Why I love my Brand Management Class...

Because Professor Morgan puts the following picture up on the projector. Genius! We spent 30 minutes discussing the issues with Apple's latest release and the fact that their real tag line, tell the customer nothing. Do they know what the device is supposed to do? Who is the customer? Is the idea to just put it out there and see how the customers use it (and who actually buys it) and then market to do that?

With my brother and my dad HUGE Apple fans it was great to hear someone stick to Steve Jobs, and critique the company's strategy. I look forward to seeing how this will be positioned in 6 months and see if all the negative associations the name has (by itself) is erased as Morgan predicts.

Internship - check, Schoolwork - ??

Everyone thinks I am on easy street now, my dream internship under my belt and the rest of the semester should be smooth sailing right? Um, no. Now that we are out of the core the number of teams I am on has grown exponentially (from one to four!) and now that I have a leadership role in Kelley Women, that seems to fill in any of the space not already allocated to school projects.

Accounting thankfully is not a lot of group work, but we have lots of cases to prepare for every class. Thankfully, for me Charlton is forced to take the same class so I have a study buddy at home to make sure I am not allocating costs to projects based on some silly driver like times they turned on the light switch.

Brand Management has a fairly in-depth project where we value a brand. My team (of 6) is valuing Tiffany. We have to look at the consumer perceptions and then a few different valuation methods. The good thing about having a team so large is we can have mini-projects within the project. Each pair has their own valuation, mine being product based. We also have a survey we all created to gauge customer preferences, so if you are reading this and want to help out...click here.

Market Research has a project too, teams of only 4, but so far it seems fairly straightforward. It is more of an exercise to get us using SPSS so our professor is walking us through it. Perfect!

Then there is my KIP class where we have teams of five to work on case write-ups and our industry presentation in a few weeks. Our first case write-up was on the Israeli Special Forces and really interesting. As for the industry presentation we are going with agriculture as CPG was too hard to find resources on.

Lastly, there is my CMA project where we are working on a global entry strategy for Kitchenaid...something like what we would see in our internships. It is fairly vague and we haven't gotten too far in, but I already know more than I ever thought I would on Japanese cooking tastes and trends.

And if that wasn't keeping me busy enough, there is our readings, homework, housework (still haven't done laundry this week!) and try to keep up with my friends. Pulled in 500 directions, and this was supposed to be easier than the core?

Where is my seat?

The start of a new semester and my first day of non-core classes, its weird to type that. While it is fun to have new classes and ones I picked I already miss some of the familiarity there was in the core. I don't have the same seat, I have to move classes and second years mixed with the first years changes the dynamic a lot. I am sure it will take some getting used to and then by then it will be summer right!?

Today I had my most filled day class wise with 3 classes: Managerial Accounting, Brand Asset Management and KIP Israel. So far I like all of them and I am really pumped about KIP Israel, and yes they bribe us with food from Falafels, but I am really excited at all we are going to see and experience. In an effort to get to bed before 1, here is the rest of my day in a nutshell:

• Waited in line forever to mail our textbooks we sold
• Signed up for the wrong pilates class after getting lost in the HPER
• Switched my pilates class to the one my friends are in
• Watched an episode of the Wire
• Fast forwarded through a whole episode of Martha Stewart watching only 2 minutes
• Wore my new boots in the house for a good 2 hours
• Danced when I got a present from my aunt of new silverware!
• Talked to my dad on the phone
• Read my case for Brand Management's Weds class on Samsung
• Read a chapter of Accounting
• Made appointments for 3 mock interviews this week
• Tried to kick this cold
• etc.

There is no warm-up, just go!