The CSOM experience

The Carlson School of Management has been know for many things: hot guys, snobby girls, world domination, and all the other things The Daily likes to write about the school. But at the school there are a few nuances that I have noticed and would now like to share with outsiders hoping to get a glimpse of the "privileged life."

The Male Population
There is this wide-held belief that Carlson guys are some how better looking than the average UofM male. A friend of mine always comments about how good-looking all these men are. This is myth number one: Carlson men are better looking that the average University male. Carlson men are known to dress in button-down shirts, nice jeans or pants, and nice shoes. The also have the tendency to comb their hair, get nice neat hair cuts, and carry around expensive looking accessories. However, all these adornments do not make the CSOM male better looking than the rest of the U. If you were to strip the Carlson man of his J.Crew wardrobe and salon cut, you would have another average-looking Joe. In fact, I would go so far as to say that CSOM men are LESS attractive than the average U population; afterall, to get into CSOM you had to have been studious during high school, and often times studious=nerd.
However, this is good proof that the way you dress can make you look better/worse than you actually are.

The Dating Scene
Myth Number 2 is that many people believe CSOM students interdate. This is also false. The majority of the CSOM population does not and will not date each other; and if dating should occur, these are short-lived flings, not long lasting relationships. Now myth number 2 only holds true during the college years and I can neither confirm nor deny what happens after graduation.
Now you may ask, why do Carlson students NOT interdate? It would seem to make sense that proximity would draw attraction, and from myth 1 we have already established that CSOM men are very attractive. So why are there no shenanigans happening within CSOM? The answer is simple:

1. CSOM students do not interact with each other until the 2nd half of sophomore year. Therefore, freshmen CSOM dating is more about probabilities than anything else.

2. By the time the typical CSOM student reaches the halls of Carlson, they have already been brainwashed into thinking that they need to be the best and greatest and whatever it is they are doing. Often times this takes the form of extra-curricula’s (which is practically a CSOM mandate), leadership, and anything else that would look good on a resume.

3. Obviously not everyone can be the best at everything, so a subtle sub current form of competition begins to take place. On the surface this seems all innocent and sweet; however, competition tends to bring out a crucial factor that leads to the lack of interdating. Girls are competing with guys for the same prizes: internships, leadership positions, etc; however, the winners of these competitions are split 50-50; meaning girls win half the time and boys win the other half. And if there is one thing a CSOMer man hates more than anything else is to date someone better than himself, thus putting half the CSOM female population out of reach. So what about the other half? Well, another thing a CSOM man hates is a girl with no potential, and these girls because of their lack of drive have given off the no potential vibe. This puts the average CSOM female in a precarious situation. She must walk the fine line of being too driven and not driven enough.

4. However, the average CSOM female does not want the CSOM male either. By the time sophomore year approaches, a few things have been hammered into the female’s mind: study abroad, internship, leadership, drive. Meaning: the average CSOM female is too driven to be bothered with the CSOM male whom she views as competition. And if you view someone as competition, you usually harbor no loving feelings of attraction to the other party.

5. Finally, the average CSOM student by junior year will have class with the same people over and over and over again, narrowing the pool of likely applicants even further.

Now the dating situation in CSOM is not something for people to feel sad about. In fact, we kind of like it this way. There is nothing less attractive than 2 ridiculously uptight people, one is more than enough.

The Female Population
Myth number three is that CSOM girls are stuck up and too focused on themselves to bother with others. Unfortunately this myth has a little bit of truth to it. The average female CSOM junior is focused on only one thing: getting the best job or internship she can. However, this phase only lasts for about 2-3 months (the length of most company’s recruiting time frame) and after she has secured her position in the world, she is once again free to pursue other options. The point is: CSOM females are not stuck up, they just dress to impress and are very focused on whatever goal is ahead of them. However, the CSOM female is focused on business during the prime lock-in your man time (think of it as steps people take to lock-in an interest rate for their house); making many of them single during senior year and the time leading up to graduation. However, this time of singleness is short-lived as most go into a committed relationship once they have started their full-time position and are married shortly after. (Like I said before, CSOMers are very focused, even when it comes to securing a relationship.)

