There are three main things SAB members want to achieve by attending orientation:

1. Meeting and welcoming the members of the incoming cohort.  We can help jump-start their sense of belonging within the Enterprise MBA Program and the greater WSOB community.  Plus, we get to meet them before everyone else.  Score!
2. Explaining our means of effecting change in our program, the Student Advisory Board.  We will discuss the history of the SAB, what we do, and how the upcoming elections will operate.
3. Presenting experienced MBA student perspectives.  Until you are actually in an MBA program, it is difficult to know which skills, behaviors, and activities are necessary to optimize one’s experience in the program.  For example, it will seem to them as if they are being invited to an indistinct, endless array of events.  But in reality, many events are rare opportunities only available to members of the WSOB.

I enjoy being a part of events like this.  This is one of the greatest things about being in a three-year, lockstep, cohort program: when you start, you get to meet your cohort and the two years ahead of yours.  By the time you are in your third and final year of the program, you have additionally met the two years behind yours.  A person in the WSOB Evening MBA Program can know 300 to 400 professionals with MBAs by the time they finish!

The backgrounds, skills, and experiences of our fellow program members are rich and varied.  My mission during the orientation will be to encourage the members of the Class of 2012 to meet as many of the students in the program as they can.

For the past several months, we have been contacting businesses who have offices in Beijing, coordinating either having our entire class visit their facility or having representatives from their company visit us in the conference center of our hotel.  (Some companies are not set up to handle a visiting group of 60 people!)  The list of companies we will be meeting with is an impressive who’s who:  Kimberly Clark, IBM, Li & Fung, Lenovo, GE Healthcare, Cummins, Procter & Gamble, and Johnson Controls.

I had a really neat experience setting up my team’s site visit to IBM.  A friend of mine, Mike Payne, has been working at IBM for over 10 years.  Mike and I first met during our days as undergraduates at UW-Madison, struggling through the computer science curriculum together.  Earlier this year, when I asked if he had any contacts at their facilities in Beijing, he was able to connect me with the event manager for IBM’s brand-new Supply Chain Innovation Center.  This is a major score for a bunch of strategic management MBA geeks!

One of the hot topics was the use of social networking sites, blogging, and SMS texting to communicate between recruiters and candidates. I described how I thought Joel Spolsky was doing it right. His company, Fog Creek Software, has always been profitable and is located in New York City – one of the toughest markets in the world. Joel enables transparency by blogging and writing articles for Inc. magazine about Fog Creek Software’s policies and practices. His efforts have made Fog Creek Software one of the most desirable employers in the world.

To help add value to what I said during the panel, I wanted to collect together links to several of Joel’s articles. These articles are relevant to recruiters, hiring managers, and anyone in the position to reveal their company’s policies to better enable candidates to self-select their employer:

• Fog Creek Compensation System
• Fog Creek Professional Ladder
• Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
• The New Fog Creek Office
• Thanks or No Thanks
• Finding Great Developers
• Joel on Software Job Board
• The Joel Test