(Re)Defining Success for Kids at MIT Sloan
Have you met the Success Kid?
The Success Kid is a popular meme that has spawned many creative captions about celebrating small wins in life. His adorably pudgy face full of self-satisfaction and the “I did it” fist pump has inspired countless celebrations of small (and big) wins across the internet. See an example below!
Success at the MIT Sloan School of Management
For this blog assignment, we were asked to create social media content that reflects life at MIT Sloan. I was attracted to the Success Kid meme because sometimes business school students can get very absorbed in “success.” After all, the focus of the program is to create successful (innovative and principled*) business leaders. Success is top of mind for Sloanies as we read case study after case study about outperforming companies, unrelenting entrepreneurs, and remarkable CEOs. I thought it would be ironic humor to mock success at MIT Sloan using the Success Kid. Sloanies have a down-to-earth sense of humor, so making fun of our conception of success I think is fair game.
I couldn’t quite decide among my favorite 3 ideas using Success Kid, and since it was so easy to create multiple memes, I went ahead and created the following 3 Success Kid memes for this post.
The next few images were created using meme generator. This website makes it easy to add captions to popular memes and upload to imgur to share on the inter-webz.
1. On Not Being the Slow/Fat Boy Scout
I don’t think any MIT Sloan alum who has taken Intro to Operations will ever be able to go hiking again without being reminded of Herbie, a character from the drama-filled and action-packed operations-textbook-written-as-a-novel, The Goal. Herbie was the fat boy scout on a troop hike that helped the book’s main protagonist (a troop leader) understand bottlenecks in factory operations management and figure out the optimal placement for a bottleneck in a plant’s manufacturing process.
One lesson Sloanies took away from that class? No one wants to be “the Herbie” on a hike.
2. Free Beer, Short Lines
C-F(x)’s are a central aspect of MIT Sloan’s cultural and social fabric. These are all-school functions on Thursday nights hosted in the large on-campus venue called Walker Memorial. C-F(x)s are usually hosted by a cultural group at Sloan, and features unique food, beer and wine, and student performances or silly entertainment. The authorities-that-be decided to only allow ONE beer/wine station, intentionally, to limit the amount of consumption happening at these semi-official functions which are co-sponsored by the Student Life Office in addition to student clubs. The one beer station creates a pretty serious bottleneck for getting drinks at a C-F(x) and so this meme is meant to illustrate the joy of getting a beer quickly on Thursday C-F(x) nights.
3. The Non-Engineer Sloanie
This caption is meant to capture the moment when a MIT Sloan student tells someone that they are “a grad student at MIT” and the person starts complimenting how smart engineers are. “Errrrr…I’m not an engineer” is often what runs through a non-engineer Sloanie’s mind as they prepare themselves to kindly explain that they are NOT at MIT for engineering. This Success Kid caption is all about taking pride and ownership of the MIT brand, even for MIT Sloan students who are not engineers.
Please leave your suggestions for other Success Kid captions in the comments!
*The mission of MIT Sloan is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice.
This post is part of a blog series for a class I’m taking at MIT Sloan called “Social Media Management.” For this blog post, we were asked to create a piece of social media content to depict life at MIT Sloan.
