1st Day of my MBA!!!

Yesterday, July 10, 2006, was the first day of my MBA in NYU Stern. I must recognize that I was pretty nervous, I arrived like one hour before I should have to (which, as all you know me know, it is not very usual in me).

We are 67 students for the summer start, which is a the size of a regular "Block" (Class) in NYU Stern. We are almost 2 women per 3-4 men, which was really surprising to me, as usually the numbers are lower than this in the Top Business Schools.

The day went smoothly. We had a reception, we were introduced to our summer study groups (I like mine very much, we are two Neww Yorkers, one from San Francisco, one from Colombia, one from New Haven and me (Spain). e had the chance to get to know the university and surroundings through a funny game. We met some of our professors, solve some administrative issues and we attended to a leadership conference.

The speaker of the conference was Chris Lowney, a great guy with one of the most rare backgrounds I have never hear of. He is a former Jesuit, who leaved his 7 years in the seminary and enrolled J.P. Morgan. He worked there for seventeen years, serving as Managing Director in New York, Tokyo, Singapore and London. Now he is a consultant for the Catholic Medical Mission Board.

The conference was really different from any other I had attended about leadership, and it was not this awkard evangelization speech that I was waiting for, when he said he had been a Jesuit. Mr. Lowney gave one of us a copy of his book "Heroic Leadership", which I am willing to read and let you know how it is (in my opinion).

Today, we had our first class. It was "Collaboration, Conflict and Negotiation". We had to read before the class the book "Bargaining for Advantage" by G. Richard Shell, which I totally recomend. My professor for this class is going to be Kim Corfman, who is the Vice-Dean of the MBA program in NYU Stern.

The class was great, very dinamic. We started with our own process of self-awareness which is essencial to become an effective negotiator, we made some play roles with our classmates, we analyze some cases... and the 8 hours just went by very quickly.



So, so far, I am really happy with the program. I think that pursuing this MBA is one of the best decisions I have made in my life.

I will let you know, how everything evolves. Actually, tomorrow I will have my first "Statistics and Data Analysis" class, the one that intimidates me the most!


All the pictures where taken from the website of NYU Stern School of Business