Back to the 80s

Yesterday New York went back in time, more precisely to the 80s.
We all dressed up in a retro style to watch a concert by an 80s cover band from San Francisco, "Tainted Love", at B.B. King's in Times Square.

Beer pong champion!

For those who remember the post where I talked about the drinking games (beer pong and flip cup).
Well, yesterday, to celebrate our first test (statistics), my cluster gathered at the Gin Mill bar for a happy hour. I partnered up with Luke from my cluster for beer pong, and guess what? We played for two hours because we won consecutively. Not bad for my first time.
These guys must watch out! Portuguese power is on its way!

Wall Street is shriking!

Columbia Business School has a strong connection with Wall Street, the Financial Sector and Investment Banking.
The recent news on Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch and AIG have been turning up the heat at the school. The impact of this crisis is present in many ways:
- former MBA students that are unemployed
- perspective for a job in the financial services is harder
- the other areas of recruitment are also getting harder because people from the financial services are trying them
- jobs for international people are also getting harder, because the USA is very protectionist

Today the Dean of the School made a speech to talk about his assessment of the situation, and to talk about alternatives that we should consider for recruiting.

Let's just hope the situation does not get any worse, and that things recover soon.

Rui

PS - I actually had an email from Lehman Brothers, sent last week, to invite me for their corporate presentation at CBS. Not gonna happen...

Tropical weather

Take a look at the following picture with the weather forecast from today for NY.
This looks like a tropical country. It's 27C degrees outside and it is raining. Tomorrow it will be 30C and raining. And the thing is, you never know when it starts raining. You are very well walking on the street and it stars pouring like it is the Great Flood ("diluvio"), and five minutes later it is sunny again.

They came...

I didn't get a ticket for the McCain and Obama conference last Thursdays here at Columbia.
However I did experience some of the excitement on campus: they had giant TV screens on campus, and everyone gathered around them to watch their speeches.
I have two friends who were lucky enough to go to the auditorium and they told me that it was full of celebrities such as Jon Bon Jovi and Toby Maguire (Spiderman).
Let's see how the following months before the elections go.

PS - Obama studied here at Columbia University

McCain & Obama

The American presidential candidates (McCain and Obama) are coming to Columbia University next Thursday, 11th of September.
There is already a frenetic mood because of this.
Us students could apply to get tickets for their conference...however there were only 200 tickets for a total of about 30,000 thousand students, which basically means that I didn't get one.

Labor Day Picnic at Central Park

Last Monday was Labor Day (Dia do Trabalhador) here in the States. It is always on the first Monday of September. My cluster organized a picnic at Central Park. Each one had to bring some food, or drinks, or other useful stuff. In the morning, before the picnic, I was still not sure of what I would cook to take to the picnic. In the end, I ended up making quiches for the first time in my life... and they were not bad.
Central Park is beautiful in the summer, and it is always very lively and full of people just enjoying a little bit of nature inside this big city.
I will leave you some pictures from that afternoon.

Things I don't understand

Everyone knows that when we move to a different country, specially one that is very different from our own, we can experience some culture shock, and there will be some things that we will find hard to understand. Let me state some of them here.

Size of the coins/bills The 10 cents coin (dime coin) is smaller than the 5 cents coin. That makes counting change a difficult task. Most countries follow the rule that, the bigger the coins, the bigger their value. Well not here...
The same applies for bills. I am used to bills with different sizes and different colors. The bigger the size of the bill, the bigger its value. Well, not here... Here the 1 dollar bill has the same size and shape as the 20 dollar bill, or as the 100 dollar bill.
Although the picture is not very sharp, you can see here the 5 cents coin on the left, and the 10 cents coin on the right. The 5 cents bigger than the 10 cents.




Paying to receive phone calls
When you receive a phone call on your cell phone, you also pay! The caller pays, and the receiver pays.
Even when you receive text messages, you also pay. When you receive a phone call, you can always reject it if you don't want to pay. But with text messages, there is no choice!
I have a friend that has told me that when you receive international phone calls and do not pick-up you also pay, because the roaming service was already activated. I haven't confirmed this yet.

Date format
I am used to write the date in the following format: day/month/year. It has logic, because it goes from the most specific and changing (day) to the the broadest and permanent (year).
Here the format is: month/day/year .... what a mess ...

Bathrooms
Public bathrooms (in restaurants, schools, etc) here have no privacy in the individual toilets. Whenever I go to a bathroom, the doors of the individual toilets have so much space in every side that you can actually see whoever is inside, and whatever that person is doing.

Drinking Olympics

These people here have two national drinking sports that I had never heard about in Portugal.

The first one is Beer Pong.
Like the name suggests, it is related with ping-pong. You play it in a table, on each side you put some cups half full of beer in a triangle. You have two people playing on each side, and the objective is to throw a ping-pong ball, and insert it in one of the cups of your opponent. If you do it, he has to drink the beer in that cup. Of course it is a little bit disgusting, because the ball falls on the floor and goes from cup to cup, however there is one cup with water where you are supposed to wash the ball each time you play (of course, that after a while the water is dirty too). The winner is the person that gets the ball in all the cups of the other player.



The second one is Flip Cup.
Here you have two teams of players, each team on a side of a table, and you start with one person on each team that has to drink his beer. After that, that person has to put his cup standing straight on the border of the table, and throw it with an impulse of fingers, so that it lies upside down on the table. When you reach this goal, the person of your team next to you, drinks his beer and continues the game. The winning team is the one that gets everyone done first.

Orientation Week

Last week was "Orientation Week". The objective of the week is to integrate all the new students in the Columbia Business School community. This is done via activities, classes, happy-hours at bars, dinners, and lots of partying.
It was a tough week, because we started early everyday and it lasted until late. In the meanwhile we had cases to read and assignments to prepare.
I loved every moment of it, specially because I got the chance to meet lots of new people. It will be hard to remember everyone, and their names, but it was a good start.
I find it curious that I was always comparing our orientation with the Portuguese "praxes", but I will write about that in a later post.
As I don't have much time, I will leave you with some pictures from the week.

At one of the Happy Hours


Doing one of our team-challenges


My Cluster's Peer Advisors (2nd year MBA students, responsible for our orientation)

Bowling Party

Our Cluster Classroom (see all the decorations...)