Category: BeyoniMeeting….

 (my last “BeyoniMeeting…” post was back in Nov 2012 already…2 YEARS AGO!! shame…)

Meeting our current MIT President for the first time! Some key takeaways from the evening:

• Love his Pope-like handshake and eye contact: very genuine, warm and strong. First he shook my hand powerfully, then he gently placed his left hand on my hand..(Urgh I hope you get what I mean). Whoa…..
• On asset allocation among undergrad & grad students: of course the undergrads win! MIT spend around $70,000-$80,000 USD per undergrad, while only 10% to 11% undergrads are paying the full tuition fee $44,000 USD. So not many ppl know that their education is in fact subsidized by the school.
• On edX & MIT OpenCourseWare: a 17-year old high school student in India got 97% in 6.002x (Circuits & Electronics) on edX, our MOOC platform. He really wanted to continue to take 6.003 (Signals & Systems), but the class is not offered on edX yet. He then studied 6.003 on MIT OpenCourseWare, our web-based publications of almost ALL MIT class materials, and started his own MOOC 6.003z!

Also in the series:
Meetng Th0mas Heatherw!ck
Meeting Kenichi Ohmae
Meeting Steven Chu
Meeting Bill Gates
Meeting Al Gore
Meeting Barack Obama
Meeting Solow x Diamond x Mankiw
Meeting Noam Chomsky
Meeting  Russell Peters
Meeting Bow Tie 

Didn’t expect I could still add more posts to my ‘BeyoniMeeting…’ collection! One more world-renowned figure, wow :3

Designer of the Olympics flame above! (And many more masterpieces~ click here!)

– Think ‘negatively’. What is not enough? What gotta be changed?

– People always remember the Olympics Cauldron as a dish of flame supported by a stick. But could you recall any specific design? Nope.

– People tend to only remember the ‘moment’ when it is lit. Not the cauldron.

– Audiences will always look around and ask ‘Where is it? Where is it?’. Why not take advantage of the ‘circularity’? (kind of ‘haha’ inside my heart when he said this word..why not just circle? XD)

– 204 different copper (Why? Too many gold silver bronze already!) petals symbolizing 204 countries with the country name engraved on each. Each rusty petal was given back to the country as a souvenir!

– To avoid any accident, the very first rule given by the board is ‘it must not move.’ See? Rules are made to be broken right away lol

– Partial rehearsals could only be done secretly at 2/3am when no airlines are operating above.

– So I asked him after the presentation..did the real thing happen exactly 100% the same as expected?! (If u wanna know, come to admiralty for lunch and I will tell you in person :P)

See Also:

Meeting Kenichi Ohmae
Meeting Steven Chu
Meeting Bill Gates
Meeting Al Gore
Meeting Barack Obama
Meeting Solow x Diamond x Mankiw
Meeting Noam Chomsky
Meeting  Russell Peters
Meeting Bow Tie 

[BeyoniMeeting series +1 ! 竟然離開了大學後還有進賬！]

難得的機會去聽了策略家大前研一的talk，very impressive as a speaker on corporate strategy esp. after knowing that he was a nuclear engineering PhD from MIT! 說話不像一般日本人，完全不留餘地，well，but他寸得起@.@

e.g. on his ppt : “Samsung in the new Sony, with no innovations.”

e.g. He stated that key to business success should be
1. time-specific (Zynga on facebook)
2. location-specific (small regions next to big markets often win, e.g. HK, Taiwan)
3. person-specific (Steve Jobs)
Then someone from the floor asked that whether it is just pure luck then? He answered and ended with “well, if you still think it’s pure luck, so be it.”

e.g. At the end a young girl walked up to him and asked “will you visit Hong Kong again?”, he just responded coldly: “none of your business .” then walked away..

有兩大takeaways，
第一，體驗上流social event的格局。第二，當然是演說內容啦。Tell you more in person later!! :P too late to write them out hahaha~~

第二次在黑暗中見到一線光，多謝，好感動！（上一次是在日本被惡意推撞及怒bear）要好好珍惜。。當發生 a series of unfortunate events 的時候，小女子特別虛弱 >o<

這兩個月見了第三位Nobel Prize Winner －美國能源部長Dr. Steven Chu。跟朋友在回宿舍路上，經過kresge，見到還有free lunchbox，就walk-in進去了。

短短一個小時內aggressively cover了clean energy sector裡面的幾十個小部分－solar energy, transportation, building efficiency, biomass harvesting,  blahblah…可能是學者出身的關係，內容都針著”Invented in America” 的研究突破。他還真的耐心地把一個又一個零零碎碎的research概要和charts推出來講兩句。(當中還用一個slide來解釋DC to AC conversion…well Dr. Chu here is not Harvard. Electromagnetism is a compulsory course in MIT!!)

Technical了一小時後，朱先生以Michael Spence最新發的paper作結。
“Invented in America” is not enough, to win the clean energy race, 要
“Made in America, Sold Worldwide”才可以說是完全勝利。

因為整個演講途中非常zzzz，沒有甚麼特別的感受。
唯獨他提到幾家中國太陽能企業的名字，甚麼wafer ASP，
都是我暑期工research過的，就勾起了我暑假的段段回憶了。（誤）

See also: