On one of my first days as a graduate assistant to the director of communications at GSE, I sat in on a meeting with a Philadelphia marketing firm that had just completed a study on what our school is both good and bad at doing.
Turns out we are mostly bad at letting the public know what we are good at; which is a lot of things. What we are mostly good at is creating a "supportive environment fostering teamwork." Their words, not mine. They were supposed to be an objective third party, which is why we hired them, but then the fact that we HIRED them makes me skeptical.
I like the word skeptical. Its like optical and spectacle mixed together, but doesn't mean any of that, and the fact that I would make such a relation would make one skeptical of my ability to think critically and logically. Which would make you skeptical which is why I like the word.
We are half way through the semester, by now we know each other, we are in the thick of it, and opinions are likely formed. That meeting with the marketeers seams long ago and by the GSE master's program schedule it is. At this point we have had submitted papers returned with grades with varying degrees of success, which is normally when nerves get worked and supportive environments that foster teamwork get tested.
Funny thing about that. If anyone was upset it either didn't show or I'm just that far out of the grapevine, either is possible, but what I did see were classmates asking each other for help. stranger still was that I saw classmates give help when asked.
Perhaps being grad school we are all a little more mature. Not likely. Perhaps being ivy we are all just inherently great people; maybe but I don't think there is a causation happening there. Perhaps GSE is good at selecting the type of student, or shaping the ones they select, in a way that helps us realize that while this may be a competitive world, our classmates aren't really our competition.
Those independent third party folks can go ahead and cash that check now.
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