It was only a few weeks ago that good ol’ Jack Frost released his wintery grip from this city. Spring is in full swing. A casual jog around the neighborhoods near Vandy is all it takes to notice the trees sporting brand new spring wardrobes, the smell of grass after it gets itself a long-overdue haircut, and the sound of kids cracking bats and kicking soccer balls. But I’m only supposed to enjoy this for a moment, and then it’s back to the grind – classes, cases and club meetings. That’s what an MBA’s expected to do, right?
Sometimes, it’s just so hard to imagine that there are folks out there who still believe MBA students are as cold as a meat locker. That right now they’d be griping about the yellow coats of pollen on their Saabs or yelling the bikers and runners off the road. But this MBA student had a chance to take a break from the books and take a stroll up and down the tree-lined campus of Vanderbilt and he took it. No regrets – just an awesome way to soak in the day!
Is it un-MBA to sit on a ledge and relax in the shade on a perfect spring day? Is it un-MBA to enjoy whatever nature has to offer you? Maybe it is, because while I was walking back into the business school I thought to myself, “Well that’s over, because I’m back here inside Owen.” But it didn’t take that long for me to realize that because of Owen, I’ve changed as much as the trees and grass around me.
I was never that mindful of trying to conserve paper when printing, learning about the newest green technologies, or finding ways to reduce waste before I came to this place. But the things you get involved with at Owen can change the way you think and behave in a powerful way.
For example, take the recycling challenges between the first-year and second-year classes during Impact Week. It embraced the “drive to win” that comes as second nature to MBA’s and combined it with the forward thinking of
being socially and environmentally conscious. For me, it challenged my previous understanding of what I as an individual could do to change the world for the better. Now, I’m inclined not only to enjoy nature, but to ensure that future generations can do the same. That’s probably not what many expect would happen to them when enrolling in an MBA program.
So then, is Owen un-MBA? Well, it might be if you’re stuck in the camp of MBA students having “cold-as-the-depths-of-winter” indifference to the world around them. But if you think, like I do, that MBA students can have that warmness to touch and actually change the world they live in for the better, then Owen is as MBA as you can get. And today wasn’t a break from the ordinary; rather, it was just another normal day in the
program.
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