Midterm Review

It's midterm season here at the GSB. I have midterms in two of my classes, the other class (30116) had no midterm or final, just a final independent project. It's becoming more and more obvious how important it is for students to have some sense of their career ambitions because the frantic pace of events makes exploration and learning nearly impossible. Classes become almost an after thought. I have time and energy only to do the basics. I am also glad about grade non-disclosure ...

So I thought I'd give a sense of day to day life around here.

• As I mentioned before, classes almost always meet once a week, for 3 hours, including LEAD. Monday through Friday class start times are 8:30, 1:30 and 6:00. I think there are 8:30, 1:30 and maybe 4:30 classes on Saturday.
• LEAD meets either Tuesday or Thursday mornings, depending on which cohort you're in, but only runs through the middle of fall quarter. (Half of the programming occurs in the 3 week Core before classes begin.)
• Then, you meet on either Thursday or Tuesday, whichever day you don't have LEAD, for career services programming.
• Monday through Friday between about 11:45 and 1:15 is filled with Lunch and Learns and various student group presentations and meetings. Some groups, such as the Investment Management Group, meets once a week but smaller groups meet less frequently. You can pretty much get free lunch any day of the week.
• Recruiting events for first-years started today, so now some lunch times and many evenings are eaten up with corporate presentations and networking events.
• Every Wednesday at 4:30 is coffee hour with Deputy Dean Kole, a great sugar/caffeine jolt mid-week.
• Late late Thursday is unofficial drinking time for inclined folks, who pick a bar up north each week.
• Every Friday at 4:30 is happy hour (aka LPF) where families are welcome - and I like to bring Baby Y.
• Then there are conferences a plenty, CEOs traipsing through, alumni events, prospective events, career coach or career advisor meetings ... to complicate the schedule further.
• Somewhere in between that you meet with your study group (if you choose to have one).
• And if you're a wannabe investment manager, you're trying to put together a stock pitch to present in front of the investment management group.

The difficult part, for me, is just arranging and coordinating all of this. Takes a lot of energy and w/o my laptop and me being Blackberry-less, I never feel like I know what I've signed up for.

I've many more posts I've been wanting to write up, but I am exhausted. Later.