About Clark Bosslet

I have been pejoratively called a dilettante, which is like being a "Renaissance Man," only on a much more superficial level. I am a dabbler (being naturally inquisitive) and as a member of Gen Y, I have rarely been told "no." I'm not sure if I have ADD or if my focus has simply been eroded by the internet. At Vanderbilt, I have mostly dabbled in healthcare, social enterprise and digital media, and I get especially excited when those areas intersect.

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On Grades

It is a common trope here at business school that grades don’t matter.

Judging from the amount of hours that most students put in at the library, one might assume that this maxim is some sort of game theory-driven bluff to fool the meek and gullible away from the battlefield. For those of us who have spent a lifetime in a system that rewards only grades as a gauge of learning, in some cases fostering the perverse incentive to take easier and less challenging courses, it can be hard to break old habits.

But in business school, grades should not drive your course selection. Don’t opt out of Corporate Valuation or Derivatives if you’re concerned it will hurt your GPA, even if you consider yourself more of a “soft skills” person. This is your chance to learn this material from industry experts. For most of us, business school is an educational safety net in addition to a career reset button. It serves as a last chance to learn dense academic material in a “safe” setting. After this, almost all of our learning is “on the job,” meaning the ramifications of mistakes are a lot more dire than a poor grade.

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Owen Podcast Series: Emma Email Marketing

This edition of the Owen Podcast Series welcomes Emma co-founder/CEO and Vanderbilt alum Clint Smith. Clint has been working with web-based products and communities for over 15 years and has overseen significant growth at Emma. He shares his thoughts on what makes the company unique, where it’s heading with future offerings, and how to craft the perfect email.

Visit: myemma.com
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Posted in Blake Knight '12, Clark Bosslet '12, Industry Insights, Nashville | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

#OwenBowl 2012

Owen had its first ever Super Bowl Twitter Party on Sunday night, using the to collect our various musings on the best and worst of the night. It was a fun exercise and collected a nice diversity of thought. For example, after Doug opined that the Cars.com “creepy second head representing the buyer’s confidence” commercial did not exactly warm his heart to the brand, I shared my differing opinion.

While exchanges like this happened all night, they were noteworthy not so much for the quality of their content (in something as subjective as this, we are all amateurs and our opinions are valued as such) but more for the fact that these exchanges were happening at all. And they were, all over the internet. According to Peter Kafka at All Things D, there were somewhere between 11 and 16 million social media comments during the game. While the increasing number of platforms make such estimates increasingly difficult to gauge, all estimates point to a substantial uptick year-over-year. , the final three minutes of the game saw an average of 10,000 tweets per second, peaking at 12,233 and setting a new record for the site.

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Twitter Lists: Doug Midkiff

Our second twitter list comes from blogger and famed Excel guru Doug Midkiff. While I’ve been a Bill Simmons fan for years, the other three twitter accounts on this list are new to me.

is the author of Dinosaur Comics and also brings the funny on his own personal twitter account. Comic humor transfers over pretty well to twitter humor.

,  aka , is the widely popular ESPN columnist who recently formed his own website called Grantland.com. You can (almost) always count on Bill to be tweeting some interesting/funny things during big sporting events.

Editor’s heavy-handedness:

Because I’m a sucker for nice, round numbers like 5, I’ll go ahead and add the aforementioned Grantland.com. The site has a twitter feed that pushes out links to any and all Grandland stories, podcasts, and soup related content.

Resume original blog entry:

aka , is an urban planner/designer who works in Dallas. He tweets quite regularly about urban form and design in Dallas, but also across the US. He often passes along interesting links, as well.

Posted in Clark Bosslet '12, Doug Midkiff '12, Graduate Life, Lifestyle, Nashville | Tagged , | 1 Comment

On Twitter

Twitter is arguably now the dominant information sharing platform, which is to say that for many of us, it is “the news.”

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t find out about a major current event via Twitter. The first time I noticed it was during the horrific January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Arizona. Instead of clicking refresh on CNN or NYTimes or the Drudge Report, I just sat all afternoon watching my Twitter feed. The same went for the death of Osama Bin Laden, and now the closest I seem to get to traditional “news” is the Daily Show.

Joe Paterno’s Twitter death, falsely reported the day before his actual death and then retweeted ad infinitum, shows the potentially spurious danger of this information sharing platform. Twitter has been praised as the most salient weapon in the democratization of information sharing, but as with all other user-based content, it is both produced and disseminated in large part by amateurs who have no real accountability to the subjects on which they report.

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