Chicago with Beta Alpha Psi

Hey everyone ~ long time no talk!  The reason for this huge delay is because I was in Chicago from Thursday until late Sunday evening and have been extremely busy getting settled back in and getting adjusted to the Akron lifestyle again.  I was in Chicago with the current and upcoming Beta Alpha Psi members, we are a business organization at The University of Akron that entails for the majority: accounting students, some finance and MIS students.  We have professional speakers from public accounting firms and industry companies and it is just a really big tool to network, get the face-to-face time with potential employers and it is also an amazing way to build friendships at the university.

Thursday 3/25/10: We departed Cleveland at 8:00 AM on the MegaBus towards Chicago.  The bus ride was awesome as we all talked, made jokes and had fun.  We stopped on Toledo to pick up more people and also made a rest break in Northern Indiana (howe? I believe).  It was nice landing in Chicago and getting the extra hour : ).  Upon landing, we took a cab ride to the Double Tree hotel and the place was awesome.  We received these amazing, mouth watering cookies, so that was a great way to start the trip.

We then got to our floor and parked our things in our rooms, and we decided to hike it to the Willis/Sear's Tower.  The wind was insane!  So I definitely understand why they call it the Windy City.  Nevertheless, we arrived at the tower, received our tickets and started to hike up the elevator to the 103rd floor!  Out here, we were all in awe.  The view from the top of one of the largest buildings in the world, overseeing the city of Chicago was breathless.  MTV was filming an episode for the Buried Life and we got to meet the actors on there which was pretty neat.  The craziest part though is that they installed these all Glass encompassing ledges that stick outside of that floor that you can walk on to.  Bottom-line, it was scary.  We all managed to do it and with a few more turns it became effortless!  In fact, Justin was jumping on them and I was doing pushups - with nothing separating everyone from the bottom but a piece of plexiglass!!!

Giordanos: The BEST pizza I have ever had - American style, that is.  WOW.  The pizza was over an inch thick and was so elegant and perfectly placed together.  It was phenomenal and in the words of Autumn "Life Changing".  Justin, Ian and I ended up taking down 3 slices of the masterpiece.

Friday: To start the day, we headed over to "The Bean" which was also just a beautiful piece of art.  We took many pictures and had a pretty good time checking out the other structures.  We had lunch at The Gage and since it was Friday, I had a salmon sandwich which was actually extremely good.  We also went to Lavazza and had some wonderful gelato - nothing wrong with that!  It's funny because my Nona Gina (grandma) loves Lavazza espresso, so of course, I had cafe espresso gelato!
Then, we had our conference meeting numero uno.  Our keynote speaker was John Blumberg and he is the author of 2 novels.  His speech was about core values and how we "drift" away from them during our careers and our lives.  At my table were Kent State, Notre Dame, Ohio Northern and Xavier students, I was surprised to actually find out we knew some of the same people!  We had a team building exercise where we had to build a tower out of newspaper and tape and relate it to core values.  Our team called ours "The IFRS Tower".  Surprisingly, out of 34 teams, we placed 5th with an honorable mention - not bad.
Afterwards, we went to the rainforest cafe and I ate Mahi-Mahi tacos.  Our server was funny as he knew Akron and was mentioning things for all of us to do in Chicago.  We finished the night by going to a little Irish place, relaxing and walking down by the river.

I will provide the next 2 days on my next post!  Stay Tuned!