Think Global. Act Local - after the scavenger hunt, of course.

Here we are in mid-April and I still haven't blogged about one of my favorite events that happened back in January... Just goes to show you how little time I have to reminisce when busy with a full System Design Management course load and while maintaining part time employment as a senior engineer at Raytheon.

It's only been three months since IAP (Independent Activities Period ... MIT lingo) during which the cohort of 2010 was put through "SDM bootcamp." Essentially, the month of January was dominated by cohort-building activities which consisted of early morning till late night (much to the chagrin of my wife and 18 month old son.) These sessions included Lectures, Workshops, and several team-based Design Challenges.

The program was generous enough to provide catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the whole month (In retrospect this was probably because they knew that we wouldn't even have time to run up the street for a sandwich) and I even gained a few pounds, prompting me to organize the SDM "Biggest Loser" weight loss contest with some of my fellow "gravitationally challenged" classmates... more on that later.

The Design Challenges were particularly interesting .. Here's how they went: The cohort was broken up into teams and assigned challengeas which were to be completed in a week or two. Teams were intentionally diverse and optimized for maximum conflict - I am kidding, but interesting team dynamics ensued -- a paranoid person might have thought that we were part of some social experiment and that there was a mad scientist observing us through a two-way mirror in a Zimbardo-like experiment.

We had three Challenges , each interesting enough to deserve its own blog post - Like a reverse polish notation calculator, I will pop my memory stack and present these backwards, starting with the one that's most recent and fresh in my mind : DC3.

For starters, DC3 turned out to be two challenges in the guise of one:

First, there was a scavenger hunt! This allowed, nay forced, us to discover the MIT campus and surroundings by looking for a mix of arcane and historic MIT-related landmarks and curiosities. The list of these is way too long to publish here. There were 50 items. In some cases you had to get a picture of the whole team in front of these places/items. I admit that, after having had knee surgery in December, the thought of running up and down the Charles river looking for "Nerd Crossing" didn't quite excite me, but I actually went through with "most" of it : we thought that we could meet the letter of the challenge requirements by photoshopping (hmm spell check didn't complain about "photoshopping," is it an official word now?) our team into the picture.

A few pictures from that hunt are below... we had to provide a charcoal rubbing of the plaque used by MIT students for good luck... Turns out that Rubbing the nose of the George Eastman plaque in Building 6 is supposed to bring good luck.

Another required item: picture of the team in front of the bar at the Muddy Charles Pub

There were several bar and pub-related scavenger hunt items, to our delight:)

Below, we found two Nerd Crossings:

After the fun and games it was time to get down to business. The real challenge!

The name of it was " Think Global. Act Local."

Each team gets a large systems issue to research. They must make a connection to a local organization. (Local organizations must be non-profit.) Each team will make a final presentation - a “sales pitch” for why SDM should support the organization they advocate.

Prizes for will be given for the top presentation in each category plus an audience choice award. Each prize is a $500 donation to the non-profit organization presented by the team.

Topics are intentionally broad. Each team will have to determine how they will decompose and or define the problem. E.g. For large scale disaster recovery, the team can identify major challenges, and choose to focus on one such as how to meet the need for potable water after a disaster. Topics :

· Improving Large Scale Disaster Recovery (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, hurricane)

· Enabling economic development with minimal carbon impact

· Promoting STEM subjects and increase participation at higher education levels

My team, team number 2 (or "team deuce" ) was assigned "Enabling economic development with minimal carbon impact."

It was amazing to see all of the team presentations and the ideas that were generated in just one week!

In my next blog post I will tell you all about my own DC3 experience in finding, connecting with, and pitching a non-profit that is all about helping build a sustainable future - How about that for a cliff hanger?