The Second Stop? Second City!

After a lunch in the Water Tower, we hopped on our friend the 151 and headed to The Second City. Located in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago, The Second City is celebrating 50 years of comedy. We were excited to be in a place that had churned out actors and comedians like Tina Fey and Steven Colbert.



The show was two acts, with the great improv that makes Second City famous. I was sitting in front of all of the students, but I heard a lot of laughing. The sketches pushed the envelope with topics about racism, gender, politics, and religion. Some wonderful conversations broke out on our way back to our bus stop.

An Evening with an Icon

We ended our day with an evening on Navy Pier. We had lots of folks on the ferris wheel, enjoying culinary delights, and checking out the large cruise boats boarding for nighttime excursions. After a full day of exploring Chicago, we were ready to head home for the evening.

All told, we took over 6 different city buses today to our three destinations. Learning how to navigate a city is a new skill set for some of us, and it's been fun to learn together. It's challenging to travel in a large group, and these students are doing a great job of being respectful of the city they are in and supportive of each other. I feel really lucky to be spending this time getting to know them.

A highlight of the evening was our very own Steph getting her own personalized beatbox rap from Yuri Lane, a performer on the Navy Pier. Lane asked her if she liked texting and when she said "yes," well, she got her own tribute performance. I'll try to get the video loaded soon; it's giving me some trouble tonight.

What's Going to Be Your Sue?

We had a great morning at the Field Museum, learning about how this non-profit with an educational mission is like a for-profit business. The manager of public relations gave a presentation on the difference between working for a business and working for a "public purpose institution" like the museum.

We also heard about several "quirky" marketing campaigns that have evolved in the Field over the last several years. The T-Rex Sue has provided many unique marketing opportunities over the years, and Ms. Telisman shared how it was a visionary move in 1997 for the Field to purchase Sue for 8.6 million dollars. She challenged us to think about what our Sue's might be in our lives.

We had lunch at the Water Tower and are gearing up for a trip to Second City this afternoon.

Our adventure has included a lot of exposure to public transit as we are using the city buses to move from place to place. This is our bus on the way to the Field this morning. It was SRO on the way back!

We're Here!

We arrived at the Seneca Hotel at about 8:15pm tonight. By the time we got all the keys distributed, and our luggage picked out (how many black suitcases must there be in the world?), it was about 8:30pm.

Despite lots of naps on the way up, we have rebounded with a great deal of energy. We had an all-trip meeting in my room tonight and played an icebreaker that involved us finding the connections we have with one another. Out of this entire group of 22, we have lots of things in common.

We talked a bit about hotel ettiquette and reviewed the schedule for tomorrow. We're headed to the Field Museum first thing, then to The Second City for a theatre performance, and we'll end the day at Navy Pier. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and I gave out quite a few ponchos tonight.

Right now the students are crammed into the suite, playing card games and Apples to Apples.

On the Road

I realized this afternoon that I broke perhaps a cardinal rule in blogging by writing in the first person without introducing myself. Your primary author for this blog, I’m the Kelley staff member chaperoning this trip to Chicago. My primary role within the Kelley School is admissions. I work with prospective and current IU students who are interested in joining the Kelley School, so this trip is a unique opportunity to connect with incoming freshmen.

This trip is a true cross-campus collaboration. While the administration of the trip is managed by the IU Office of First Year Experience Programs, our daily activities and business site visits were all arranged by staff members of the Kelley Undergraduate Program. This is a unique effort between an academic and administrative unit, and I know it will be of great benefit to the students.

Before we left campus today, we had a workshop on professionalism. We’ll be interacting with companies who do recruiting and hiring at IU, so we wanted to be sure to share our expectations for our student participants about asking questions and interacting with our site hosts.
The director of the Undergraduate Program, Kathleen Robbins, co-presented this workshop. Our final exercise was dividing into groups, reviewing brief profiles of the companies, and then creating possible questions we could ask after the business presentations. I was thrilled with the depth of questions we heard from this brief exercise and can tell that this is an excellent group of students.

As I’m writing this, we are on 465, circling Indianapolis on our way to the city. We’ll stop in Lafayette for dinner, hopefully hitting our hotel by 9pm. We are sharing our bus ride with the Arts & Culture group. All but 3 of our group of 19 are sleeping, while the Arts & Culture students are talking. Perhaps we wore everyone out with this workshop?

Highlights thus far:

*Kyle and Jason (Arts & Culture chaperone) teaching Adam and Erik (KBI chaperone) euchre.
*Kyle busted out some delicious Twizzlers. (Thanks, Mom! We are now down to 2)
*Learning that for 2 of our 19 participants, this will be their first trip to Chicago.

*Talking about CultureFest, an IU tradition that takes place during Welcome Week.

*Brittany helping me write the blog post!

Onwards!

Megan

Chicago-Bound

In about 2 hours, I'll head to the Indiana Memorial Union to meet the student chaperones who are joining us on this trip. We have great chaperones joining us this weekend: Erik G. and Grace B. They are super.

Our student participants for the trip are coming from all over the US: Penfield, NY; Terre Haute, IN; Indianapolis, IN; Floyds Knobs, IN; Valparaiso, IN; Brownsburg, IN; Flower Mound, TX; Carmel, IN; Hinsdale, IL; Manchester, MO; Westfield, IN; St. Louis, MO; Muster, IN; Muncie, IN; Overland Park, KS; and Annandale, VA. They are moving into their residence halls today...a very busy day for them.

We'll have a workshop on professionalism and then hop on the bus to head to Chicago! Our final destination this evening is The Seneca Hotel & Suites. We'll be staying there along with the Ats & Culture Chicago trip.

Preparing for the trip!

We're packing up and getting ready to go! Looking forward to meeting all the students taking this trip to Chicago tomorrow. Our corporate partners are looking forward to meeting them as well!

It looks like the weather is going to cooperate, with one day of rain...Saturday. The temperatures look like they will be moderate...in the 80's while we are there. Good students, good experiences, and good weather. We are set for a fantastic time.