The Humor and Social Section will see a few changes in the New Look Harbus. At least we hope so. These changes all depend on YOU, as we need your contributions to make them work. We hear most second years a lot of free time on their hands, and we know the “ultimate” Januaries have a lot of enthusiasm. I ask one simple question: Who will write with me?
First off, some of you have built some pretty entertaining websites. In other words, you’ve gone way beyond the call of duty required in TOM class. If you know of some particularly good work—yours or a classmate’s—please let us know about it so we can enlighten our fellow HBSers.
There used to be some thing called the E-Date, where the Harbus would give two single students some seed money to go out on the town, as long as they would each write a short article on their adventures for the next issue. This feature, quite popular last academic year, only made a couple appearances this past fall. The Harbus is re-introducing this feature as The Harbus Intraview. You see, we do enough in-ter-viewing with recruiters, it’s time we did some more in-tra-mural recruiting events amongst ourselves. The basic premise is the same: We give two people expense money to go do something interesting together and they both write about their experiences.
The change is that you don’t have to be single to participate any longer. If you’ve got a significant other, give us some potentially entertaining ideas for a night out, and we’ll set you up. Single people can throw your name our way, and we’ll find you a partner in crime. After the Intraview, each participant writes about the event from their perspective. If you think one of your buddies needs to get out more, we’ll also accept nominations for Intraviewers. How will we pick your partner if you don’t have one? We pick the matching algorithm, that’s the unknown. Just like which Section you end up in, where you get to sit in class, and whether or not you have to go to Math Camp. Look for the first appearance of the Intraviews in next week’s Valentine’s Day edition.
We’ve also got some ideas for some new humor features, but they’re also dependent on your input. One is the Kong Report, where some members of the mid-week pub crawling crowd do a report on each week’s activities. Of course, this assumes we can find a reporter that’s sober enough to actually remember what happened.
It also turns out there’s a lot of funny stuff in the cases we read every day, so we’d like to start the Case Rip Cord. If you find something in a case that’s particularly noteworthy, please send it on in along with your comments. For example, C&S Professor Pete Coughlan liked the following line from the Gucci case so much, he put it on the overhead for us in class, “Muccia Prada was a college radical with a doctorate in politics, who reluctantly entered the family business after training as a mime.” I assure you ridiculing a case in these pages is much more effective in making changes than using the new Case Edits button on the cohort home pages.
Speaking of which, when I was a Computer Science undergraduate at Stanford, it was commonplace for our textbooks to be in manuscript form. Our professors were keen to have us find errors in their books before they went to print, which is apparently what this Case Edits button is all about. At Stanford, however, the professors offered a $50 incentive to the first student to uncover an error. I recommend whoever is running the Case Edits offer us a similar incentive, and they’ll see it become a much more effective tool. This is Business School, after all. In other words, we the HBS Case Reading Labor Force, should strike until the value of our efforts are duly compensated. OK, that’s enough soapbox.
While we plan like to add many features to the Humor and Social section, the anchor features will remain the same. Each section will get a column to describe their recent events, and funny-man Tom Fishburne will continue to produce his Sky Deck comic strip.
But the question remains, Who will write with me? Come on by the Club Fair this afternoon, and we can chat about how you can contribute, and we’ll welcome any suggestions you may have.
