I ditched (one) class Friday afternoon to go judge the Global Social Venture Competition. Someone had reached out to ST@B to see if anyone wanted to be a student judge for the Berkeley applications, so I signed up. After all, I’m interested in how ventures’ intentions can actually be socially beneficial. I didn’t know anything about it prior to - or after - volunteering, but I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some ‘formal’ experience/training interacting with business plans.
I’ve had plenty of exposure to business plans via classes, internships, and talking shop with my dad, but I have this weird habit of seeking further instruction on certain topics whether I think I need it or not (why I keep going to stuff to “learn about social media,” for example). Story of my life, actually. I know a lot of stuff, but I’ve never gotten any kind of structured lessons on much of it, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right/well/properly. Perhaps that’s what business school is for, but that remains to be seen. I’ll let you know in a few years if I decide to go.
So I show up and walk into a room full of MBA students. Oops… didn’t get the memo on that one. Luckily someone asks me if I’m in one of his classes, so I suppose I didn’t appear too out of place. Actually, a few people at the She’s Geeky Unconference also assumed I was a grad student; I wonder what makes people think that. Anyway, instead of swooshing right over my head, the task at hand was totally manageable.
I’m rambling as usual, so here’s my point: It turns out I am well able/qualified to read and evaluate executive summaries that had taken MBA students presumably months of research and planning and writing to formulate. Yay for me, right? The sad part is, some of them were awful (I’m not an MBA so I don’t have to be politically correct!). I encountered badly written plans, full of typos and illogical sentence structure, and one that could have been amazing - if the core idea made any sense at all. Still another looked like the product of an hour of brainstorming over coffee with zero research backing it up (at least not in the summary). There are real judges that will decide which plans continue in the competition, but since they asked for my input, I strongly feel that some of those should not.
Does this mean I’m The Shit when it comes to business plans? Hah. I think it suggests that I can trust a lot of what I know even if it isn’t formally delivered information. It may also mean that I can continue learning for my career in the way that I have been so far - nonacademically and sometimes haphazardly. I’m smart enough to discern what’s important. Indicator: when people ask what I’m majoring in (Linguistics, International Political Economy) and what kind of work I’m looking to do after grad (the non-technical side of the tech industry), they no longer ask what the relationship that can possibly be. I just talk about what I’ve done outside and around school, and they’re satisfied.
Well, at least it looks like I know what I’m doing.
