Vignesh Panchanatham

Felipe and I were really excited for our stay in Cincinnati because we had booked a 4-star hotel through Hotwire in the heart of downtown. I freaked out slightly on the ride there because I was nervous about the age required to check-in. Luckily, those nerves proved unneeded and we were able to get our room with no problem. That calm, however, didn’t last. Felipe’s work permit had arrived in Princeton the previous day, so there was a debate on how best to get it to the Midwest. Overnight shipping was cheaper, but there was a chance that the permit could get lost and the entire process to get it would need to begin again, an exceptionally disastrous situation. The other option was for Felipe to fly to Princeton from Cincinnati, pick up the permit, and then fly directly to Indianapolis. Obviously, this plan would be much more expensive, not to mention seemingly wasteful of time, but it would definitely secure the permit. Eventually, the risk of losing the permit...

From Pittsburgh we headed back to Ohio, to Columbus this time. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and decided that we would catch a movie that night. The theatre at Easton Town Center was a dine-in AMC, meaning that you can order food from your seat and waiters will bring whatever you ordered directly from the kitchen to you. We watched Shaft, which was actually hilarious, but we spent more time admiring the mall itself. Easton Town Center has most of the big clothing brands, all the major restaurant chains as well as some local ones, and most importantly for our purposes, plenty of free parking. In my opinion, the mall was nicer than many of the malls that I had been to in California. In one of my meetings I learned that the mall was a major development of Les Wexner, the CEO of L Brands, and that it had once regularly hosted Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. We ended up going to the mall every day that we were in Columbus to spend time in between meetings because o...

Pittsburgh is a particularly important city for the Midwest region of Corporate Contacts because there are a lot of longstanding partners in the city. Some of the people that we met with had been donating to and participating in Business Today for over 10 years. Those longstanding partnerships are extremely important to continue, so we were excited for the meetings, but also slightly scared that we might be the ones to break the streak. Luckily, we had great meetings with all of the Pittsburgh companies that had sponsored Business Today in the past. A lot of times the meetings with these longstanding partners ended up being short updates about Business Today and then long conversations about their careers and jobs. One of the more entertaining meetings was part of a running joke between two Princeton alumni in charge of separate financial companies. The first one of the two that we met told me to ask the other if their company was going to “ break the buck ” (...