is a really exciting class because Mr. Stengel is a world-famous and highly accomplished marketing executive, Prof. Sood is renowed as being one of the best professors at UCLA Anderson for marketing and entertainment, and together they have assembled a fascinating array of guest speakers in the field.
Further, a whopping 20% of our grade will be based on "social media"; we are tasked with tweeting our reactions to the presentations by the guest speakers. We've only had one class with this component thus far, but I thought it was a unique take. It was interesting to see what my fellow students found poignant from the presentation, and to give and hear our reactions.
In the first class, we mostly quoted what we felt were the highlights. I tried to highlight some parallels to other facets of industry, and asked a question or two. I think as we get more comfortable with the concept, we'll have a broader dialogue, where perhaps the twitter feed will be almost like a separate conversation to the presentation -- ideally an interesting debate. Definitely a unique way to change the classroom experience!
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I need to bring up something that happened last quarter, that I should have addressed after it happened. Better late than never, I suppose.
I wanted to shout a hearty THANK YOU to a fellow Bruin. I don't know her name or which school she is in (she's not from Anderson, or at least, I didn't recognize her). But I really appreciated her sentiment and would encourage all of us to follow her example.
See, what happened was, I was driving out of Parking Structure 7, which has a ramp that leads to a three-way stop T-junction with the main road. It was relatively late -- think it was about 10:30 PM or so -- on a Monday night.
I got to the stop sign at the same time as another car reached the stop sign to my right. I realized then that I had forgotten to plug in my iPod into my car stereo. So I put the handbrake on (my American readers should know that I drive a manual transmission), put my emergency lights on, and quickly fished out my cord.
999 cars out of 1,000 would have driven off from that stop sign and gone on their way. But she was that 1,000th car. Rather than go straight and away from the garage, she turned left, pulled up next to me, rolled down her window, and asked, "Are you ok? Is your car ok?" I told her that I was just adjusting my iPod, she said, "great", U-turned, then carried on her way.
It occurred to me well after the fact that she's a small woman driving by herself late at night on a dark campus, yet took the time to make sure I was ok before going on her way. I was touched. Those of us to live in the major metros in the US are so used to mis-trusting people that we forget to help each other -- or in this case, just make sure we are all ok.
To the wonderfully noble-minded Bruin from that night, thank you very much. You made my day.
-- Sreesha
