I think the last blog post I wrote was shortly after classes began, and when I look back over my Outlook calendar at what I’ve been up to in the interim, the hiatus makes sense. Even before school when I was working full-time, traveling several times a month, and training for races, I don’t recall feeling this busy. Maybe it seems so hectic because I am constantly changing my focus from academics, to company presentations, to resume and cover letter work, to fulfilling my duties as a First Year Director for three clubs, to a million other things, every day. Or maybe it’s just that even after my 10-12 hour days on campus, I still have homework to do!
In any event, midterms wrapped up on Thursday. Getting back into intense studying mode nine years out of college, for classes I never would have voluntarily picked if I knew I was getting a grade in them, made this quite the experience. If you’re like me, the following looks more like gibberish than the Significance Test for Proportions, but that was something on the Statistics midterm.
I actually wrote this equation in my spare time.
Similarly, you Econ majors might recognize the following as the Cobb-Douglas Principle, but Cobb to me is a salad, not something I am prepared to use to analyze a regression like I (sort of) did last Tuesday.
Cobb-Douglas Principle; Not Pictured: Avocados, bacon, any shred of logic.
But in between all this hard work there has been some fun. There are social activities scheduled many nights of the week, such as Lit Club (Wednesday nights), Anderson Afternoons (every Thursday after classes, free beer on campus!), and football games & tailgates (UCLA beat Cal (Berkeley) in the Homecoming game this weekend!).
Go Bruins!
Two of the highlights have been the 80s Party and the Halloween Party. I’m not sure if it’s an Anderson thing, or a business school thing, but when costumes are involved, people really go all out!
This is a situation where a picture is worth a thousand words.
Things really warmed up on the dance floor, good thing I had a stylin’ side pony to stay cool!
The annual Halloween Party was this Friday, and it got pretty crazy as everyone let off their post-midterm stress. The party was held at the beautiful Petersen Auto Museum amongst many cool vintage cars on display.
Yes, this is really the Batmobile.
All the pics came out like this, largely because the photographers were being rammed by people taking their Angry Birds costume too seriously.
I am a first year director for the High Tech Business Association and we have had a few great events as well, most notably the popular Kick-Off. This was a reception and cocktail hour with a twist—among the attendees were representatives from leading tech companies, Cisco and Google. For three hours, students were able to enjoy food and wine in a relaxed atmosphere while interacting with company reps and one another, without the recruiting event crush.
The keynote speaker was Mark Thomas, Anderson Class of 2010, who gave a company presentation and showcased a Google product he has been working on called Google Trends, which allows the user to compile useful analytics into easy-to-read graphs. The crowd favorite was the visual representation of the search traffic generated by “UCLA Anderson” far outstripping that by “USC Marshall.” Although this was news to no one, it was still exciting to see backed by numbers in a graph that was presentation-ready.
Overall, it seems that everything I was told about first quarter of business school being the busiest time of your life seems to be proving true. But it helps that I love every minute of it!
-Charlotte Baxter
Follow me on Twitter
