Today was a big day, for a number of reasons.
First Pitch
I’ve been working on a business idea for a few months now, and I pitched it for the first time tonight, at a meeting of the Entrepreneurship Interest Group at Judge Business School. It was really good to pitch it first to friends and peers, especially since they came from a wide variety of backgrounds and had some really interesting perspectives on it all.
Talking about it to them made me realize just how much work I have in front of me, but just how much I could really “change the world” if I’m successful in my quest. Their comments and feedback have sharpened my ideas; they found a few weaknesses in my thinking, but also reinforced a few key principles on which I had based my plans. Next steps are to really start talking to people more widely about this.
First Exam
Yes, it’s only the third week at Cambridge and we had our first exam today, in Business Statistics. I’m a bit of a bone-head… I didn’t realize the exam was open-book until about 5 minutes before it began! Luckily that meant I had studied harder than I probably needed to, which did make the exam seem a little easier than I had expected. Stats can be a bit rough, especially since a number of the things you’re taught in class (particularly how to do statistics calculations in Excel) can’t be examined, which does tend to confuse things a bit.
Speaker Series
I’m part of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, which has a 500+ year tradition. There are currently five MBA students studying at Jesus this year, and we’re looking at creating stronger links between Jesus and Judge through a speaker series. (There are some tremendously successful Jesus alumni out in the world… we want current students to hear from them!) It’s early days, but we had two really positive meetings today with key people and things are starting to look like they’re coming together. More on this as it develops.
Term Project
As part of the MBA, this term we complete a “Cambridge Venture Project.” Done part-time over approximately 4 weeks, teams of five students (our study groups) work with local small businesses on challenges they’re facing, typically marketing-focused. We received information on our project late last week, and had our first group meeting today. Can’t really talk about it here, but it sounds like it’s going to be a very interesting (and international) project.
Things are about to get much, much busier… should be fun.
Jed Christiansen 