This summer I taught Jobs to Be Done with its infamous milkshake example to my service design class. And I went to McDonald’s to bring them all milkshakes. You can do that with 16 students. You can’t do that for 40 students, which I have this fall. But how could I not do it? I’d be breaking the Rule of Cool.
It took four of us (me, our TA, my admin, and the other instructor) to make it happen. At 7:30am on Halloween, the coldest day of the year thus far, I found myself in a Giant Eagle supermarket buying gallons of milk, chocolate syrup, and cartons of ice cream, chocolate and vanilla. We’d done a poll of students for their flavor preferences and it was a 50/50 split between vanilla and chocolate. Like last time, I had my camping cooler in my car to put the perishables in. But this time I also had a blender. Two blenders in fact. We were going to make 40 milkshakes.
I can’t stress enough not to do this. It’s a mess, takes longer than you think, you get ice cream all over yourself, everything is sticky, and the milkshakes are of varying quality. But it is fun and memorable. Carnegie Mellon has a well-deserved reputation for being a slog and burning students out, so anything that can ease that a bit, I’m all for trying.
This is exemplary “do as I say, not as i do” and I am here for it 😂