Life after School
The final myth is that CSOMers have no fun after school. This is the biggest myth of all. The truth is we have more fun after college than most others and have jobs that require very little work out of us. Think of your typical engineers and then go into the finance department and compare their workload with one another. The truth is, we pay our dues during school (and when I say dues I am talking about the political and social dues that we pay to get to the position we are at) but once we have secured our prize, we revel in the glory of our win better than any other school.

I hope I have brought insight to you on the inner workings of Carlson. I am off now to get my picture taken for our senior yearbook and to enjoy some free pizza.

My friend Lydia and I are going to go to the channel 4's downtown station tomorrow at 6pm and stand in behind their nightly news and try to get on TV. So please watch channel 4 tomorrow at 6pm to see us.

I signed a purchase agreement today!

Ok, I usually don't post twice in one day but I'm just too excited about my new place. The first picture is of the living room, the second is my bathroom, and the third pic is of my room. I feel so grown up!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I like to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings. I usually watch about 3 hours worth of cartoons each morning and then officially start my day at around 11. I figure most people my age do not get up until about this time anyway, so I'm not really wasting my morning. Anyways, this blog entry really isn't about that per se. (Matt, please notice how I correctly spelled per se.) I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles this morning (a show I used to watch when I was little) and they went through and explained how the turtles became mutants. It was very interesting because I had always assumed that they were originally human and then mixed with turtles somehow (think Spiderman or X-Men), but really they were turtles all along and then mutated into bigger turtles that have human characteristics. This is rather interesting, although a little unbelievable because I would have thought that many of the human characteristics picked up by the turtle can only be learned, which would be difficult seeing as how Splinter prevented the turtles from having any human interaction (except with April, but that was only after the turtles were already developed). The fact that I was actually in deep thought about this issue is probably a good sign that my brain has already started its transformation into useless things, although I did have a lapse yesterday at a supply chain club meeting. Hopefully by the end of May my brain will have turned 100% into a vat of useless knowledge.

Dirty little secrets

Ok, so everyone has them...you know stupid, silly things you enjoy even though the world tells you its dorky or trashy. For me, my new addiction has been Days of Our Lives. It started out innocently enough with me casually listening to the show while my roommate sat intently staring at the TV. But somewhere along the way I found myself looking forward to the days when I would be home to watch Days of Our Lives, but still I told myself "it's Hillary's show and I'm just along for moral support." Well yesterday I crossed over to the dark side. I watched Days (yes, I have now started to refer to the show by its more commonly known name) all by myself, and enjoyed it.

The Kerry, Austin, Lucas, and Sammy saga has captured my heart, as has the Belle and Sean situation. Who will Kerry chose? Will Sean marry Mimi or make the right choice and chose Belle? All these questions must be answered, and I must know. I have become the typical soap junky. All that is missing is a bucket of wings and a screaming baby in the background.

But yet I have a sneaky suspicion that I am not the only one with a secret such as this.

My thoughts on the war in Iraq

I think what I'm going to say will make a lot of my conservative friends mad, but I believe what I am about to say is true so I don't feel too bad about it. Before I start my rant I would like to say a few things about me: I still consider myself to be a conservative, a Republican, a Christian, a Bush-lover, and an American.

