On Wednesday we went to the “Tribute to Elliott Carter” concert at City University of New York Graduate Center (34th st & 5th Ave). A varied roster of (mostly) great (mostly) young performers, and Elliott Carters unmistakables compositions. I must admit it is not my favorite kind of music to say the least, but I do keep trying to expand my horizons. Always learning, or trying to. Experience, expose, try… isnt that the hackers attitude?
February 9th was truly a day of wine and snow.
A big snowfall came down the night before, leaving the pretty pictures we have all seen in the media, along with 6,000 cancelled flights and 400,000 homes without power in the Boston area.
So I had no plans to get out of my comfortable Chelsea apartment, but Jill (a friend who works at the New York Times, and who is moving to Washington DC to head the DC Bureau of the NYT) invited us to the NYC Winter Wine Fest.
After MIT`s crazy week, back in NY I needed a couple of days of sleep and relax to get back into the normal rhythm. Luckily it was SuperBowl weekend, so the streets (and Chelsea Market) were fairly empty!
So on Tuesday I was ready to get going full speed ahead. First, after meeting with P. Oberton in the NYPL, then I went to Condé Nast publications` building, into Wired Magazine, to discuss a PR campaign/project along with Valencia Regional Minister of Industry (& etc) Max Buch.
The final day was an interesting one.
My team (team senZa) choose me to do the presentation of the teams project. We all thought we did an excellent job, and everybody in the room (372) congratulated us. One of the judges even said "it is the best one I have ever seen". But... lo and behold, we were not selected to the final round. And whats even worst, we received almost no feedback.
Day 5 started with a presentation of MIT`s eMBA and the REAP program.
After that, lectures by William Aulet, Scott Keating, Paul Maeder, and Antoinette Schoar.
And then… an all-nighter preparing the group project. Tension, stress, frustration, but in the end a great feeling of accomplishment, and pride in a job well done.
Day 4 started with a corporate presentation (we got to choose, and I attended the one by Pfizer) at 7:30am, in which Pfizer`s Senior Vice President of Research and Development talked about the rapidly shifting way in which big pharma is working, and mentioned an unacceptable fact that should make us all reflect on how much the patent system is broken:
Pfizer has 98,000 employees… and 31,000 lawyers!
The rest of the day I attended classes by Catherine Tucker, Brian Halligan, and a speech by Dean David Schmittlein.
Day 3 started with my winning the Twitter competition with this tweet:
Then we had classes by Matt Marx,William Aulet, Elaine Chen, and John McEleney.
Even during lunch (at room E52, 6th floor of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship – Tang Building) we are lectured. In this case by Scott Stern. Non stop from 7am until 8pm (or later, depending on how hard working your team is).
