UF MBA Orientation Day 1 and 2

MBA orientation kicked off yesterday.  There are only 38 37 of us in the Class of 2010 and everyone seems cool and down to earth.  The variety of life experience is much more diverse than I expected.  There’s a journalist in the class, an ex-fighter pilot and ex-Peace Core(r).  In fact, the class is so diverse that none of my classmates shares a birth city with another and perhaps more surprisingly there are only seven classmates that hold an undergrad degree from UF.  I expected at least a third of the class to have had one.  Equally more surprising is that one of my classmates is also from Los Angeles and was friends with a girl I know back in L.A.  I had never met this kid until yesterday.  It’s amazing how small the world can be.

After the breakfast meet and greet we went into in Stuzin Hall and were bombarded by speeches, information and opportunites.  There is a lot of opportunity to be extremely involved in the program and in extracurricular activities and I plan on diving head first into as much as I can handle.  They also gave us our class stats and they are quite impressive.  The average GPA of my class is a 3.4, the average GMAT is a shade under 690, the average age is 27 and the average years of work experience is four.  I am not sure how I cajoled my way into a class so impressive but I like it.

Day Two was supposed to be our Ropes obstacle course out at Lake Wauberg but Tropical Storm Fay cancelled that for us.  Ropes has been rescheduled for Saturday but of course Fay can’t make up her mind which way she wants to blow and it turns out we could have done the course today.  I am convinced that it will rain on Saturday and we will be the first MBA class at UF to not do the ropes course.  So instead of Ropes we had our Developing Yourself leadership day.  We received our DiSC evaluations, participated in a fun listening exercise, wrote the alphabet chicken scratch style with our non-dominant hands and practiced our elevator pitches.  It was interesting and interactive stuff. Hopefully once school starts our real classes will be as interactive as our orientation has been so far.