First Day of Class

Yesterday marked my first day back at school, but today I started my first class. As I mentioned yesterday, five of the twelve days we spend on campus during orientation are spent taking a class on leadership. As seems to be usual for business school, we started off class with an ice breaker - 4 lies and a truth. The game basically consists of getting into a group and everyone telling the class a bizarre fact about themselves and one person lying. The game was entertaining and allowed all of us to share embarrassing stories with people we've know for about 30 hours. I broke out my four spleen story, which definitely brought about some weird looks.

Anyways, we finally got going with real class, analyzing some reading we had been assigned the week before. This being UCLA, of course there was the obligatory John Wooden reference which was accompanied by a video on his thoughts on leadership.

The two most interesting exercises involved filling out a Strength Deployment Inventory personality test and solving a "Who Done It?" The SDI test is a positive/negative test that seems to be geared more towards business and management. Regardless, I scored as a blend between Altruistic/Nurturing and Analytical/Autonomizing (with a slight learn towards the analytical side). My "Conflict Sequence" or my expected behavior when facing a conflict indicates that I am the type of person who meets conflict with flexibility, which can sometimes be seen as unpredictability (especially by those who don't know me well). I'd have to say that both are pretty accurate, although I've always thought of myself as more analytical than altruistic.

The "Who Done It?" saw us brake into groups of three and try to determine who killed Robert Guion. After about 50 minutes of reading through the case and discussing it with my team, we settled on Eddie, the handyman. (Yes, I know this means nothing to you). When the entire class got back together and began to discuss the case, we realized that there were multiple versions of the case, each with slightly different information. Turns out the whole thing was not an exercise for our analytical ability, but it was meant to teach us about the importance of diversity when creating teams. Instead of just turning to the people sitting next to you to form your team (all of whom had the same version of the packet), we were supposed to seek out people with different opinions and information. I'm guessing this will not be the last exercise that conveys a meaning different than what appears on the surface. But that's why I'm here, to learn something more about business and to stretch myself.