Pablo Valdivia

It’s been nearly a year since my first Rady blog post reflecting on my first month as an intern, and I am sad to say this will be my last. My yearlong internship with the Rady School is coming to a close and I’ve come quite a way since. For those who don’t know, I’m the assistant writer within the marketing department here at the Rady School. For the past year I’ve been given the opportunity to work with wonderful staff, faculty, students and alums and now it’s time I send one last thank you before my departure.

To the students and alums: your ingenuity and innovative spirits have inspired me and will continue to inspire in my own educational track forward. Never before have I met such a diverse group of scholars with such bright visions and tenacious personalities. I wish you boundless success in your own ventures and I know you will all continue to make the Rady School proud.

To the faculty: your expertise is unmatched and your knowledge is limitless. I learned quite a bit from those I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with. With you, I know the students are in good hands.

Finally, to the staff: The school hasn’t built it’s winning reputation on luck alone, it’s with your help and strong work ethic that a startup school can become as impactful as it has become today. On a personal note, to my marketing team; Melinda, Kristine, Sean, Maria, Carleen, Joleen, Arturo and Joy, I thank you the most. You’ve allowed me the space to improve my craft and have showed me what it means to be a valued coworker and friend. You have become my second family and I am thrilled and honored to have taken this incredible journey with you all. I aim to carry myself in my future career with the same light and energy that each one of you has carried throughout your own journeys.

As I move onto the next phase of my life, I wish each and every person reading this the same positivity and acceptance I was met with during my time at Rady. I will miss you all dearly and I hope you “never stop” fighting for what you want in life. This is Pablo, signing off. Thank you, thank you.

Gone are the days where checking your email felt as futuristic as the 90’s desktop you checked it on. Now the only futuristic thing about it is how we manage to maneuver through our inboxes like space ships rummaging through black holes. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, we spend an average of 13 hours—28 percent of our workweek—reading, deleting, sorting and sending emails.¹ As cumbersome as it may seem, emailing is a necessary evil in the professional world that can be dealt with efficiently and effectively. Here are some tips to make your digital mail life far better for both you and the recipient:

1. Subjects Matter: Treat your subject line like you would a newspaper headline. It is your selling point and allows the reader to decipher whether or not it is worth opening right away (or opening at all). Be clear, concise and specific. Keep it between 5-8 words; anything less may be far too vague.
2. Get To The Point: For those who receive a constant barrage of emails, it is important that you keep your emails short, but meaningful. If your email chain runs long for one question, or if the email itself starts to look like a short story submission for the New Yorker, it may be time to pick up the phone or schedule an in-person meeting to discuss the issue at hand.
3. Timely Responses: While it’s not necessary to respond to an email instantaneously, it is important that the message be tended to within 24-48 hours of receiving it. Keeping up with emails in a timely manner improves the workflow for not only yourself, but the recipient as well.
4. Beware of Humor: Unless the recipient and you know each other well enough, humor may not always be your best bet when trying to communicate something across. Humor is very subjective and what you may find to be funny may not be funny to somebody else.
5. “Reply All” With Caution: There are not too many things that require the attention of every recipient in the email train, so don’t blow up everyone’s inbox/phone with notifications to messages that have nothing to do with them. No one deserves that avalanche of emails that “reply all” causes. Just manually enter or CC your proper recipients.
6. Signature: Unless you’re Beyoncé, there is a slight chance that your recipient may not know exactly who you are or they may just want to find out more about you. A signature is the perfect place to state this and to in a way advertise yourself even further.
7. Respect Comes A Long Way: A simple “thank you” or “I appreciate your help” in your emails allows you to be perceived far more positively and the recipient may work that much harder when they feel valued, respected and visible.
8. Spelling Counts: Although a typo here or there won’t end your career, it is important to realize that professional emails aren’t tweets or Facebook messages. Using proper spelling and grammar as opposed to texting lingo would be best since emails can often reflect the professional demeanor of the sender. Also, proofread, proofread and proofread.
9. Email Isn’t Private: As two-sided as it looks on the surface, emails aren’t necessarily private property. Keep in mind that emails sent within an organization have free reign to be forwarded or exposed as soon as you hit the send button. Emails can also be examined and used in a court of law.
10. Know the Company Culture: Everything I’ve listed here may have its exceptions based on the culture within the organization itself. In some places it may be perfectly fine to use texting lingo and humor so you can disregard that from my list. It is important to keep in tune with the way people connect so you too can connect effectively and appropriately.

