Can I just take a moment to talk about how pretentious the Carnegie Mellon Graduate Business school is?? I got a card from them today with the words "ITS COMING..." in large white block letters on a black trifold postcard mailer. Inside there are several lines with gibberish text in grey, interspersed with more white block text reading:
GET READY...
BE THERE. 03 19 04
DON'T MISS THIS HISTORIC EVENT...
AN UNPRECEDENTED EVENT...
I won't even comment on how bad the copy is. What made me angry was that the "major event" they were trying to promote is actually a live webcast on the GSIA website. A webcast?!? I'm sorry, nothing that school produces will EVER be considered an historic event, especially when introduced in such an inconsequential forum as a webcast on their own website.
Of course, this comes from the same school that, after earning a #2 ranking from the Wall Street Journal, printed four huge wall-sized banners proclaiming their superiority and hung them on the outside of Posner Hall so they could be seen from the bleachers at our commencement ceremony. The blatant, almost tacky self-promotion should not really come as a shock to me.
Yea! A rant! I love those. You tell 'em, Katy! Damn business school. Pretentious asses. :)
oh oh! i got one of those too!! and if my site wasn't down > i would have ranted as well!! How pretentious of them!!! Chad must be having a field day with this.. Yeah, GSIA has visions of grandeur, a certain Napoleon complex if you will... A certain je ne sais quoi and not in a good way either. Bad graphic design... Historic event?? Is this how they spend alumni donations?? Grumble.
I got one of those too and was curious enough to open the card. It went straight to the trash when I got to the webcast url.
Out of curiosity, why is GSIA trying to lure undergraduate business majors back to the website?
Maybe they are still celebrating their ranking from 2001. That could be both historic and unprecedented. hmmm....
I, too, have wondered why I get graduate fundraising mailers when I was clearly an undergraduate student. I always get these supposedly inspiring, poignant memos from Dean Dunn (either of them) talking about all the school does. It makes me somewhat ill.
Do they not KNOW that we were second-class citizens in that building for four years? Do they not KNOW that we were stuffed into a delapidated and under-sized lecture hall with inferior resources and restricted access?
What on earth would possess me to perpetuate that?
oh, can i also add that we all have much cooler jobs than the grads? he he :)
Thankfully, engineer alumni donations go straight to building robots.... girl robots. Wait, something about that's not right....
A field day indeed!
We spent half a BusComm class dissecting the tackiness, the cheesiness, and the utter sloppiness (hello! parallel structure, anyone?!) of that damned flash teaser.
Bad bad bad.
And a disservice to some otherwise cool news.
Sigh.