The First Week of School

The end of the first week of school felt like the end off the first month.  Days were so long that I forgot what time it was and how many hours I spent working on schoolwork.  Class was scheduled from 8am-12pm, with a break from 12pm-1:30pm for lunch, then an afternoon session from 1:30pm-5:30pm.  We only had two classes per day, and each one was 4 hours long.  In the first week, including Saturday morning, we had 3 Accounting sessions, 2 Operations sessions, 2 Economics sessions, 1 Marketing Session, and 1 Organizational Behavior session.  Trying to focus on financial forecasting at 8am on a Saturday morning was the most challenging part of the week.

About half the cases we did were Harvard Business School cases, a slightly smaller percentage were IMD cases, and one was a London Business School case.  We did cases on Chemalite (glow sticks!), Swatch, Dell, Zara (retail clothing), and Toy World.  Most of the preparation work was not hard at all, it just took time.
Most evenings I had 3-4 hours of homework to do, split evenly between group work and individual readings of case studies and chapters from our textbooks.  Some evenings there were only 10 pages total to read, but other evenings there were 40 pages to read.  Most people liked to get started on the group work directly after class, and then I usually stayed after the group work to do my own readings, so most evenings I didn't eat dinner.  I left school sometime around 10pm, went home, had a snack, and then went to bed.  Two nights I stopped in at the White Horse with friends on the way home and had a drink and some food there.  The not eating dinner part was also inadvertantly a cost-saving strategy, and since lunch was so fancy (and FREE, or at least included in our tuition already) we chose to eat most of our calories at midday so we only needed a small amount of food in the evening.

Even considering how busy I was the workload the first week was actually pretty light compared to what I expected.  I was able to do all the readings before class and feel relatively prepared for each session. 

In one of our first classes one of the girls described a particular market as having "HUGE Potential" so from then on it became our default catchphrase - healthcare market? "HUGE potential" - online dating market? "HUGE potential" - ? finding a job after grad school "HUGE potential" (we hope).