For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
The INSEAD cabaret was a creative, entertaining interlude, taking everyone’s minds off exams (not that many of my colleagues have been thinking about it, as the workload of the last few weeks has been bruising) and driving home the message of how short this experience is. Or and I had our best-laid (which isn’t saying much) plans for participating in this even blown away by the recent workload.
I suspect that if you’re actually getting around to spending most of your time partying (“John, come have a drink!” Not bloody likely, considering the mountain of finance practice questions I have to work through before the final) you might start believing the constantly repeated message that “this is the best year of your life!”
I’ve considered the possibility that I’m struggling with the best year of my life because I’m older than most of my colleagues, or perhaps just as a result of never having experienced this kind of workload and stress, compounded by my seeming inability to execute the mechanical aspects of our more quantitative subjects. Nonetheless, it’s certainly the most intense thing I’ve ever put myself through. Even now that I’ve started checking off project after project, as well most of my assignments, far ahead of time, I can’t find the time to really make myself understand some of this stuff.
Hopefully the predictions about period 2 being a boon to the more qualitatively-minded among us (hooray, we have classes where they talk human) will pan out. Nonetheless, having in-depth statistical analysis rear its ugly pinhead during projects for courses we’d previously thought of as “safe” gives cause for concern.
Rumor has it that at some point in the next 2 months we’ll be taken aside by the administration and told that everything we’ve learned so far is theoretical, airy-fairy nonsense with little practical application in the real world. That would certainly put an interesting spin on the academic experience here; what bothers me is that, while I seem to innately and immediately grasp most of the concepts we confront, I am just shit at taking tests. And however nice and good it feels to know that you’re flexible, smart and experienced enough to walk into most professional environments and figure out what’s naughty and what’s nice, the fact remains that a fairly intimidating battery of exams, however theoretical and airy-fairy, lie athwart our path like a bunch of hairy, ogrish path-athwart-lying things.
With Singapore coming up, I’ve decided that it might be a wise idea to get cracking on job research, time permitting. Unfortunately, time is about the most precious commodity I can think of right now, both for myself and Karin. We don’t really feel like we’re getting the most out of life, having spent most of last weekend sleeping off the accumulated exhaustion. Maybe things will look up when I return from Singapore — if my already-precarious finances hold up. Small blessing: thanks to a change of heart of one of the gentlemen I contacted there about an apartment, I seem to have landed an amazing deal.
After weeks of putting it off (it doesn’t count as procrastination when you’re neck deep in projects) I finally got around to polishing up my resume — the submission deadline for the INSEAD CV book is a good motivator that way. Maybe it’s the techie in me, but once I start fiddling with something like this under pressure, I can’t stop until it makes me happy. It’s a good one, I think. Hire me.