That wasn’t the first time this fall that I have found myself fascinated by a business school case that was rooted in the nonprofit world. For the Deloitte-sponsored Net Impact Case Competition in November, a raucous all-night affair that bookended intensive work around the case with a party at the graduate center bar, we analyzed a (real) profit-generating initiative by a (real) charity for autistic adults and children in the local area. The case, which was published by SOM’s Program on Social Enterprise, was a big hit among the competition participants. I’m looking forward to Sharon Oster’s Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organizations course in the spring where we’ll be doing a lot more of this kind of stuff. The only downside is that it meets Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:15am—for the entire semester. Alas, five and a half years of post-college maturation has not made me any more of a morning person.

The second half of SOM’s Organizational Perspectives series completes my courseload in the first spring session. In addition to Oster’s course, I’ll be taking Employee, State & Society, Operations, and Innovator. That all seems far away right now, though. For the moment, I’m home with the family and looking forward to my trip to Israel and Turkey as part of my International Experience next month.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading the blog thus far, and I hope to keep entertaining you in the new year. If you ever have any feedback for me, please feel free to leave a comment or email! Take care and happy holidays, everyone.

Next week, we start the official “core” of Yale’s vaunted new curriculum. I’ll be eager to see if it lives up to the hype. I’m taking courses with titles like “Competitor,” “Customer,” “Investor,” and…wait for it…”Sourcing and Managing Funds.” I guess they felt they had to throw at least one normal-sounding class in there—either that or “Accountant” just didn’t sound sexy enough.

By way of introduction, I am a composer and singer who took a circuitous path to my current field—I was a computer geek for the first 17 years of my life before I discovered music. (OK, technically I was only a computer geek from about age 7 onward, but it feels like I had the bug at birth.) Since then, I’ve written two “rock symphonies” for senior projects in high school and college, founded a collaborative chorus called C4 and an electric chamber ensemble in which I sang through a guitar effects processor, and worked in fundraising for several arts organizations, most recently the American Music Center. I’m now at SOM trying to understand how everything I’ve been doing for the past 10 years fits in to a broader social and practical context. Won’t you help me along the way by commenting on my posts and writing me fascinating and/or witty emails? I can be reached at ian.moss@yale.edu. Look forward to hearing from you.