In the bubble

One of the phenomena that comes with having a complete, self-contained campus is the HBS "bubble." It's very real, particularly for those who live on campus; our entire worlds can be found within a 2-minute walk of where we sleep. Almost all of the buildings are also connected by subterranean tunnels, which means that come winter it's possible to go days without ever setting foot outside a campus building. Even the main Harvard campus, separated from the business school by the Charles River, can seem distant. This past week recruiting for summer internships began in earnest, with numerous employers giving presentations each day for the next few weeks, ratcheting the intensity and activity level up yet another notch. It's amazing how quickly the world inside HBS becomes the only place you think of , and how everything outside of it is temporarily set aside. The fact remains that one day in the not-too-distant future, the HBS bubble will go away, and the real world, for better or worse, will once again be all that we have.

More than meets the eye

A word that is strangely absent from the HBS recruiting materials but that crops up with some regularity here is "transformational." The MBA experience is designed to foster this transformation by setting up all the conditions and interactions needed to help make it happen. For some people the way these things are done may not make sense initially: fixed courses for a year, assigned seats, assigned study groups that meet early every morning, classes five days a week. I love the structured aspect of it all. There's something about the environment, this particular life stage, the constant thoughts of careers and visions and other deeper questions that add to the general ferment this environment creates. I suspect experiences like this aren't unique to HBS. You can probably "transform" wherever you are, if you want to, but this is a particularly exciting place to do so.

Minuteman

Punctuality is not an option at HBS. This is a characteristic I find extremely appealing, though I suspect most prospective students are only dimly aware of it when they think of what student life is like. (It reminds me of the military, and incidentally there are a lot of students here from the armed forces.) For a class with an 8:40 AM start, when the second hand on the classroom clock sweeps past the 12 you'd better be planted in your seat, because things will get rolling. My learning team meets every weekday at 7:30 AM, and I try to never arrive past 7:30 and zero seconds. It's an unusual norm for graduate schools, from what I can tell, but when you think about lecture-based classes it shouldn't be too surprising: they can commence without all students present and engaged, since the conversation isn't necessarily two-way. Classes also end on time, almost without exception, and professors are apologetic if they run three or four minutes over. When I worked for CBS News I remember seeing a tightly choreographed Evening News production where every second was scripted and accounted for. We're not that extreme, but I've been surprised how aware of the time I've become here, sometimes getting scheduled down to the minute. Somewhat paradoxically, it seems to be going by even faster.

Time capsule

One of the most remarkable elements of President Faust's speech yesterday was her allusion to a letter that had been left in the University archives by James Conant, then the president of Harvard, with the instruction that it be opened by the first Harvard president of the 21st century. (According to the Crimson blog, this letter was lost until recently, which is why previous president Larry Summers was not the one to open it, although he was the president who should have done so under Conant's stipulation. The fact that the salutation read,"My dear sir...", was a source of some mirth, but it appears that it would have been technically correct.) Written in the aftermath of World War II, the letter was apparently filled with concern as to whether the existing political and economic order would even survive the century. The full text has yet to be made publicly available, although it should provide a very interesting glimpse into the prevailing mindset of an earlier era. The unfulfilled predications it contains may be interesting, but I suspect it will be more remarkable for just how much of it still applies today.