So I'm still reading this book by Shane Claiborne, the reason it has taken me so long to go through the book is because the things he talks about are very challenging to take in and so I can only read one chapter at a time. Today I read a chapter that was devoted mostly to the war on Iraq. Shane does not "support" the war on Iraq and he said a lot of things that I have been thinking about in the last year or so. I can still remember when congress voted to go to war and being very supportive of our nation's decision. I also remember a year after the decision and having a lot of my Christian friends waver in their support. However, I have always taken the stance that "what is done is done, and let's just finish the job." However, more and more I am becoming disturbed by this stance. The biggest reason I am becoming uncomfortable about the war in Iraq is that it seems like more and more those who are for the war identify themselves as Christians.
Yet, the more I read the Bible, the more I see contradictions between Christians supporting war and Jesus. Luke 9:56 says that "the Son of Man did not come to destroy people's lives but to save them." Jesus also said that if you live by the sword, you will die by the sword as well as blessed are the peacemakers. But what bothers me the most is that Jesus came to earth not as a political figure, and did not have a desire or a plan to bring a new political order to earth. In fact, so many people did not believe in Jesus because of his lack of political authority; and it seems like this was God's plan. Yet somehow over the last 2000 years, Jesus or at least Christianity, has become part of world and US politics. This has not been a bad thing altogether as I'm sure it has brought the Gospel to more people than otherwise would have. But should Christianity have ever become political?
I don't think Christianity was ever meant to be political. In Acts God brought thousands to Jesus and all throughout the New Testament people came to Christ without the need for a political movement. In fact, Christianity was almost anti-politics. So this brings me back to my concern from a couple of paragraphs ago. I find it rather difficult to support a war based on my faith or the faith of my President. What I mean is, knowing what we know now about Iraq and the war it seems difficult to maintain the same stance that I had from a few years ago.

I believe our decision to go to war with Iraq was based a lot on emotions. I'm not saying this to blame anyone or anything, as I think a majority of the people who are against the war now were for the war back then. But the war has also seemed to hurt and kill a lot of innocent Iraqis. There are casualties in any war, but I don't think Christians can be utilitarian and write off these casualties.

I think we made a mistake going to war with Iraq. We should have waited for the UN, for more evidence, for something more. Saddam is a very bad person and killed many innocent people, but our war has (accidentally) done the same. I find it hard to believe that our God is not creative enough to stop Saddam in any other way than war. But with that said, we all make mistakes and have to deal with the consequences of them, why should our government be any different? However, now comes the tougher question. Just because I believe we made a mistake going to war, does that justify us pulling out of the war. The economic side of me says yes- because all the costs incurred are already sunk and should not come into consideration. But the human side of me says it doesn't seem fair to go into a country, destroy it, realize its a mistake and leave without fixing it. So I don't really have an opinion on this part of my thoughts.
But I do believe that I need to be honest with people (mostly democrats and those who are against the war) and say that I made a mistake in supporting the war and that as a Christian I have to support peace and that it should never come at the cost of another person's life. But I am also called to submission to my government and will not protest against it as God is also the one who has put the government into place.
The point of my ranting is that I think we need to divorce our Christian identity from our American identity. Peter gave to Caesar what was Ceasar's and I think we can give to our government what is our government's and segregate our faith from politics. Thomas Jefferson understood the perils of having the government influence religion and it seems like he was right. Christians should not support war. Americans should support its government (and vote if they don't like it!). Do the two have to be mutually exclusive? I don't think so, at least it wasn't back in Jesus' day.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

So I'm in my finals week and last night as a treat to myself I decided to rent Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I've been wanting to watching all the Harry Potter movies ever since the Sorcerer's Stone was on TV a few weeks ago. So I rented the movie but didn't get a chance to start it until after midnight. But I thought to myself, its no big deal, little kids watch this movie.
Before I go any further into my story I would like to point out that I rented the movie from Blockbuster and it was found in the kids section next to Disney cartoons and the like. Also, I was home alone last night as my roomie has started moving into her new place.
So anyways I'm watching this movie and about an hour and forty minutes into it, the movie gets so scary that I cannot continue it any further. At this point it was about 1:30 in the morning and I'm so scared that I cannot go to bed. So I had to call my friend and he had to calm me down and then talk to me until I fell asleep. But this morning I woke up and with a great desire to finish the movie (I'm like a moth to a flame), so I got up and finished the movie and let me just say, thank goodness I didn't finish it last night because I think I would have lost all of my marbles then. I don't know what this movie was doing in the kids section, it is totally an adult movie with very scary things like spiders and snakes and sorcery. But the sad thing is, the movie still creeps me out enough that I cannot take a shower or move my butt from my seat...I have to wait a bit and let the movie simmer and die down in my brain before I can get enough courage to take my shower.