We are a “collaborative community”!!

“Leading Organizations and Strategy” is one of my favorite courses so far. The course, as the name suggests, primarily deals with the issues of people, strategy and leadership.  The class for the subject is highly interactive and offers opportunities for  learning from experiences of people from different cultural and professional backgrounds.

Last Thursday’s class dealt with issues of Organizational Culture. 10-15 minutes into the class, when we were done with the introduction to the concept, the professor asked us (about 60 of us in the section) to think of a single word that comes to the mind when we think of the culture at Goizueta. Next, he asked us all to come and write down the word on the board. I was juggling with “collaborative” and “community”, but then went ahead with “community”. As I returned to my seat, I was surprised to see the pattern that clearly emerged from about 60 words on the board. “collaborative” seemed to be the most common choice, with “community” not too far behind. Together, these two covered about two-thirds of the board. Some of the other words (with relatively lesser frequency) that I remember from the board are: intense, team and rigorous, (I agree with these too 🙂 ) and some creative ones: JB (our associate dean 🙂 ) and Ron Weasley (No clue where that came from. 😐 )

As I later came to know, the other two sections had  similar results too. The order may have changed, but the top two words remained the same. At this, I was reminded of one of the blog posts that I had read when I was applying to Goizueta. This post was written three years back and then, the answer was “family”, certainly not too far from the current result in the sense that it conveys. Clearly, the family/community culture at Goizueta is something that has been consistent across years.

I would certainly agree with the results from whatever I have seen so far. Right on my first day in the States, I was received on the airport by the Harriet Ruskin, the Director of MBA Program Office. I was really wowed by this experience. (I come from an undergrad institute that I still consider next only to my family, but even there, I would not expect a Dean/Director to be there at the railway station.) This was not all. For the next few days, she drove each of us through Atlanta, taking us for grocery, furniture, laptops etc. She also took us for some local sight-seeing, including CNN office and Georgia aquarium.  This again is consistent with experiences of previous years.

Later, I have found this feeling of community echoing time and again, during Winshape (our formal induction program), block 1 exams, preparing for a career fair* and even the routine classes. And this is true not only while interacting with batch-mates, but even with seniors, professors and the alumni. Everybody I reach out to is more than eager to help. I really feel proud to be a part of such a close-knit community.

*Each of these experience perhaps deserves a different post. Stay tuned; I’ll continue to bring you inside story at Goizueta on this blog.