Rising junior at Vanderbilt with a major in Economics and a minor in Corporate Strategy. Native of Westchester, NY, and first in her family, she says, not to go to college in New England. “I love Nashville and Vanderbilt. Now my younger brother wants to apply. I knew I wanted to go into business, so I talked to other students here who had gone through Accelerator. They said it was an incredible experience—and they were right!” 6:00 AM
for a business environment, or how to use Photoshop, or interviewing skills. We can choose what interests us most.
Wake up and get ready for a fast-paced day. It’s never the same from one day to the next. In fact, we never even know what our schedule will be for the next day until the evening before.
7:00 AM
An Accelerated
Day
in the
Life:
Ilana French Robbins
Breakfast (on most days) at Owen—and (on some days) 2:45 PM at Starbucks with colleagues on my team to review our Today, we have a class work on one of our consulting projects or review details in Entrepreneurship with Professor for a presentation. Michael Burcham (the knowledge I got from 8:00 AM On most days, like today, we have class after breakfast. the professors at Owen was amazing). Two afternoons One day it might be creative advertising. Another might a week, we’d have free time for exercise, when I’d head to the Student Rec Center or maybe call my family. be managerial economics. On the “presentation days” (like yesterday)—when groups present their ideas to a “client,” such as Nissan, we’d wait in the lobby to make our 10-minute pitch and then watch other groups (there are 10 teams in all) make theirs. Then we’d talk with each other in the lobby while the Nissan executives did their evaluations and ranked our groups. The winning teams posed for photos. We got to pose twice!
4:00 PM
Project time again. This morning, we worked on Surgical Care Associates. Now, we switch gears to something completely different—Warner Music Nashville.
6:00 PM
After dinner at 5 (every day), our teams get together again to work on our projects. For each client, our projects involve evaluating the 3C’s—the company, customers and competitors—and developing the “big idea” for the business challenge they’ve given us.
9:30 AM
On days without presentations, our teams work on our projects until lunch. We usually have two projects running at once, which makes it feel like the real business world, and our sessions involve a mix of group thinking and regrouping on individual assignments.
8:00 PM
Maybe one night out of six, we’re done for the evening when the building at Owen closes. Not tonight, though. We’ve just received our schedule for tomorrow, so we can gauge how much more we need to accomplish tonight. We head back to our dorm for a few more hours before bed.
Noon
Catered lunch at Owen. Depending on what our team needs to do, we often make it a working lunch.
1:00 PM
Faculty host different breakout sessions for professional development—like how to dress
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owen.vanderbilt.edu/accelerator