Don’t ever be the first, don’t ever be the last and don’t ever volunteer to do anything.
So, grades are out. INSEAD’s policy prohibits any on-campus recruiters from asking for them, but hey, they can see it in your eyes. Yes, dean’s list. No, not that dean’s list. Suffice it to say,
Yeah. Considering the huge, stupid amounts of stuff I’ve absorbed since arriving here, I find it amusing that people are still advising me not to be stressed about grades and performance and whatnot. At some point after finals (aforementioned whiskey binge following the exams may have had something to do with it), something snapped, and now all I worry about is my finances.
And finding housing in Singapore for January / February. I’ve given up on the Dover / Heritage luxury complexes which seem to be the measure of things for INSEAD students in Singapore, as they are run by price gougers, usurers and affiliated swine. The hunt is not helped by the fact that Singapore does not seem to have a sensible district-naming system. If worse comes to worse, it’s a nice warm place, I’ll find a refrigerator box under a bridge somewhere. Suthesh, the Singaporean air force guy in my section, was kind enough to point out that I should be looking in
Dover
Clementi
Commonwealth
Holland Village
Buena Vista
Normanton Park
Bukit `tiMah
Queenstown
In case anyone’s reading this. Homelessness notwithstanding, Singapore beckons on the far horizon like a warm, pleasant Shangri-La of palm-bedecked beaches, cocktails with silly paper umbrellas, hula girls and swimming pools. I look forward to being disabused of my notions of tropical paradise, but for the moment, it beats living in the daily reality of our majestic-yet-sub-zero, wild-boar-infested forest.
Finding work after graduation is another source of impending brain pain, as I’ve not spent any time on it yet. On-campus recruiting doesn’t seem like my thing, as joining a general management, consulting or investment banking trainee program at 34 sounds like about as much fun as joining the army at, well, any age. Opinions are decidedly ambiguous about what the world economy is coming to, seeing a healthy combination of massacres, hiring freezes and no signing bonuses for banks, oh my, mixed in with the stupendous quantities of cash most companies are rumored to be sitting on after the last fat years. And as our profs drill into our heads on a weekly basis, cash is king.
Indeed, cash is king, but I do wish our courses would focus a bit more on real life. My inclination is to call “horseshit” on some of our lecturers on a regular basis for seemingly completely disregarding the “well, uh, it depends” factor in his analyses (despite the fact that the Harvard goons who write 95% of our cases seem to be paid by weight of paper produced, they somehow miraculously fail to provide relevant information that might make the material of value in a real-life context.) Nattering nabobs of negativity indeed.
Tomorrow morning is the mad dash from the Fontainebleau chateau to campus. 3 minutes, 08:27 a.m., costumes encouraged. What idiot thought this up? Must have been one of the Singaporeans. I imagine the lot of them sipping their mai tais, laughing it up over the poor soaked and freezing cretins hoofing it through the diesel-choked refrigerator that is Fontainebleau in the morning.
Life goes on, there’s always the next dinner party to look forward to. They’re such thoroughly civilized affairs.
Joao's Cigarette Papers Suffered.