TechConnect: The Fringe Version (An Interview with Lauren Finkelstein)

Week 2 of the Questrom MBA blog series kicks off with an interview with Lauren Finkelstein, President of the MS-MBA club (now the MSDi club) and the head woman in charge of the TechConnect conference.  My aim is to keep these interviews fun, fresh, and not stuffy.  Since Lauren is basically the funniest person in the entire class, her interview did not disappoint.  Check it out:

1. This year's TechConnect was called the "Fringe Version" - can you explain what that means and how you guys came up with this theme?

With Boston being one of the nation's tech hotspots (pun intended), conferences on topics like security and cloud computing are aplenty. Our goal for TechConnect was to do something a bit different- we wanted to explore fringe technologies and focus on where tech could be going as opposed to where it currently is. For this reason, we focused on topics like machine learning and virtual reality. Here’s a fun insider fact for you – when we started planning the conference about ten months ago we knew we wanted to focus on emerging technologies, but the original theme name was Not Yo Mamma’s Tech Conference. However, as we reached out to potential speakers and moderators (including our own professors) we found ourselves explaining our ask with the phrase fringe technologies, a slightly more professional version of Not Yo Mamma’s Tech Conference.

The MBA West Coast Networking Club Presents: The West Coast Trek

*Hey readers, my name is Winston Jones. I'm a 2nd year MBA student and I will be starting a weekly blog series of cool events and happenings around the Questrom community. The first one up is a brief interview about the West Coast Trek - one of the cooler events in the MBA program. I interviewed fellow 2nd year MBA student and the President of the West Coast Networking Club, Jason Marmillion, about the event.*

1. Can you briefly describe this year’s West Coast Trek?

The West Coast Trek is a student-led trek to the San Francisco Bay Area. We visit companies to learn more about their unique cultures and to try to get a sense of what it's like to live and work in the area. It's also an opportunity for trek members to make connections with business people, BU alumni, and local MBA students, as well as build stronger relationships with the other BU students that attend.

2. What companies did the group visit during the trek?

Netflix, Amazon 126 Labs, Pandora, IDEO, DJI, Google, San Francisco 49ers, Founder's Institute, Plug and Play, Autodesk, Zynga, CBS Interactive