An Action-Packed Week at the Graaskamp Center!

Today, first-year MBA student Ben Schmidt contributes a post to our Meet Our Current Students series:

As Eric talked about in his recent post, we’ve been fortunate to host a steady stream of guests at the Grasskamp Center recently. This week it’s time to turn the tables: instead of numerous alumni and guest speakers coming to campus, the Graaskamp Center is hitting the road!

A number of faculty, staff and students--including Academic Director Stephen Malpezzi, Executive Director Michael Brennan, Senior Associate Director Kris Hammargren and fellow first-year MBA student Julia Xia --are attending ULI’s Fall Conference this week in Washington, D.C.

The Graaskamp Center will be hosting a networking reception TODAY (October 14) from 6:00-8:00 PM in Room 209C of the convention center. Alumni, board members, and friends of the Wisconsin Real Estate Program are welcome -- you need not be a Conference participant to attend. We hope you will also say hello at the Graaskamp Center booth (#723 in the convention center).

While many of us will be traveling this week, that’s not to say that life around campus will slow down at all. In fact, we’ve hit that point in the semester where things really start to ramp up. The foundations were laid in the first few weeks of classes, and now we students are being called upon to apply what we’ve learned. That means assignments and exams: Monday was our first midterm exam in Accounting, last week required the submission of our first Data to Decisions (data analysis) assignment, and we have two assignments due this week in Real Estate Finance.

In between, we’re getting another visitor: alumnus Terrance Wall, Founder, Chairman and CEO of T. Wall Properties, will be speaking to our Real Estate Finance class while Professor Abdullah Yavas will be attending to his duties as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee with the Central Bank of Turkey.

So things are busy for everyone! Hopefully, you’re staying just as busy, too.