Hell Month

Imagine during the first day of class you're thrown together with 61 perfect strangers. You're served breakfast. The staff welcomes you to MIT. They then begin to tell you that collectively, you and your cohort constitute the most impressive skill-set and experience base of any class entering MIT. You're feeling pretty good, but then, 10 minutes after they've begun to build you up...

Many things await you in the next month. You will work very hard for the next four weeks. In fact, you will only average 4 to 6 hours of sleep per night. Many of you haven't attended school for 10 years and need to be reminded what an academic program feels like. Welcome to the top of the academic food-chain. This is MIT; there is NO whining at MIT.

With that we were thrust into the most amazing 30 days of our lives.

Many things were learned during that time, among them, the concept of IAP. The last three weeks in January at MIT is considered Independent Activities Period (IAP). Basically it's a much needed break-for students and faculty alike-from the MIT academic program. For the purposes of the SDM program, IAP = "Hell Month."

In the least Hell Month teaches you how to work in unstructured, non-hierarchical work teams. For each team challenge, the cohort are split into groups of 6-7, given a common objective, a time line, and expected to deliver a particular product; all of this outside the time allotted to all our other responsibilities. There are two of these objectives-Design Challenges-during Hell Month: DC1 and DC2. For DC1 we had to develop a tangible product. In DC2 we researched a weighty issue and collectively wrote a 40-60 page paper. For both, each group was required to give 15-25 minute presentations with slides to the rest of the cohort and SDM staff.

Once you're in your team, decisions about leadership, and task addressing, and egos, and rule interpretation, and conflict resolution are all team efforts. There is no authority within the groups. Problem resolution therefore isn't a product of decree, but one of persuasion. You learn very quickly that you must convince others to proceed in a particular direction with subtle leadership. In fact, if I've personally learned anything in the past month, it was that in order to move tasks to completion, a good leader has to consider the long term leadership objective. He or she must constantly re-evaluate performance/inputs etc, commit to a vision of completion, (and here's the important part I think) determine what inspires your peers or employees, and use those strengths, with positive feedback, to realize the end-goal. After all, everyone wants to feel as if their input contributed to the solution.