At the GSB, we refer to classes that are in departments outside of the B-school as being “Across the street” and, earlier today, I had my first “across the street” session. The class was an Education school class called “The Politics of Education”, which is the first class I’m taking toward the MA in Education degree that I’m pursuing, and covers issues having to do with politics and policies that are encountered in the education space. It is taught by Prof Michael Kirst who is a heavy hitter in the education space and it filled mostly with Education PhD and Master’s students. In fact, there are only 6 of us who are joint degree MBA/MA in Education students. I must say that it was a totally different experience than I’ve seen in any of my classes at Stanford so far. In the business school, people are very insightful with their comments, but the passion of those comments were nowhere close to what I heard from these Ed School kids today, which doesn’t surprise me because it isn’t easy to get passionate about talking about financial statements or the CAPM Model. The class discussion was about the Headstart organizations and changes that George Bush would like to make to it and the other students were giving great comments about both sides of the issue. I have a feeling that I’m really going to like this class and the other Education classes that I take.

One last thing before I run off to class…I just got a call from Accenture about 30 minutes ago with news about my status…and it was finally some good news. They gave me an offer to spend the summer working as a Strategy Consulting intern in their NYC office likely working on their COmmunications and High Tech team. I’m still smiling from getting that news and, because it is the sort of work that I want for the summer, I’m leaning toward jumping on this while it is still on the table (it is late in their recruiting process and they’d like a response soon). I’ll give more information as I get it.