My BBL, My Choices
Brown Bag Lunch, or BBL in short, is a tradition in Stanford Sloan Fellow Program and also in Stanford GSB at large. It's a lunch session where everyone brings lunchbox and listens to a classmate's self-introduction called BBL.
Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP35
Brown Bag Lunch, or BBL in short, is a tradition in Stanford Sloan Fellow Program and also in Stanford GSB at large. It's a lunch session where everyone brings lunchbox and listens to a classmate's self-introduction called BBL. BBL is to talk about yourself, let your classmates understand better who you are, where you come from, and where are you going (这是北大门卫的三个提问么？）. It's an open canvas and you can freely draw up whatever you want, talk about whatever topics that you think might be interesting for others to know. Usually one BBL goes for 15 minutes and the program staff tries to have 4 BBLs during one-hour lunch session in one of our lecture rooms.
BBL is the single most valuable experience I have as a Sloan (except my flash mob, except my half-time show, and except my rock band debut...sorry for the excessive qualifiers...I've been busy). My Sloan fellows have told some amazing stories. There are 81 Sloans in the class, coming from more than 30 countries with prior experiences ranging from corporate executives, investment bankers, serial entrepreneurs, angel investors, government dignitaries to military officers and scientific researchers. BBLs offer an excellent way for us to peek into their past lives, their countries, how they grew up to become who they are today, the monumental decisions that changed their life trajectories and led them to Stanford, their families, their hobbies, their aspirations beyond Stanford. The BBLs are not only a kaleidoscope into multiple parallel universes we never know, but also a personal bonding moment with the speakers. This event is Sloans-only, and the rule is that whatever shared in BBLs stays in BBLs - no picture, no video, no sharing. Such an exclusive setting leads us to some very private corners sometimes. When that happens, we all know that's a special moment that has bonded us together - the speaker and the audience, it's a trust that will be shared for life, and it's a connection that will never be replaced by any online social networks. On top of all these, BBLs are also a lot of fun, and many are highly creative. Not too many of us ever have the opportunity to have an audience of 80 friends who are equally talented and accomplished and willing to spend 15 minutes just listening to our own life stories. So the overachieving Sloans really put in tremendous amount of work to make the BBL as memorable as possible.
Here's my own BBL for those who missed it. There were a lot of things I could talk about and it was a bit of a struggle to figure out what should go into the BBL. In the end I skipped most of the usual topics (family, travel, work, etc) and only talked about one topic: choice. I think the choices a person makes defines who he/she is, and I shared 3 choices I made in this BBL. The perfect lead-in music to open my BBL is my monologue inspired by Ewan McGregor in Transpotting, which can be found here: https://site.douban.com/yangkun/
Without my narrative it's probably hard to understand what all this is about, but as I said earlier, those moments can never be re-lived.