Park Perspectives: Core semester? It’s like drinking from a firehose.
By Jeff Hughes, Two-Year MBA ’18 & Brady Reece, Two-Year MBA ’18
Park Perspectives are authored by Johnson’s Park Leadership Fellows.
A popular cliché around Sage Hall during the core classes term is that the onslaught of new classroom content, recruitment activities, and social events is like “drinking from a firehose.”
But drinking from a firehose is, of course, physically impossible. It would make someone explode in no time! Even if you were able to spray it into a swimming pool and try to drink it later, it would take you almost four years.
Yes, we did the math
The math is tricky but we calculated it as follows: The average firehose output is around 500 gallons per minute. Compare that to a water fountain, which flows at a reasonable, and entirely drinkable, 1 gallon per minute. Drinking a gallon of water a day is tough, but then again, so is the Johnson core. With 125 days in Johnson’s academic calendar, it would take you four years to drink that pool of water. But we don’t have that long. Luckily, we didn’t have to do it alone. So, in comes a true reliance on the core team, on second year mentors, and on the general community.
With the work split among core team members, each can focus on strengths to bolster or weaknesses they most want to develop. With recruiting, there’s a tremendous amount of support from second years in the form of professional clubs, Career Work Groups, and Johnson Leadership Fellows. Even people outside of classes, like alumni, come into play by donating their time to field questions and help students prepare for recruiting.
It takes a team
So, the trick is not to each be drinking out of different firehoses, but from the same one. We each contribute in different ways to help one another to achieve similar goals of learning academics, meeting potential employers, and getting involved on campus—albeit each in our unique way. While separately it would have taken more than four years, together, we can drink a swimming pool full of water in a semester. More productively, we can also gain years of knowledge and skills in a surprisingly short period of time… which frees up time for Johnson on Tap during the second semester.
About Jeff Hughes, Two-Year MBA ’18
Previous Academic Institution(s): University of Missouri
Previous Employer: Newton Europe
Internship: BCG
Interests: Skiing, Sailing, Kite-surfing
About Brady Reece, Two-Year MBA ’18
Previous Academic Institution(s): University of Colorado
Previous Employer: Naval Special Warfare Seal Team Ten
Internship: Evercore Partners
Interests: Investment Banking, Skiing, Reading