Breaking all self-imposed rules, promises, and general personal preferences, I did something awful a few weeks ago. Something self-righteous liberal College students with useless-but-fascinating majors should never have to do. Something I did for you, dear readers. Yes, both of you.

I, Wharton-mocking, anti-Event Planning 100, “Who-Needs-a-Job-When-You-Have-a-Soul” Lindsey Stull, attended management training. For six hours, I stared at PowerPoint presentations and role-played (er, not the fun way) and heard the seconds tick by on the clock behind my head. Worst of all, I was subjected to this in the Death Star, which just added insult to injury. (And yes, it has its own website.)

I stress-ate my way through two sandwiches, handful after handful of chips, and 18 mini candy bars. I then carefully folded the wrappers into perfect little rectangles, wrote out a to do list, saved it on my desktop as a “do me” list, and looked around for the bag of chocolate. I discovered that I cannot, in fact, levitate objects and mentally pull them toward me.

And then, depressingly enough, I realized that I’d learned something. Maybe they really do pump all sorts of extra oxygen into the building, or perhaps I was just channeling pent-up frustration at that stupid bag of unmovable candy, but I certainly felt ready, willing and able to boss people around. And exchanging sad, pitiful looks with coworkers sort of counts as team-building, I think.

Even better, I confirmed something to myself: I’d rather strip naked, cover myself in computer parts and let the engineers at me than ever get a business degree, even from the best school in the country. Then again, I know engineers who’d rather strip naked, cover themselves in money and let the Whartonites at them than take my current favorite history/science/music class.

A great thing about Penn is that, by simple virtue of living in such an intense, demanding place, you learn what you don’t want to do as well as what you do. In the last year and a half, I’ve discovered an abiding hatred for physics as well as certain types of hospital work, vodka (a purely legal investigation undertaken in Europe, of course), cinema studies, and now, anything business-related. My list of interests has grown a bit faster but just as arbitrarily.

So, I say, go forth and manage. Or physic. Or whatever. See what Penn has to offer, even if it’s for six miserable hours, and figure out what you want to do (or really, really don’t want to do) with your life. Before OCR does it for you.

Tags: corporate hell, management, OCR, Wharton

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Penn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.