The MBA Student Voice

An Amazing Anderson Outdoor Adventure

As a native Californian I have always loved California's natural beauty and all the awesome outdoor activities that California has to offer.  My love of the outdoors is one of the reasons I was really drawn to the UCLA Anderson community, there are lots of people like me who love the outdoors, there's even a student club dedicated to outdoor adventures. Anderson also has a really cool series of pre-orientation trips for incoming students, the trips send groups of about 15 classmates to a number of California's nicest areas.  Some of my classmates canoed in the Colorado River, others spent time in the Channel Islands and a number of the trips went into the High Sierra's. 

I grew up camping and hiking in the High Sierra's so when I saw that one of the pre-orientation trip options was to spend six days backpacking 26 miles in Hetch Hetchy I jumped at the opportunity to go. The trip was held about a week before orientation started, our group was made up of two guides from UCLA Outdoor Adventures, one second year Anderson student and twelve incoming students.  I wasn't totally sure what to expect going into the trip, I hadn't met any of the people coming on the trip beforehand but I figured spending six days together would end up being an amazing way to get to know my classmates.

The trip ended up being better than anything I could have imagined.  Our guides were amazing, they were very knowledgable and put together a program that facilitated all of us getting to know each other.  Our second year student was really cool and filled us in on what life is like at Anderson.  And most importantly all of my classmates turned out to be really great to camp with and very interesting to talk to.  Through a combination of structured activities and unstructured time while we were hiking, camping, swimming and exploring we really got to know each other very well.  My time in the mountains with my classmates really validated the fact that the Anderson campus culture was a good fit for me.  And the greatest thing was that after the trip I had a group of classmates who I'm really close to, so when campus orientation started earlier this week I already had friends in all of the sections and two of the people I camped with live within a block of my apartment so we already have a neighborhood hang out crew and carpool to campus. 

I had so much fun on my pre-orientation trip that I am already planning to volunteer to go as a second year on one or more of the trips for next year's incoming students.  For anyone reading this post who loves the outdoors and is considering Anderson, I can attest to the fact that there are lots of outdoor lovers at Anderson and if you end up coming to Anderson DEFINITELY do a pre-orientation trip.  My pre-orientation trip was one of the best trips I've ever been on. 

LA Here I Come!!!

As I write this I'm getting ready to move from the San Francisco area to Los Angeles to start what's shaping up to be a great adventure at UCLA over the next few years.  It's funny as a northern Californian I never really pictured myself living in Southern California but I've fallen in love with UCLA so LA here I come!!!!!! 

Before the LA adventure starts I figured I should introduce myself.  I'm a Berkeley, CA native but I spent most of the last ten years elsewhere.  I went to school in Upstate New York at RPI, when I graduated in 2003 I moved to the New York City area to become a management consultant first with American Management Systems (now CGI) and later with IBM.  I consulted to financial service firms, at AMS in a technical role, at IBM in organizational change and regulatory compliance roles.  I loved consulting both for the work and also because it allowed me to feed my love of travel, I did client work in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Gabon, Vietnam and Laos.  The more exotic work locations came out of a consulting engagement I had with one of the worlds biggest environmental NGO's that ran in parallel with my financial service roles over a four year period.

Consulting provided all sorts of amazing professional opportunities, it also opened the door to a really amazing personal opportunity.  Through all my work travel I built up a lot of airline miles which made it possible to pursue my life long dream of taking an around the world trip.  Last year I turned in a little over 200,000 miles for an around the world plane ticket and traveled through twenty countries. 

I came back from the trip and launched into the school hunt which is a little more complex for me because I'm hoping to get a JD/MBA.  I knew I wanted to attend a west coast school, first and foremost because after ten years away from home I was ready to come back and secondly because I wanted schools with a strong focus on entrepreneurship and social ventures.   

I moved back to California last summer and started looking at schools.  I actually didn't initially look at the southern California schools but I eventually decided to take a trip down to LA to check out the schools.  During my first visit to UCLA I absolutely fell in love with Anderson, the campus culture just clicked, I really liked the interaction between the students and faculty in a class I sat in on, UCLA has great entrepreneurship and social venture programs and I really liked the area around the UCLA campus.

With my heart and mind set on attending UCLA I applied and got into Anderson, the law school side of my JD/MBA is a little complex so I'll get into that during a later post.  Once I had the application process behind me I decided to learn more about what it's like to work at a social venture so I took a volunteer role with Kiva.org in San Francisco, CA for six months prior to school.  I had an amazing time at Kiva and learned a ton, I'm now wrapping things up in the Bay Area and preparing to move down to Los Angeles.  I'm really looking forward to my time at UCLA, I'll be posting again soon as school gets going in the coming weeks.