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”-Vincent van Gogh

To try and live free of disappointment is to live free of opportunity. For those who strive for success, falling down is simply another avenue by which you are able to learn something new, grow from it, and teach it to others. Society, be it business leaders, entrepreneurs, students, or the like, often define themselves by their disappointments and failures when they can in fact serve as incubators for future prosperity.

During Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he stated, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Living your life through the fear of failure can mean never escaping the fence you yourself have built. The world is your oyster, don’t let it become your bubble. Often times we may not enter a new opportunity or build new bridges for fear of collapsing under the weight of change. Adaptability to change is what separates the good business leaders from the great ones. Keep in mind however that this change can very well mean falling flat on your face, which is okay if you have the tenacity to rise from it.

To rid yourself of all fear is ineffectual simply because fear can be a motivator if you allow it to be one. It’s not a matter of expelling it, but transforming it into something positive and useful. Face the possibility of failure and embrace it. It’s possible that a business plan won’t pan out as expected or a partnership might fall through, but that doesn’t mean standing still will you get you any further than you already are. Accepting the fact that failure is just another temporary aspect of life allows you to envision moments in which those faults won’t matter much longer. It’s these risk takers who drive innovation forward.

Taking risks and learning when to say both “yes” and “no” are vital aspects in the professional world. It is important that you say no to things you are afraid of, and say yes to things you are afraid of. The former means saying “no” to risks in your life that you know aren’t true to your authentic self. Often times we feel pressured to say “yes” to careers or decisions that we know make us unhappy, so saying “no” is a critical skill to hone. The latter means saying “yes” to something you’ve always wanted to do, but have always been afraid of failing at it or looking like a fool. If you fail, at least you can say you tried. If you look like a fool, take a note from Lewis Carroll when he says, “You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

Our fear of failing is nothing more than a mental construct; a tape that is subconsciously playing over and over again as we make even the most minute decisions in our lives. It’s about time you bring that thought to your conscious and unravel it. Take a chance and allow yourself to be defined by your triumphs and not by your shortcomings. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that if they allowed failure to paralyze them, they wouldn’t be anywhere near where they stand today.

“Thank you” is a phrase much more powerful than some let on. Being thankful shouldn’t be an emotion reserved solely for turkey-dinner holidays, it should be encompassing sentiment by which people run not only their businesses, but also their lives. All too often we as a society tend to focus solely on the bad and never once blink our eyes to sit in the stillness that is the good, no matter how mundane it may seem. Once we are receptive to this, then we can then create a space within ourselves that allows an array of positive opportunities to enter our lives.

For entrepreneurs and other business leaders lucky enough to have employees, it is beneficial to foster a gratitude-based atmosphere within your company. The start of this begins with never taking your company or its strides for granted, because if you don’t exude optimism, then there is no reason for your employees to provide it either. Showing that you are mindful for both your position and power within the company allows other professionals to respect your position as well. Paying it forward means outwardly demonstrating that self-gratitude by allowing your employees, co-workers, and customers to feel it too.

Displaying gratitude doesn’t have to be as formulaic as a free coffee mug or company dinner, it’s the simple act of letting co-workers and employees know that they are being seen, heard, and valued. A 2012 survey conducted among 1,714 adults by the American Psychological Association (APA) found that half of all employees who claimed that they feel underappreciated at work intended to look for a new job in the next year and that 93% of the employees who said they do feel valued were far more motivated to do their best work.[1]The outcome of putting value on good work far exceeds the consequences of putting employees in the periphery. This can be as simple as acknowledging the work itself and the effort that was put behind it. It’s often the case that people chase small cracks in walls when they don’t realize that the building itself is still standing. In other words, it’s not bad to try and fix mistakes within your company, but that doesn’t mean that the foundation that is keeping that very company running doesn’t deserve some of the focus.

Running a business will always have its rough patches and can many times seem discouraging when it feels like the ground beneath you is perpetually crumbling. It is in these times that practicing gratitude can effectively sustain both your business and your overall well-being. One such way to do so is by keeping a gratitude journal. There is a power and permanency in written words that speaking cannot compare to. Writing down five things in which you are grateful for on a daily basis can have the potential to lift your spirits, allowing you to work for a higher purpose and lets your employees see that their work serves that very purpose.

