MBA Experience

It's very un-MBA-like to brag about oversleeping, yet the last two nights I've had 10 hours of sleep EACH night. I have no problems bragging about this. Though it's fantastic, I know oversleeping is just a temporary delight. That's ok, I'm relishing in it for now.

It's much nicer to think I can make a few phone calls that I've been slacking on (sorry, iwhoelse), and just all around chill out and not be stressed, than to think about the midterms that are just around the corner. Actually, I have a stats and strategy final and an accounting and econ midterm all within one week - in just 3 weeks to be more exact. This fact scares the bejeezus out of me, but sleep was way more important this week.

Ya, now I'm stressing myself out.

That's what the orientation gods told us our first day at CBS. It's about the network, who you meet... who you know, the activities you get involved in. Blah, blah, blah. That may be true, but grades is much different than work load, my friends... I guess that's why am I sitting here at 1:30 a.m. just about to start my strategy homework? Though I have mastered the art of procrastination in my past life, I have done 5 hours of homework tonight and I have 50 pages of reading and case preparation to start now. I spent several hours working on campus between my classes today, and after my classes, in addition to my 5 hours tonight - and I foresee about 2 more.

If this is not Academic Torture, I don't know what is.

Thank God for my iPod right now. Good night :)

That's the sentiment according to the latest Forbes magazine, which has also been echoed by the Columbia Business School's Career Office. As 1st years, we have mandatory career sessions on various topics before recruiting starts... self assessmets, on campus career resource info, outside resources available, what recruiting look like this year, how to 'network,' resume workshops, presentation workshops, etc. Yes, they are fine tuning us for the recruiting machine that begins next week.

Here's some more info from the article, which stated that last year's recruitment was up and this year is headed the same way: "The data was also positive for the upcoming school year. Seventy two percent of the schools predicted that the MBA job market would improve and 70 percent anticipated that average base salaries for entry-level MBAs would increase. None of the schools anticipated a decrease in recruiting."

Our career counselor mentioned that recruitment was 'way up' this year and many more companies are lined up to visit campus and interview students.

I suppose this will hit home to me after next week when the flood gates open for companies and recruiters to contact us 1st-years.

Tomorrow is Sunday, the last day I have before school starts again, and I am determined to get out and see something new in New York. I have spent the last 10 hours studying, and that is so unlike me, but I've had about all I can take.

My brain is fried. I've fried it good this time :)

I make a concerted effort to email only if I absolutely HAVE TO. Why? Because email is not the answer to everything. It's not the method by which every message should be communicated. That's just me, and I could be wrong.

That being said, everytime I turn my laptop on, I have a messages galore. If I wanted to, I could go through the MBA program just checking email all day. For example... I checked my email 2 hours and 20 minutes ago. I now have received 26 emails since then. I probably receive at least 100 email messages each day, if not more. 75% of these go straight into oblivion (AKA "recycle bin").

ok, that's my rant for today. Back to accounting and finance for the evening.

My impressions of being a graduate student:

• More drinking involved (I didn't think it would be this way, actually)
• Higher tuition costs (for me anyway... about 12X the cost)
• Real world application of business theory, which I finally 'get'
  
• More time commitments involved (something around 26 hours per day, I do believe)
  
• I've finally found my peeps. They go to Columbia and seriously are superb
• Exponentially higher caliber professors (well, I once had a finance professor who habitually came to class drunk.... which is also probably why he cancelled 50% of our classes)
  
• Droo, where are you? We need to meet up and swap CBS stories

Ya, I like school. No one really admits that, but I really do like school. I love my classes and even my professors and, in my cluster, the students have brought some great experiences and thoughtful comments into the classroom already.

This week we also signed up for clubs. For some reason, I thought that 13 was a good number to join. 13. There are 3 clubs I would like to focus attention to and the others are an added bonus... like the wine society.

And, for some reason, statistics is kicking my butt. Really, this should all be intuitive but then the professor introduces a few greek symbols into the equation and my eyes glaze over. And, as statistics is a half semester course, we have a midterm in less than 2 weeks. So, I have to pay stats some extra attention in the next few days.

As for my other classes, it seems I knew more coming into B-school than I thought I did. I didn't think I knew anything about corporate finance until we were introduced to ratios that I already knew about from my previous employer. Since I know about balance sheest and income statements, Accounting hasn't been too challenging (yet). My Econ professor hasn't introduced anything new. I give this little bubble of comfort about 2 weeks to burst and I will probably be asking myself, "what the heck is going on here."

The lesson for this week is that you better be ready to devote your life to the MBA program as if it were your reason for being. I have spent 18 of the last 24 hours on MBA-related activities... and this is still the 'review' week, real classes don't start until Wednesday. Well, at least I'm getting my money's worth :)

... I foresee some time management skills developing at full speed...