Flux Capacitors and Whatnot

Man, that was an interesting week. I'm in my pajamas this grey Friday and I'm another week closer to graduation, which is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, mostly because when I leave this place the days of blogging on a lazy Friday in my pajamas while listening to music are so going to be over it's not even funny. Speaking of work and being a grown up one day, my future employer had a recruiting dinner last night and it was pretty nice to be on the other side of the table this year answering questions and sitting back and relaxing a bit. I really don't like "holding court" at these recruiting events but I didn't find it to be that much of a drag. In fact it was kind of nice. My only major qualm was that the guy next to me was ruining his Blue Label by mixing it with Coke. Other than that, put me at a dinner where I'm getting fed like a champion, and give me a captive audience that is going to laugh at all my jokes and I'm like a little piggy in shit.

This year's Corporate Finance prospectives/recruits are once again are a very international, heavily Asian-skewed group. As a Caucasian male (with a some flava) I am in the minority. So this brings me to my story du jour. So a Chinese, a Pakastani, a French Canadian, and an American walk into class.... and while this might sound like it's the preamble to some joke, it really was the preamble to my week, which kind of was like a joke come to think of it. I'm taking a CleanTech Venture Assessment class. "That's cool", you say, to which I reply, "eh, maybe, maybe not". Our work for this course centers around assessing a CleanTech, you know, venture or whatever. On Monday we got our teams and projects (my team consisting of the aforementioned motley crew), and like a swift kick to the mid-section, my team was informed on Monday that on Thursday we had to present our initial assessment of the technology, which was thin film solar and specifically, OLEDs, which obviously stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes. Obviously. So how this class works is that there's one MBA in each group and the rest are Masters of Engineering aka Masters of Nerdometry. So it was going to be me mobilizing the United Nations Army to get this project done. And here were some issues.


Issue #1: Will the Real Xiaopei please stand up?

There was a person in my group named Xiaopei (Sh-ow-pay). When I set up the meeting to meet and hash out a powerpoint presentation I had no idea who this Xiaopei character was, and not to be all racialist here, but there may or may not be a few Asians who are Masters of Engineering students. So I'm sitting in the lobby of the Bioengineering Building and I'm trying to find Xiaopei. At this point, I'm not wearing my glasses, so when I'm not rocking my specs I've been known to squint a little. So there I am, this "round-eye", squinting at every Asian walking by, guy or girl, and asking them if they were Xiaopei, which unfortunately for my cause sounded a lot like Sharpei.

I said Xiaopei, not Sharpei.

It was going to be a matter of time before someone came back and knocked me out with a laptop or named me Biggot of the Year. Thankfully, I only embarrassed myself for 5-10 mins before the real Xiaopei (a girl) emerged. Good lord, this was not a good start.


Issue #2: And we're talking about what exactly?

So after Team United Nations finally sat down, them engineering cats started talking all kinds of craziness. I think they were speaking Wookie for a minute. This is the marketing position statement we came up with and by "we" I mean not me.

"For the manufacturer of solar panels using thin film, the OLAMco Organic Bilayer Nanoparticle Thin Film is more efficient and more economical than other thin film because it uses a patented nanoparticle technology that lowers costs by using organic materials instead of costly polysilicon or metal oxide materials and a patented manufacturing process which enables large format applications and a more robust finished product."

Well, duh.

I was trying to contribute to the tech talk, but let's just say that my "chlorophyll...more like BORE-ophyll" joke fell on deaf ears.

Anyway, there were several different kinds of language barriers in place and that's an understatement.


Issue #3: Time Crunch


Turning this thing around was not particularly easy either. I guess because all I do is group work I come off being that Type-A b-school guy who is checking in to make sure everything is going as expected. I am surely more mellow than "that guy" but someone has to be the heavy sometimes. Despite the challenges we actually put something pretty solid together and like I told my group, at 6pm on Thursday we'll be done and it is what it is. And it was. Mission Accomplished. Now all I have to do is figure out what the hell we actually said.