Kyle is a fellow Darden Blogger, check out his amazing blog here!
All guests brought boxes of mac & cheese to be donated to Blue Ridge Area Food Bank
I still haven't figured out how to focus so I apologize if this gives you a headache!
Me: Thank you so much for making mac&cheese for everyone, that was amazing. Why did you decide to do mac&cheese?
Kyle: I decided to do mac&cheese because, funny story, I cook every now and then for my wife when we were living up in Arlington and my wife loves comfort food like mac&cheese. So I would make boxed mac&cheese and I'd add in meat and onion and all these types of things. And I was very proud of myself because she would come home and it would be like a one pot wonder and she'd always appreciate it.
But one time I was telling my father-in-law 'Look, I'm taking care of your daughter and she really really appreciates it' and he replied 'Oh, what do you fix?' and I said 'I do this thing with mac&cheese and I call it Mighty Mac and I add in beef and onions and all this stuff'. After I described it to him he replied 'Oh yeah! I remember doing all that back in grad school when I didn't have much money, we'd do that hamburger helper!'.
I was devastated.
But he meant it in a very honest way and I appreciated it. So I thought, mac&cheese, that's fun, everyone loves it and you can also do different varieties so we were able to have kind of a nice set up for it.
Me: Yeah, well it was fantastic! It tasted really really good. Are you having much time, now that you're at Darden to actually make your Mighty Mac?
Kyle: No. So the one thing I do like to do is, I usually go and get two or three heads of romaine lettuce. When I'm done with class I try and run back and chop up a fresh salad which is fun, I enjoy that. But that's the amount of cooking time that I have.
Me: Yeah!
Kyle: I mean, we're just busy! And the other thing is that you want to be able to go between classes and spend time with friends and do the whole recruiting, social life & school. So, cooking time gets very minimised. It was more predictable when we were working.
Me: Did you expect Darden to be this busy?
Kyle: I had heard that it was busy. It's been busy but it hasn't, to me, reached a level of craziness that I wake up and have no idea where I am. And I think that's because I have a different recruiting schedule compared to some others. I'm recruiting for technology so the way that I'm recruiting requires me to network all throughout the year whereas for banking or consulting there's different levels of intensity and it reaches peaks kind of early on in the year. So I've had a little more time but I wouldn't say exceptionally more time than my classmates.
Me: Yeah, that's true! So why did you decide to come to Darden in the first place?
Kyle: I wanted to come to a place where the focus was on school. The focus was on classroom excellence. I had been a classroom instructor before. I taught adult learners and I'm now an adult learner sitting in the student chair!
The other piece of it that really sold me was the people. For everyone I met from Darden there was a moment where you sort of saw how much the people around them, the teachers, the environment, produced this collaborative community. I've felt that since I've been here.
Me: I can definitely agree with that. Can you pick one moment since you've been here that's really stood out for you. Or is that too hard a question?
Kyle: So, to me it's a collection of moments and they've been exhibited in a couple of different ways. So the learning team moment when we did the scavenger hunt at the start of the year was just a fun experience with us as a group.
And the Darden Christian Fellowship that I've been apart of and whether it's what we did for Mac&Cheese today or something else where we're getting together as a group has been great. And then our section! So we had a section Thanksgiving last night which was amazing.
Me: It was
Kyle: So much fun!
Me: We're all such good chefs!
Kyle: Yes! Everyone is such a good cook. So it's the moment of community and I think in the day to day that I was working before I didn't always have those opportunities. I was busy, I was travelling or you're not in that big office that everyone was doing these types of community events. And that's crucial and that's something I really appreciate about Darden. This 6 months, well, it's probably been 4 months....
Me: It feels like 6!
Kyle: It feels like 6. You have this sense that there's this community and it's about everyone coming together and that's the Darden moment and it happens over the period.
Me: Definitely! Right to end, just a few quick fire questions:
Mountain or Beach?
Mountain
Salt or Sweet?
Both combined?
Surf or Turf?
Surf
Pen or Pencil?
Pencil!
Operations or Decision Analysis?
DA. Loved every moment of DA.
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