Enjoying the Ride

Bananas? Ninja Turtles? Human Jelly Bellys? If you have celebrated the one day of the year where you get to dress up in a costume, then you know the joys of Halloween. Or maybe that day for you is St. Patrick’s Day, in which case you relish the chance to show off your kilt – which we’ll leave you to it and just focus on Halloween for now. If you have participated in Halloween, then you can recall running around through your neighborhood as a kid, going door to door and filling up on candy and goodies. Once high school hit, trick or treating and wearing costumes were definitely not the things to do, and anyone who did was obviously an adolescent. What better time to brush off those costume wearing skills then when in a full time MBA program?

Even with a busy course load, plenty of extra-curriculars, and job recruiting, a group of full time students (with some others not pictured) made sure to represent the adult population in some strong showings for costumes for Halloween. We all got together in the atrium inside the Carlson School of Management for a quick photo (Facebook has to be kept informed) and then we went back to our business! The community at Carlson is a pretty tight-knit group of people that work hard together, depend on each other, and find ways to have plenty of fun together as well, and this was one way for us to enjoy an excuse to get dressed up! A brief get together at the Corner Bar at the conclusion of the day wrapped up the festivities, where the best costume was decided. Rest assured–the preposterous showing of a nerd in the bottom right corner (author) didn’t get the nod.

Following the thread of community, this past weekend some students made the trip from downtown Minneapolis to Burnsville, MN to the home of CrossFit South Metro, which is owned by a student in our program, Laura Gerdes. She and her husband Rob were kind enough to host us for a “Hero” workout, in honor of Veteran’s Day. Both Laura and Rob are both Marine veterans, and their passion for fitness, which really gained steam while active duty, came to fruition once they made the step to become entrepreneurs and opened their gym. This past Saturday, they hosted a group of both students and partners for a workout on a beautiful Fall day in Minneapolis–which are unfortunately coming to an end soon! Only part of the group is in the picture below since I had forgotten to take the picture after we finished the workout–partly because all the oxygen was out of my brain at that point and…nope, that’s pretty much the entire reason. Thanks to Rob and Laura for a brutal workout–it was needed!