The worst and best of the Haas first semester experience

The best Haas experiences from the words of my closer classmates:

• People, people, and people. People are the most valuable asset that differentiates Haas different from the other top schools. They are smart, incredibly intelligent yet very humble, down to earth, friendly, fun to be with and extremely helpful


• Dinner with my study group. We have a really diverse, yet supportive team. We get along really well, in fact, I feel pretty close to them already. Academically, we were very efficient, and I think for all of us, our grades were better as a whole than as individuals

• The extremely diversified environment: From digital media’s >play conference to the biggest finance conference in the west coast. From the Young Entrepreneur At Hass program (YEAH) where you get to listen to the kids from middle school telling you what they learned about teamwork, leadership, etc in their own words to representing Haas competing with Wharton, Chicago on a deal restructuring case competition. From participating the apple case competition to receiving my investment banking fellowship award. There is so much opportunity for one to freely explore


• The wild parties: : San Francisco Scavenger Hunt , the Hamptons party after the fall A finals celebration, the Halloween party, the walk-off and the Indian consumption function..

• Great core classes: Marketing, accounting and communications
  

To be fair, I’ve also asked them to share what they thought were the worst Haas experiences:

• Getting an email on a Saturday about a 3-hour make-up class on Tuesday. (After all, we are a pretty chilled group!)


• The food in Haas café (I’ve started to bring my own sandwich about half way into the fall semester. However, I have to say they do have pretty good fries)


• Sitting in the leadership class (This is probably the most controversial fall class. People have complained that we don’t learn much by listening to professors that aren’t even inspiring leaders themselves, content overlapping with the Organizational Behavior class and not getting enough support to analyze our 360 degree leadership feedback. To me, I think leadership is more a mindset rather than a capability issue. As such, there is a limit as to how much one can teach about leadership. Of course good leaders need to be capable, but I deeply believe the really great leaders are the ones that have the “servant”, “humanity” and “inspiring” mindset and not necessarily always the most capable)