Meet an MIT Sloan core team: The Indian Puffins
My life as a student here at MIT is inextricably linked to the 6 other people that make up our core team. It’s time you met them.
Here at MIT Sloan, our first-year MBA class of 404 students is organized into two major groupings:
- “Oceans” of about 70 students each, who we take all five of our core (required) classes with. I am in the Indian Ocean. We are a great, warm, and friendly ocean, famous for cultural cross-pollinization and open commerce. Go Indians!
- Core teams of 6 or 7 students, each named after a bird. We are responsible for a lot of core group assignments together, so this is a very important team in terms of both social dynamic and academic performance. I am a Puffin. Puffins are the best. Caw! <whisper> Puffinssssssssssssss. </whisper> (That’s our cheer. There’s an accompanying Puffin dance.)
As a core team, we spend a lot of time together — typically 3–5 hours in class four days a week, and sometimes another 8 hours working on a group project, studying, or just hanging out/arguing about stuff.
Core teams are a fascinating and central part of the MIT MBA experience. Every core team is a very interesting combination of backgrounds and skills, and my team, the Indian Puffins, are no exception.
Readers, meet the Puffins. You’ll be reading a lot more about them over the next two years.
There is one Puffin missing from the above photo: Mumford. He’s a mini-pig who lives with Will and Carrie Wolfe. But he’s also a Puffin. I know, it’s confusing.
- Nuño — From Madrid, Spain. Worked in Finance as a Portfolio Manager in a Multifamily office in Madrid.
- Natalia — Worked in the technology practice of Deloitte (strategy consulting) for 6 years, focused on building client relationships, gathering project requirements, and managing distributed teams. B.S. in Business Administration, minor in Computer Science.
- Aly — From California, most recently living in NYC. Experience in both market research and brand management in the beauty industry.
- Joseph — me. :-)
- Jimmy — From Georgia, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. Worked for BP in Alaska as a drilling engineer for 3 years. Studying mechanical engineering and business at MIT. Interested in robotics and factory automation.
- Will — Navy veteran with an educational background in engineering. Experience in sales and negotiations. Married for eight years. Has a pet mini-pig named Mumford.
- Anni — 6 years as an organizational and strategy consultant, helped federal agencies and US retailers improve their people operations and customer experiences. 5 years of hospitality experience, spent past summer interning with owners of Shake Shack and 14 other restaurants.
- Mumford — A mini-pig. Did not get into MIT Sloan; we don’t care. He’s still a Puffin.
Pretty cool, right? Welcome to MIT.
