Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Wharton

Today was quite a day for this Wharton girl. I started out at 9am in my Managing People at Work class surrounded by Secret Service agents and listening to General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which means, among other things, that he is the Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and to the President). He was an AMAZING speaker--really thoughtful, articulate, and direct. He didn't shy away from tough questions about the war and why and how he has made certain decisions in his military career. He even started out by personally introducing himself to each one of us and shaking our hands. Very cool, an experience I would never have had anywhere else. Wharton is incomparable.

I also attended a talk by the VP of Product Strategy for Yahoo!, Bradley Horowitz. This was intriguing...learning about the cool emergent systems technology firms leverage to improve their nextgen products is fascinating to me. The vibe from Bradley is that Silicon Valley would be a great place to start an interesting and high-powered yet not stuffy career.

I also gave two presentations today--one a persuasive speech for my communications class (legalization of marijuana) and one the presentation of my (15 page, blech!) Lauder paper on the economic revitalization of Bilbao following the construction of the Guggenheim museum by Frank Gehry. Both went really well, I think.

Nothing much other than that, just a few additional classes and a recruiting session for Diageo rounded out another ho-hum day here at Wharton. Yawn. Snore. Drool.