The Shailesh-tival

Running a marathon has always been on my bucket list, but I always figured it would be one of those things I’d do when I was older. The amount of training involved means that you pretty much have to focus on running and nothing else, and I didn’t want to give up lifting weights, Tae Kwon Do and the many other things I’ve picked up over the years.

For some reason I wasn’t thinking about this on the morning of January 1, 2011 and at 9 am that morning, I took advantage of the early-bird discount and signed up for the Detroit Marathon. Read the rest of this entry →

After I tweeted Thursday’s plea for help out to the Twitter-verse, I was pleasantly surprised to get a few responses back from people who knew their way around midtown Detroit pretty well. Ultimately, David Lingholm from the Detroit Regional News Hub was nice enough to meet on Friday morning and share a little bit about the history and current goings-on of midtown Detroit. (Before I forget let me extend a special thanks to David and the News Hub for helping to set all of this up). Read the rest of this entry →

I’m spending a couple of days in Detroit on my way home to DC. (It’s a nice way to catch up with old friends while splitting up a mind-numbing 750 mile drive.)

One of my biggest regrets about my time in Detroit is that I didn’t get to learn the city very well until it was almost time to leave. I’m fairly certain that in my first year here, I made a grand total of 3 trips into the city. I caught up fairly quickly though, and by the end I honestly feel like I knew things about Detroit that friends who’d spent their lives here didn’t know. I learned my lesson from that, though, and I made it a point to embrace Chicago and city life (despite living in Evanston) when I moved last summer. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve had some pretty major life changes recently and I wanted to reflect before I wrote about them. That’s why this blog has been inactive for the past three months. But now that the reflection is over, I’ve turned my thoughts into a three-part series — today will be part 1.

So what’s happened? In March, I was accepted to the MMM program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Kellogg has a top-notch MBA program, so taking the opportunity was a no-brainer, but it also meant I’d be leaving Detroit; a city I’ve grown to love.

So let’s start at the basics: an outsider’s thoughts on Detroit. Read the rest of this entry →

I haven’t posted in a while, but here is what is new:

I got a new job in the suburbs of Detroit, MI. I am working for Bose Corporation. I am an audio systems engineer, and what I do is tune sound systems for new cars. This is very similar to the type of work I did in college and grad school, so I am very excited about the opportunity to learn a ton of new things.

My last day at Anheuser-Busch was on 1/20, and my first day at Bose was 1/30. In the middle, I went to Chicago once, and stayed in Champaign for a few days to visit professors and friends.

I have been at my new job for a week and I absolutely love it. I am geniunely amazed by some of the tools that Bose has developed to build new sound systems, and I am very excited to learn even more.