From taxes to touchdowns, some suggested podcasts to fill your feeds. Photo by Elena Zhukova/Stanford
The pandemic may be (once again) winding down, or should we say entering another trough. That means folks are on the move again, including (perhaps especially) MBA students. With most schools’ campuses reopened for in-person classes, many are spending more time in the car or on the train again. At Stanford Graduate School of Business, Insights by Stanford Business polled GSB faculty asking for their top picks based on what they’ve been listening to in their free time, and the professors came back with a wide-ranging list of shows.
Among them, Michele J. Gelfand, the John H. Scully professor in cross-cultural management and professor of organizational behavior, recommends EconTalk, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, and The Big Idea: “I love EconTalk with Russ Roberts. He is a generalist and his guests cover many disciplines and topics. He is also a phenomenal interviewer. Another favorite: Sean Carroll’s Mindscape. He’s a theoretical physicist from Caltech and his reach is wide and deep. Finally, I love David Edmonds’ The Big Idea — wildly entertaining and nuggets of wisdom in every episode!”
Most of the suggestions, however, are non-business-related. Chenzi Xu, assistant professor of finance, recommends Alistair Horne’s The Seven Ages of Paris: “Horne is a historian of Europe and has written many books on many different periods, but this particular one is his love song to Paris. It recounts all the major events in French history, but does so through the lens of how they impacted Paris’s architectural footprint. Anyone who has been or who would like to go to Paris would appreciate the city much more having listened to this.”
MBA candidates and students looking to shore up their knowledge before applying to B-school should check out Poets&Quants‘ Business Casual, with new episodes weekly.
At Darden, adversity, grit led duo to create first-generation student coalition
Graduate students Ivana Brancaccio, right, and Jesse McCain are the co-founders of the First-Generation Graduate Student Coalition. Darden photos
Ivana Brancaccio of Las Vegas, who is pursuing her MBA from the Darden School of Business, spent part her undergraduate years at American University interning for U.S. Senator Harry Reid.
Her parents make their living by making draperies and worked hard so that their daughter and son could go to the best schools, but they “fell on hard times when the housing crisis hit our home city of Las Vegas.”
“Growing up, I remember my dad would tell me that he never wanted me to work with my hands,” she said. “He wanted me to work with my mind.”