TEDxCMU Inspirations

I'm in the middle of listening to a live webstreaming going on now of TEDxCMU. It's an independent TED event. If you don't know what TED is, you should check it out. TEDxCMU happens every year; unfortunately, it's very popular so when I applied for a ticket (free), I was unsuccessful.. along with the other 700 people who didn't get one of the 400 seats. So live webstreaming it is - granted, though, it has the benefit that I can study for my Statistics Final during the parts I don't want to listen to, go check my washing, etc. The downside is I may actually skip over talks that I probably should've listened to.

One of those talks was by a blogger called Gala Darling. I didn't pick it up at first, but she's a Kiwi living in the states with a large following, primarily in fashion. When I listened to her talk, it seemed a lot of the same stuff that I've been hearing as a woman: love yourself, build up your self-esteem, so on. It's a message that I think has the ability to be distorted; telling a 350-pound woman that she should love herself and there's nothing wrong with her body size gives out the wrong message. But during her talk, she brought up a few ideas that I think I'm going to incorporate. One was to have a Things I Like Thursdays. My list will be pretty small at the moment, seeing as we're in the middle of finals and about to head to Spring Break, but I will try to maintain a similar blog entry about my time here at Tepper. The second and third suggestions are a little bit more personal; write a log book of things I'm happy about/feel good about, and write down every compliment someone has given you. One of the biggest aspects of this program (and probably any top-tier MBA program) is that is really throws your self-esteem into the blender and churns out a pile of tatters that you have to tenuously hold onto.

 When visiting her blog, I was also referred to this site called The Grindstone. I'll have to say, one of the most interesting and relevant blogs I've come across that talks about women & business. Or just life in Business. Very interesting.

I write this waiting for John Riccotiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts. I heard him speak when we visited EA in January as part of the B&T trek and it was amazing.

Since this is also the first mini in which I undertook some elective classes (well, I lie, I took one in Mini 1 but that was more convenience than desire), I'll post a write-up of my experiences in those classes. A couple of people I've talked to said that a lot of their decision on which school to attend was dependent on the types of electives that were offered, so I'm going to assume that it's going to be the same case here. I'll aim for that one on Wednesday after my last final, but before I head off to GDC. :)