The key to effectively creating a culture of gratitude within the workplace is to be sincere in all that you do and say. Without genuine sincerity, even the words “thank you” become an empty shell of their own potential. No matter how’s it executed, the act of being grateful is a fantastic business strategy that employees not only demand, but deserve.

In an age where information flows swifter than ever, it’s often difficult to get lost in the current. The vast pool of social media sites available today may seem perplexing or even a tad overwhelming, but its time businesses learn how to swim or risk sinking. With nearly 1.15 billion active monthly users on Facebook and 232 million active monthly users on Twitter, the capacity to reach consumers worldwide spans out in ways traditional media has never been able to do so.

Effective use of social media has numerous benefits for businesses small and large alike, which may include: low costs, easy entry, brand awareness, audience communication and word-of-mouth marketing, to name a few. Although the learning curve to sending a tweet may not be difficult, it is vital to differentiate the content within those 140 characters from yours to that of a drunk college student (unless your key audience is drunk college students, then by all means use the latter). Here are seven general tips through my own perspective on how to effectively utilize social media in order to adequately build a brand and foster growth within a company and within the community.

Simply Start: Much like an exercise plan, simply starting means conquering the first hurdle. Create an account on the social media sites you believe best target your demographic and make a commitment to stick to the site. Nothing’s sadder than coming across an abandoned Twitter page.

Plan Ahead: Hit the ground running with a plan in mind. Draw out a social media marketing strategy that focuses on implementing a strong and centralized branded voice as opposed to aiming too broadly. This involves investigating who your audience is and what sort of content the audience would prefer on each separate platform.

Stay Consistent and Authentic: Like Henry David Thoreau said, “Be yourself – not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.” In other words, stay true to the identity of your company. Organize content based on platform (for example, some things meant to be shared on Facebook might not work on Twitter) and keep a consistent identity throughout. Also create content that is shareable and posts that stay personable. Variety can be fun, but save the cute cat videos for some other time.

Be Reciprocal: Getting your content shared can be an amazing way to get your name out there. The almighty retweet and share buttons can be powerful tools, so use them to help spread other people’s content applicable to your business as well. Reciprocity can go a long way and potentially builds bridges and connections with peers and consumers.

Engage Your Audience: Once you’ve got your following, it is important to engage your followers and other social media friends. They chose to be part of your social media experience so allow this to be the opportunity to display the personality behind the brand name. This is one of the biggest benefits of social media; don’t take your followers for granted and allow them to see the humanity behind the scenes.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin: While some may say it’s important to be on as many social media sites as possible, that is simply not the case. With dozens upon dozens of sites emerging yearly, it’s important to think about quality over quantity. It’s easier to create high quality results on a few sites as opposed to lackluster content on multiple.

Have Fun: As strategic as it may seem, implementing and talking with an audience on a few social media sites can inspire you to be innovative in ways you would of never thought of otherwise. Have fun with it and enjoy everything a global audience has to offer you.

Christina Martinez, the Undergraduate Academic Advisor for the Rady School, is an advocate for many and defeatist for none. As a former UCSD student herself, she knows a thing or two about navigating the academic careers of students in positive directions. Let’s meet the self-proclaimed reading enthusiast and educational proponent who helps make the Rady experience far more maneuverable.

