Blogpost #2 - Due September 17th

Over the last week or so I have done several things to help towards building a new network, as well as tried a few that did not work. One of those was just getting to know people in my classes. Of course this is easier in Merit Discussions (there are less people, and it's not as daunting). Most of the classes do the work for you though. They split you up into smaller groups, and then you get to know your individual groups better. So I have, of course, tried to be friendly and get to know everyone in these groups in each of my discussions.

This is looking to be relatively easy however, so I decided to try something a bit different and bold. I tried sending an e-mail to the president of Nintendo (Satoru Iwata) asking him what inspired him to follow the path that led him to be so successful. The one e-mail address I managed to find only resulted with me getting an automated message saying that the e-mail address provided did not exist. So obviously I need to continue searching for a working e-mail address. I could just use one of the many provided on Nintendo's site, but I know those would only lead me to customer service or some similar lower level branch of the company. Even if I don't manage to find a way to contact him, it's not like it was all worthless. I learned a bit about the Mr. Iwata along the way, like where he started out; that he majored in computer science back in the late '70s and early '80s-which must have been drastically different than it is now; and that his first job was with HAL Laboraties, which is a subsidiary of Nintendo.

In each of these things I learned the value of teamwork with my fellow classmates and that with it, things get done more quickly, as well as the fact that networking can often be easy, but at times it can be incredibly difficult - especially without having a definite means of contact. And even after finding that contact, that does not mean things will get easier.