Fahradamus - Joseph Fahrendorf blog

Joseph Fahrendorf blog:

During the sixteenth century, a French apothecary named Nostradamus scripted cataclysmic predictions for planet Earth such as: the Balkan Wars, World War III, and the release of the iPhone. Unfortunately, Nostradamus’ vague quatrains require intense hindsight and lack the ability to predict the future. As a result, Nostradamus’ literature can be found in the Fiction aisle of the public library.

Nostradamus’ work is a stark contrast to the blog entries of Fahradamus: a strapping, young, Fisher MBA student. In recent blog posts, Fahradamus accurately predicted a curse on the MBA basketball team. The day after the entry was posted; I took an elbow to the cheek while playing basketball which resulted in a humiliating black eye. Perhaps you are thinking that one accurate prediction is just luck. If this is the case, keep reading.

Last week, Fahradamus posted a blog that stated he was planning to play softball for the Fisher MBA intramural team. In this entry he stated, “Although softball might seem relatively safe, I am quite sure that one of my classmates (probably me) will either get a black-eye or sustain some other serious injury while attempting to relive our glory days.” What happened next is probably obvious… In my very first softball game, I sustained a black-eye and required eight stitches above my eyebrow to stop the bleeding after I collided with a guy on the base path. Go figure.

Going forward, Fahradamus will only predict straight-A’s, high paying job offers, and success in safe recreational sports such as golf.

Joseph Fahrendorf Fisher Grad Life Blog

March Madness - Joseph Fahrendorf

Post from Joseph Fahrendorf's Fisher Grad Life Blog:

Two rounds into the NCAA basketball tournament and I can officially throw my bracket in the trash. I picked Kansas, Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Villanova to make it to the Final Four… only Kentucky remains alive. You might be curious why I didn’t take the very talented number two seed Ohio State Buckeyes to go to the Final Four instead of Kansas. My answer is three-fold. First, it is a well-known fact that my teams never do well in the NCAA tournament. I am cursed. If I pick you, then you lose… usually in a painful, last second choke kind of way. Second, Kansas is a tough team and I really questioned Ohio State’s ability to beat perhaps the best team in the tournament. It is no secret that Ohio State relies too heavily on Evan Turner to get them out of sticky situations. Why should I have believed that Diebler, Buford, Lighty and Lauderdale would all of a sudden make meaningful contributions to the team at clutch points in the game? Third, I figured everyone who I was competing against would have Ohio State beating Kansas out of some sense of pride and loyalty to the University. It’s not that I don’t have these things; it’s just that I really, really wanted to win the prize money and the ability to boast about my basketball picking ability. If Ohio State would have lost as I predicted and if Kansas would have won the tournament, I would easily have won the pool since no one else would have had similar picks. It’s too bad none of my strategies ever seem to work as I envision. Fortunately this time the results aren’t entirely negative… Ohio State is still in the tournament and most of the really good teams that would have posed a challenge to them have already been knocked out. Sure my bracket is complete garbage, but maybe this March might just be the month of the Buckeyes.

Joseph Fahrendorf

This post was republished from Joseph Fahrendorf's Fisher Grad Life Blog.

Joseph Fahrendorf - 1st Year Case Competition -- bing.com vs google.com

Last Friday was the Internal Case Competition for the 2011 MBA class. Since I am trying to broaden my MBA experience and hone my public speaking skills, I decided to take part in the competition. My team was comprised of three other first year students: Emily Bae, Joseph Lopez, and Chris Kessler. The case was on Microsoft (circa November 2008.) At the time their search engine, msn.com, was a distant third to Yahoo! and the behemoth Google. We were asked to conduct analysis on Microsoft’s current search engine and to produce recommendations accordingly. After extensive research on both the market composition and the existing client experience, our recommendation was for Microsoft to pioneer a brand new experience called, Microsoft MiLife (patent pending).

MiLife is an all-inclusive system where a user sets up a personal profile and comprehensive data is collected and maintained for each person. This would be a person’s Internet identity and a portal to everything they need online. For example, MiLife would be an amazon.comfor the entire Internet, not just for things placed on Amazon. Our goal was to avoid regurgitating bing.com, but to make bing.com better.

The project took us the entire day to complete and we presented to four judges (one of which was Dean Wruck) the next morning. Although we were uncertain that the judges would like our idea, we pitched our idea with as much passion and energy as possible. Later in the day we learned that we had won the case competition for our room and we received Barnes & Noble gift cards. This also means that my team is eligible to represent Ohio State in the Big Ten case competition.

Overall, the case competition was worthwhile. Although it took up a lot of time (all day Friday and half a day on Saturday), the pros certainly outweigh the cons.

-Joe Fahrendorf

This was reposted from Joseph Fahrendorf's Fisher Grad Life Blog.

Football is over... time for school

It has recently become very evident that I will have little free time this quarter. Between working on my core classes and my recently invigorated summer internship search, this might be my busiest quarter of the year. I guess for the benefit of my MBA degree, the Bengals lost in the playoffs yesterday to the NY Jets. There is no doubt that with my team out of the playoffs, I will now have significantly more time available each week. Gone are the days of spending endless hours on espn.com to get the most up-to-date information on my team, gone are the Sundays of spending four hours watching the game and then several additional hours either too happy or depressed to do any work.

I was actually at the Bengals game this Sunday with my dad and brothers. The 1 degree wind chill was not nearly as bad as losing. I’m still upset about the loss, but eventually I will adapt to life without football. Hopefully I do this sooner rather than later, especially since I have an important phone interview with a recruiter from Cardinal Health on Tuesday. I will be speaking with her about their summer marketing internship and hopefully I can make a positive impression.

-Joseph

This post was republished from Joseph Fahrendorf's Fisher Grad blog.

Columbus winter warning

There is no doubt about it: the Columbus winter is harsh. For the past seven years I have taken great pride in my ability to survive the winters of New Haven, CT and New York City. When I decided to move back to Ohio, I never thought twice about the Ohio winter. I clearly underestimated its potential.

Since the beginning of the month it has snowed pretty much every day. Although the accumulation has not been too heavy, it has been an obnoxious amount capable of covering my car, which inevitably delays my departure for class by 15 minutes every morning. Not only is it constantly snowing, it is absolutely freezing outside. It is so cold, that I succumbed to driving to the gym a few days ago. Although this might not sound bad, you should know that the gym is about 300 meters from my place and is clearly visible from my apartment. Where is global warming when I need it?

Joseph Fahrendorf

This was reposted from Joseph Fahrendorf's Fisher Grad Life Blog.

Q2 - Joseph Fahrendorf

Tomorrow is the first day of the second quarter. Christmas break was great, but I’m glad that it is over. Three weeks is a long time off and towards the end I started to feel restless.

This quarter I am taking five classes. Four are mandatory: Cost Accounting, Finance, Operations Management and Marketing. The elective that I’ll be taking is Negotiations. Even before taking a single class, I think I can say that I’ll prefer the second quarter over the first quarter classes. Marketing and Operations are two areas that I am considering as majors.

I wish I had better news to report. I am writing this blog as I watch my beloved Cincinnati Bengals get crushed by the NY Jets. Fortunately the Bengals are in the playoffs and it just so happens that they’ll be playing the Jets in Cincinnati next weekend in the first round of the playoffs. I’ll need to make sure to get all my reading done during the week so that I can return home this weekend to attend the game.