1. Describe your position at Rady and little bit about what you do? I’m the Undergraduate Advisor at Rady so I handle all the student advising for undergrads. That can be everything from answering questions about “What class should I take next quarter?” to “I got an F in a class, what do I do now?” I just generally try to help students navigate the different university requirements and bureaucracies and get them where they need to be. I’ve been with Rady for 5 ½ years. I started working here as a Faculty Assistant right after I graduated from UCSD in 2008 with a Literature and Writing degree.
2. What inspired you to work for Rady after your UCSD experience? I took a few teacher education courses as an undergrad and realized that being a teacher was not something that I was ready to do yet.  I was very shy as an undergrad.  I was however very interested in education so I knew I wanted to do something in that arena.  I looked for jobs at UCSD and I just got pretty lucky that a spot opened up here at Rady. It’s nice to be on-campus and still be a part of education; it’s a very dynamic and exciting environment.
3.  What is one of the greatest lessons you’ve learned in your lifetime so far? I think it’s really important to always be learning and growing even if you’re not in college. There’s still learning to do, still books to read, still interesting things to be trying and doing, so that’s how I try to live my life.
4. Who or what inspires you to do and be better? I had a lot of really great professors as an undergrad and a lot of them have become friends and really good mentors as well. Also, I met my husband here at UCSD in the writing program and I would say that we keep each other motivated.  He works in education, too so it’s fun to go home at the end of the day and swap stories and tips.
5. What sort of contribution do you hope to make as an academic advisor? At the end of the day I just want to help students and make getting through college as painless and as possible for them because I think all the rules and requirements can be really overwhelming. Even if the answer to a student’s request is “No” I at least try to give them an understanding of why the answer is “No” and why the rules exist.  It’s all about keeping students happy and helping them focus on learning in the classroom.
6. What do you enjoy doing in your off time? I read a lot (some favorites are authors like Clarice Lispector and Margarita Karapanou). I also like being outside, so I go to the Farmer’s market or go hiking, jogging, any way to get outdoors.
7. Do you have any favorite places in San Diego? I’m from San Diego so I’ve had a lot of time to explore the city. I really like my neighborhood, which is University Heights. It’s close to Balboa Park and there’s tons of really fun restaurants. I also like a lot of the hikes around the city, such as Cabrillo Monument and Torrey Pines. I really like going camping out in the desert, too.
8. Is there anything the students have in turn taught you in working with them? Absolutely. I’ve learned a lot about how to communicate with people. Every student that comes in and sits down at my desk has a completely different communication style, whether it be language barrier or personality type, so my communication skills have greatly developed.
9. What advice would you give to both the undergrads and MBA students alike? I think a lot of students feel a lot of pressure to succeed, whether that’s pressure that’s placed on them by their parents, professors or their own personal ambitions.  I think that can be a great motivation, but I believe a lot of times it’s really helpful for people to step back and enjoy their lives too.  School is really important and it’s important to do well, but it’s also important to have fun during your undergrad or graduate studies, meet people, join clubs, and have really good experiences that you can take with you for the rest of your life.
10. Name one thing about yourself that most people don’t know. I love to cook!  And I like to eat weird, healthy things like hemp seeds and chia seeds and kale-cucumber juice.

Written by marketing and communications intern Pablo Valdivia.

In a mobile era where productivity doesn’t cease when leaving the office, our lives demand organization and efficiency in order to keep up with the day-to-day rush. From handling business emails to playing games, smartphones have become the greatest entrepreneurial sidekick in the many arenas of life. These are just some of many apps that can help both businesses employees and entrepreneurs alike keep track of their schedules, documents, and lives in general for a far more prolific work week.

1. Evernote: Be it a quick tidbit of inspiration, a to-do list, or must-have photo, Evernote allows you to input notes and documents in various formats (text, photo, and voice). Once created, these notes are automatically accessible on both your mobile device and computer for quick and convenient access wherever you may be.
2. Dropbox: This allows you to save, access, and share all your photos, documents, and videos into one space that is accessible on the go. This app can help if you’d like to safely back-up important documents, take your work anywhere you are, or share documents within your network.
3. Basecamp: As a web-based project management and collaboration tool, Basecamp provides structure within your business. It allows for both internal and external users to create and collectively manage projects with seamless whiteboard and messaging capabilities in the comfortable dashboard styling of a social network.
4. Mint: A personal finance app that allows you to track, budget, and manage your money in one convenient place. It securely pulls information from your checking, savings, credit cards, investments, and retirement in order to categorize spending and create customized budgets based on it.
5. Pocket: A short-term bookmarking app that allows users to create a queue of various online articles and videos for later offline viewing within the app. Pocket makes it easy to keep track of and store must-read articles in an ideal viewing format that allows the busy entrepreneur to read what they’d like when time allows.
6. Genius Scan: A simple yet convenient scanning app that utilizes your phone’s camera in order to capture physical documents and allows for strategic cropping, thus creating and storing optimized versions of your important documents in a convenient digital format. This can be an ideal way to keep digital copies of business cards and receipts in one place.
7. Any.DO: To-do and task lists will always be in-style in the world of productivity. Any.DO’s simple user interface allows users to type out lists (while predicting your activities) with location and date/time based integration so you can organize your day quickly and easily.
8. Nozbe: Inspired by the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology, this project management and task based web and mobile app gives its users an organized focus to get more done. Its integration with both Dropbox and Evernote makes it a powerful holistic productivity tool.
9. TripIt: For the business jetsetter who’s always on the move, this travel organizer pulls flight, hotel, restaurant, and car rental information to create ordered itineraries that can be accessed on any device. As a bonus, you can also get directions and weather information for each of your destinations.
10. SignNow: Whether you need to sign a document or have someone sign one, this app makes it easy to do so with just the glide of your finger. Just upload the PDF, Word, or Rich Text document, sign it, and then it’s good to go via email or print.

