Snow Day and Illegal Luncheons

A day after proclaiming the end of winter and the melting of the last piles of snow, the weather strikes back:

Snowing Again!

From Spangler Window

Aside from just complaining, I’ll add a quick story: a club I help lead hosted a fantastic luncheon today with a company executive.  I’m completely sold on the idea — presentations are often tediously boring, and there are typically fewer than 10 people in each that are truly engaged and interested, anyway.  The opportunity cost (and risk) are also high — do you really want to take an hour away in the afternoon for a potentially useless presentation?  This is why you’ll see about half of the audience walk out in the middle of these things!

A luncheon solves each of these problems.  You only have the most interested participants, you give them an environment where they can interact one-on-one, you offer a higher quality interaction to the presenters, and you take care of it all during a time when everyone’s already on campus!

Here’s the catch: career services bans all club events before 3pm.  Why?  I guess it’s to prevent conflicts with classes.  Small group lunches walk a fine line here.  Are they “official” club events?  Well, if they’re invite only… maybe not.  It’s a tricky issue, but I think we’ll keep hosting them as long as the benefits seem to accrue to all parties.  It’s probably something we should discuss with them at some point, but I’m a bit concerned the answer might be a “our policy is no” rather than consideration of the actual impacts.  HBS has a lot of rigid policies…