Team Positivity Contagion: Finding the Virtual Spirit of the GSB
This past weekend, Stanford GSB students celebrated one of their last days of spring break in an unusual way: in pajamas at home, students watched a livestream of Becca O’Leary (MBA2) receiving a crowdsourced haircut from classmate Sami Tellatin (MBA2).
And as strange as it sounds, for many it was one of the most heartwarming moments of their GSB experience. And if you’re wondering — yes, Becca’s hair turned out amazing.
This is one of the many creative student-led events that have launched under Team Positivity Contagion, an informal, Zoom-based events series aimed at keeping the GSB community (MBA1s, MBA2s, MSx, SOs, families, etc.) connected, while promoting social distance to combat COVID-19. Since launching two weeks ago, the initiative has seen 900+ participants, 80+ events registered, and has helped launch similar programs at two other MBA programs while collaborating with seven additional schools as they launch in the coming weeks.
Earlier this month as Stanford announced that classes would be moving online while students fled to loved ones all over the world, we were left to reconcile what our new reality would look like. And social events like Becca’s at-home haircut viewing, a situation we may all find ourselves in over the coming weeks of indefinite shelter-in-place, have been a way to acknowledge this new normal with humor, positivity and connectedness.
TPC organically grew out of a series of solution-seeking Slack posts and uplifting Blast emails wherein a group of us (myself, Danny Reyes, Jen Lopata, Kasey Uhlenhuth, Natalya Thakur, Ryan Youra, Sam Margo) united over a shared mission to preserve the GSB’s uplifting social community during this moment of universal anxiety.
As our now formalized team connected over texts and Slack messages, we acknowledged the paradoxical position GSB students found themselves in: While the GSB has told us ad nauseam to change lives, change organizations and change the world, one of the most effective ways our go-getting classmates could help the world was to simply “do nothing” — to immediately stay inside, to not travel and to not be near others so that we could break the chain of spread.
That urgency is in part because we represent the exact characteristics that were initially associated with the virus spread: we regularly travel the world, we’re hypersocial, we love physical contact and we’re young. While we now know that the young are more at-risk than initially suspected, as we entered finals and spring break two weeks ago, we had a choice: we could begrudgingly start virtual classes and let social groups calcify while letting our anxieties build in silos, or we could adapt to figure out how to support each other, from afar.
And I am proud to report for posterity that the GSB accepted the proposal for the latter. As the whacky name suggests, Team Positivity Contagion launched with the goal of spreading positivity and social support through the GSB during a time of fear and uncertainty. Through our self-service calendar (built by Ryan Youra), automated Slack bot (coded by Kasey Uhlenhuth), funny shirts (designed by Sam Margo) and weekly digests, TPC promotes an agenda of hyper-inclusivity, where any event that is open to the entire GSB community is welcomed.
As we’ve embarked on this journey to answer the timely question of “WILL IT ZOOM!?” classmates like Becca have tested the limits of this virtual medium in fun and connective ways that also show the humanity in the new world we occupy.
Take for example Dan Knapp (MBA1) who quickly realized that we would likely struggle with fitness as we faced potentially sedentary isolation lifestyles. As a welcomed departure from a sea of lonely fitness apps, Dan was one of the first GSBers who sign up to lead fun exercises, including a TikTok dance class where we all learned how to stay fit like a member of Gen Z to the tune of Doja Cat’s “Say So.”
Anticipating that we’d seek mental stimulation beyond the pandemic zeitgeist’s Tiger King, students also thought of creative virtual activities that would keep our minds busy. One of the best mental sweats came from hosts Andrew Powell (MBA2) and Kim Schreiber (MBA2) where the pair led students through challenging logic puzzles that occasionally injected some much needed self-referential humor:
Classmates have also been mindful of the fact that we’ll be seeing a lot more of our non-GSB housemates in our Zoom backgrounds during our upcoming virtual classes. Ahead of these inevitable surprise cameos, Lauren Rachel Boros (MSx) and Jen Lopata (MBA1) elected to host welcome parties to introduce our classmates’ pets and children to the community. Spoiler alert: we’ve got a lot of random mid-class cuteness ahead of us.
While the world is thrown into turmoil and we face the most unusual time to be an oversocialized MBA, I am proud that the GSB has sprung into action to connect from afar while recalibrating a new, much needed sense of normalcy. To further spread our positivity contagion, our team will continue to collaborate with MBA programs across the country to help one another launch similar virtual social initiatives while making the most of these unprecedented circumstances.
For future GSB classes, I hope you can look back at our actions now and see that we are capable of building community even under extreme duress. We choose how to contribute and bring levity amid chaos, in our own ways.
As we all join Team Positivity Contagion in the months ahead, let’s do what we do best and be our positive, welcoming selves. And if you need extra motivation on a hard day, just remember that our beloved Red Shirt Guy (Hugh Ching) will be awaiting our return to campus:
“I tried to get people to hug as much as possible, before it was too late… But I shall return to dancing when we get some antibody. A Big Virtual Hug, Hugh.”
