HCAP Day 3

The day starts with the “Negotiation” workshop. The conductors are very experienced and the most valuable points taken back include following:
-Sometimes we can increase the pie by making both parties better off
-“Smoke when I pray? Vs Pray when I smoke” analogy, how we present the condition
-Cooperative strategy, recognize possibilities for mutual gain.
-Always ask more questions and understand the buyer’s needs before giving a deal

Then Yung Hei, Veera, Tremay and I head off to the MIT campus for a tour. It was snowing outside, and the scenery was really really beautiful. We manage to find the funny building in MIT and took patriotic pictures of USP logos on snow ground in MIT :) I still don’t understand why I become the popular target of snow balls >”<. MIT campus is radically different from Harvard campus despite their close tie. I guess that’s because of the nature of the institution itself as well as the students’ culture. I always hear how Harvard students describe MIT, “Their school is named by numbers and when they run out of number, they name it ‘the random hall’” or “When we have combine lecture in MIT, those kids look like they have just rolled out of bed!”. There are many more fun anecdotes and I always enjoying how the street-smart Harvard students and literary smart MIT students see each other. The world is more fun with diversity.

The delegate cook off is a big success. I did not get to cook with the fellow Singaporean delegates but it was really fun to taste the different cuisines. It’s absolutely amazing how the delegates can come up with such delicious food with limited resources on hand.