[Photos] Alcatraz Island

As I said in last post, our super-supportive second year MBA students offered guided tour to the famous Alcatraz island on Saturday August 15th.

I knew the name of Alcatraz island even when I was in China, because of the 1996 action film The Rock (IMDB link and Wikipedia link) starring Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, and Ed Harris, directed by Michael Bay (director of  Pearl Harbor and Transformers).  The Rock is one of the best and most well-known action films, and then was very popular in China.

The trip is great.  The most impressive thing is the tagline in the cell house:

Break the rules and you go to prison, break the prison rules and you go to Alcatraz.

This is so cool.

Alcatraz island on the Google Map:


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Photos…

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[Photos] San Francisco Farmers Market

Although the Orientation for our new MBA students will officially begin on Monday August 17, but our super-supportive second year students kindly offer guided tour to San Francisco’s Farmers Market and Alcatraz island on Saturday August 15th.

Here is my tour to the SF Farmers Market.   Thank you, Ari, Jacqueline, Akhil, Sagy and all other involved second year students!  I appreciate your efforts to make all this happen.

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[Thinking] Delegate vs. Get Your Hands Dirty

I am attending the Summer Workshop provided by the Haas School of Business of UC Berkeley for our new incoming MBA students.  The workshop is ongoing, and one of the components, the Quantitative Method camp helped us review the very basic quantitative concepts in a business setting.

An interesting point was that from Day One, the instructor talked about that the importance for us is to understand the fundamentals, and the rationale behind, but not the mathematics tricks, because it is very likely in the future we, supposed to be the future managers, will delegate the work to someone else.

I understand and agree with the instructor, but here in this post I would like to extend my thoughts to a question:

Delegate vs. Get your hands dirty (GYHD), which is better?

It depends, I would say.

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Hello, Berkeley

Finally I started my two years life as an Berkeley MBA student.

It took me 11 hours to fly directly from Shanghai Pudong airport to San Francisco airport.  Eleven hours, not too far away from my perspective.  Could I imitate the famous words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” from Neil Armstrong by saying: “That’s one small step for a flight, one giant leap for me.”  🙂

After a couple of hectic days, I settled down in Albany, CA.  It is not very close from the UC Berkeley campus, but I can take a very convenient bus to commute.  So far everything is pretty much fine.

I took a shot of a slight bay view at Albany.

Hello, Berkeley, and Albany.

Slight Bay View at Albany