Written by marketing and communications intern Pablo Valdivia

It’s not every day you get to read a scene from the TV show “Friends” and accept it as dependable source, but when studying the conventional goings of daily life, “Friends” is as good as it gets. Rady School Professor Uri Gneezy and Booth School Professor John List have used this and various other personal and professional experiences in order to bring forth the idea that in order to do and be better, we must read between the lines.

As existential as it sounds, self-awareness and conscious decision making are the new waves of thinking in a world striving for productivity. Being efficient and successful isn’t by its own nature a simple linear formula that can be solved by adding x and y together; it must be interpreted from the inside out. Even the most mundane of days contains an intricate inner-working of inscribed human behavior. Our motivations and interactions with one another aren’t necessarily chosen roulette-style; but by the deep rooted script we as humans continue to write for ourselves.

This inside-out approach is something both Gneezy and List have attempted to unveil in their new book “The Why Axis.” By leaving the traditional lab and putting an anthropological lens on the incentives that motivate us, both Gneezy and List have decoded our behavior in order to bridge the gap between economics and conventional life. From visiting a business as small as a daycare to a corporation as large as Disney, these scholars use moments from our everyday lives in order to tap into conscious decision making that can not only broaden the entrepreneurial mind, but better society as a whole.

This form of experimental economics creates a dialogue between both the reader and the text that tackles tough issues in the fields of business, philanthropy, politics, healthcare, and education. From magnifying the root of gender inequality in the workplace to increasing productivity among workers, this kind of curiosity can potentially rewrite our actions.

To know why people behave in certain ways is applicable to the everyday person. As a professional looking to connect their vision with the consumer, it is vital. As a student myself not too familiar with the economics niche, this book was able to speak to me as clearly as it would a Nobel laureate. So next time you watch “Friends” or hang out with real ones, tap into the book’s core message of looking beyond the explicit because everything is a learning lesson if you allow it to be.

Written by marketing and communications intern Pablo Valdivia.

The collaborative nature in which Rady was built upon doesn’t end with the academics in our classrooms. The employees foster unity in order to guide even the most unseasoned interns, such as myself, to fruition. Prior to diving into the world of marketing and communications the only experience I had communicating was as a former food service worker in a town seemingly invisible to the greater population. My desire to write wasn’t new, but Rady realized that vision and I am here today as a fresh-faced and eager-eyed assistant writer who was simply given the freedom to give his words a new meaning.

After what seems like a lifetime of self-doubt, my Rady intern experience has so far led me on a path of self-realization. Working at a leading business school was never my intention, but it is now my reality, and I’m ever so grateful for what it’s become. While I’m not made to be on constant coffee runs like a typical office intern, I am instead fetching interviews with up-and-coming business leaders, a rush that coffee can’t seem to replicate. To sit in on a team meeting is a task most don’t romanticize, but it’s a privilege I’ve seen as both a respect of inclusion and power. It’s one thing to respect those in charge; it’s another to have those in charge equally respect you back.

As a UCSD student with a somewhat vague idea of where they want their future to go, I have found a niche in business communications that a year ago today I didn’t much know existed, let alone put too much thought into. The business world may appear grand and intimidating, but now that I’m looking from the inside out, it doesn’t look as scary as it did the day of my first interview. My experience has humanized the entity that was “business.” It may just be that as a relatively new school, Rady is still digging its roots into the soil, but the foundation in which its set itself has helped stabilize my career focus as I forge onto graduation in the coming year.

I can’t speak for the experience of others here, but what I know to be true now that I didn’t know prior to sitting in this very cubicle is that it pays to keep an open mind. Opportunities exist in places one wouldn’t think to look in before. Whether I continue to work in an academic marketing setting or not, I can at least say I know the purpose behind the passion that drives employees here to excel. Part of Rady’s self-proclaimed mission is to “educate ethical leaders for innovation-driven organizations,” a holistic mission that as a student of Rady’s marketing department I hope to carry out as a soon to be student of the world.

Written by marketing and communications intern Pablo Valdivia.