Daily crono / Regrets? / MBA - second thoughts / Beer and fish and chips - and friends

Daily crono

This week is easier than last. We only have one assignment to do. So, I had time to write my first draft thesis proposal. This is strange program: after studying 1 month we must/should already have decided thesis topic and lured a professor to supervise us. But the faster, the better. At least I cannot get bored. What else today. Well, a great lecture about ERBA (risk analysis). I think the topic is important for any system architect, and I am sad I did not have the conceptual tools earlier. They would have made my life much easier. Then, another great lecture about Apollo. It is getting even more interesting - and I may even have time to read some books during weekend. Then, writing thesis proposal, and now relaxing by writing this blog. It is 5pm. At 6pm, we will have some CEO lecturing us about marketing and advertising industry. I am sure it will be interesting. Oh, on Saturday, I will participate in Sloan leadership seminar. Lecturers include Peter Senge and others.

We have small cubicles in the SDM-office. We could use them for studying, but I cannot concentrate there at all. It is much easier for me to work in the libraries. There are at least 14 libraries in the MIT-campus, so one is never too far way. What's even better, is that one can have a window seat in the library, which makes it even more pleasant.

My proposals for thesis topics are really theoretical: "developing context dependent Crawley-machine (CM/OPN, later CM)", "adding natural language interface by merging GF and CM", and "Mathematic properties of complex system models". They are all exciting and hard topics, and I am not sure whether they are small enough for SDM-thesis. But what the heck: doing something easy and simple would be wasting time. It is better to (try to) do as hard things as possible (person dependent). I base my proposal on mr Koo's PhD-thesis, which is really good one. It is surprising that he has written thesis on the topics I have been interested for the last 6 years. What is more surprising is that he has come up with the same token passing structure, which I invented in April 1999 in the Types-seminar. I just did not do anything with my idea even. Sad, or funny, I do not know. A fact anyway.

Regrets?

Sometimes, when studying here I regret spending too much time in the industry. I could be a professor already by now, if I had only studied. But I ran out of money, and was spoiled enough to want to have some. Then again, maybe my time in the industry taught me something, which many professor do not have. And it was fun, at least at times. Anyway, I have now realized, that I have been just going on 10% speed for the last 1 or 2 years. Now I try to speed up, and try to make up the lost time. Keep your thumbs up for me, please.

MBA - second thoughts

I went again to the so called CEO-class today. Today the founder and boss of WPP was there talking. It was pretty interesting and actually nasty. The CEO told, implicitly, that one should not study in an American business school. Instead, one should study in China or India. I am not sure if the MBA student caught the bun.

Personally, I am really happy that I chose the SDM program and not any of the MBA-programs. I would suffer in an business school. I just cannot/could not get myself motivated enough to study just management, finance, etc. I would get bored, it is not rigorous enough, and making money and getting rich is not what motivates me (even though I thought so when having boring and miserable time in Nokia, not that it helped even then). Also, somehow I sensed too much pure admiration, too much idolization in the class today. The MBA-students seems to be too amazed by seeing an real CEO, and could not really bring themselves into making hard question. Neither could I, but it was because I had not done any research. I did not even now, nor do I know now, what WPP is etc. To get credit from the course, we should write 3 memos. Right now, I feel that I cannot get enough interested in the task, even though it might not require that much. Let's see. In short, I think that my motivation is coming from science and technology. When you combine that with extreme need for freedom and autonomy, going to an MBA-school would have been a really bad alternative (just to let you know, I applied to IMD and was promptly rejected; they now what they are doing there).

Beer and fish and chips - and friends

I have nice dinner with Spiros, Dave, Christian and Kumar in the Cambridge Brewery. They serve just excellent "Russian porter", which is strong in taste and in alcohol content. I took fish and chips as I always do. This time it was not so good, but just decent. The brewery itself is a nice place, and I am sure to visit it several times this year. After dinner, we did some shopping: groceries.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs February 2005".