My last post was dated Sept. 11, and it was the week of our midterms.
It might interest you to know that two weeks after that week, we had our final exams. While we were studying for final exams, we did case study assignments with our respective groups. After our finals week, we had a week devoted to doing a case study for an actual company (in our case, a well-known consulting company). After that week, we had a career trek in one of the signature areas of the United States, networking with alums and seeing what companies looked like from the inside. The career trek just finished yesterday, and I'm writing this now.
The MBA is fast, yes, but a lot more intense than you realize.
What have I learned so far? Well, aside from the basics of accounting and statistics, I've learned how to ransack databases for research data I need for case studies. I've learned how case competitions are structured -- how sometimes you get to specifically define the problem you have to solve, how you focus on the how more than the why on your slides. I'm lucky to be in a very collaborative group, where each person's primary skill complements the others'. You know those horror stories of groupmates shouting at each other over cases and coming home in the early hours of the morning? Yup, those are true.
I've re-learned to wake up early and sleep late. I've learned to buy food that I could cook or warm up easily so that I can have breakfast ready in five minutes. I'm trying my best to keep up with constantly-updated email inboxes, internship notices, weekly club meetings, and my overflowing laundry basket. I have learned to better appreciate my free time, which I spend sleeping, doing chores, going with my friends to outlet malls or just walking around, taking pictures in our park-like campus.
There is just so much happening around you that even though you get in the program, believing to cruise through the subjects with A's, you switch to valuing the connections you make and the insights you get from the course material and outside trips more. Now, I'm not the type of person who spent her college days social drinking. I was more of the "let's have dinner next week," one-on-one kind of person. "Networking," which business schools heavily advocate, isn't necessarily equivalent to social drinking either. I believe in what a close friend of mine said, that you should stick to your values when networking, much in the same way that you should work for a company whose goals and way of life you believe in. Find out the networking style that suits you, and work it to your advantage in an American setting.
Americans may jokingly complain all they want about Asians not drinking as much as they do, but they respect people who can stand for their own principles. So know your principles and values going into the MBA program, and decide which of these are "unchangeable."
I now realize how much it was good to have been able to reflect and know more about myself before I entered the program; everything happens so fast that decisions are much, much easier when you know who you are, what you stand for and what you want to get out of the MBA.
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