B-schoolers live and work on the move. They are in class, in the library, at job interviews in different states, and on the road during stolen weekends. One place they're rarely found is at home. Since they're constantly on the go, a cell-phone is their primary connection to classmates and to recruiters; landlines at home are used mostly for logging on to the Net.
Some students wait until their second year to buy a cell-phone. That, says Rob Bailey, who graduated in June from Sloan, is a big mistake. "Buy a cell-phone as soon as you can, and buy lots of time: You're going to need it," Bailey advises. "You'll want recruiters and the people on your project teams to be able to reach you on their first try -- which they'll never do if they're calling your home phone. In fact, I would never even give out my home number. My only phone of any consequence was my cell."
A real standout at Sloan is the Nokia 5190 digital cell-phone, no doubt because it comes in can't-be-missed colors like "Bermuda Blue" and "Gecko Green." At 5.2-inches long, the Nokia takes up minimal space in a briefcase; it weighs less than six ounces and delivers three to five hours of talk time with a standard battery. Its phone book stores up to 250 names and numbers, and there's one-button access to such features as email and faxes. Bailey suggests that people spring for Nokia's Headset Kit, which resembles the tiny, in-your-ear gadget made famous by the Secret Service. The earpiece frees up his hands so he can enter information on his computer while he talks on his cell.
The slick Motorola StarTAC ST7760 cell-phone, with its clamshell-like design, remains the standard-bearer for stylishness among business school's ubiquitous cell-heads. Now there's a bonus: Motorola's personal StarTAC organizer, dubbed the clipOn, can be piggybacked onto the StarTAC phone. Multitaskers can make changes, consult scheduling information, or access up to 1,000 names and phone numbers on the clipOn while talking on the cell. When the two units are connected, users can leverage the phone's one-touch dialing to call directly from the organizer's address book.
Unfortunately, choosing the right cellular provider and calling plan is a little like buying a car: No matter how good the deal, you can't help feeling as if you've been ripped off a little. And sorting out the sheer number of choices offered by even one provider's plan is nearly impossible.
While there's no comprehensive online comparison of cell-phone services, Point. com (www.point.com) covers a lot of ground with its Service-Plan Locator. By narrowing service searches by city and state, cell-phone shoppers can compare plans offered by companies such as Nextel, Cellular One, and AT&T Wireless Services.
Coordinates: $149. Nokia 5190, www. shopnokia.com; $524.95. Motorola StarTAC ST7760 phone; $250. clipOn Organizer, www.motorola.com
One gadget that's made some cameo appearances on a few campuses -- and will almost certainly take center stage in the next year or two -- is the digital camera. Visual components are increasingly being included in class projects, and students are beginning to use digital cameras to make PowerPoint presentations more compelling, to beef up project Web sites, and to enhance assignments with visual aids.
In fact, Rob Bailey's digital camera played a critical role in his product-development class. His project team, which designed a one-hole paper punch for kids, used a digital camera to capture ideas, share prototype suggestions, and show off the final design. One of his team members would upload digital images on to the Web and email the URL, so the rest of the class could view the latest version in real time. "Clip art is dead," says Bailey. "People expect to see real images."
A camera that's worth considering is the Sony Mavica MVC-FD81. It saves images on floppy disks as jpeg files, which frees you from having to mess with PC cards. Just pop out the disk, which holds about 40 still photos, and slip it into your laptop. With Sony's mpeg movie mode, you can also record up to 60 seconds of digital video; if you still take stills, you can annotate them with up to 5 seconds of voice-memo recording.
Coordinates: $799. Mavica MVC-FD81, www.ita.sel.sony.com
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