There is always a way, and it usually doesn’t work.
It’s over.
The tsunami of ecstasy that washed over me when I set foot outside my last class (brand management — it felt somehow appropriate to have a reassuringly fuzzy marketing elective wrap up my time here) defies description. All the intensity and madness of the past ten months have brought it to me on Tuesday the 24th of June 2008; a dazed, slightly hung over, mildly overweight, utterly drained 34-year-old soon-to-be MBA graduate stumbling out of the halls of INSEAD, blinking in the sunshine, wondering what exactly the hell just happened (and banging on the steering wheel during one of my recent trips to Paris, screaming “I MADE IT I MADE IT YOU FUCKERS COULDN’T TAKE ME DOWN I MADE IT” through tears of relief as the built-up stress I mistakenly thought had gradually ebbed over the past weeks came pouring out. I fit right in with the French drivers.)
Not that the gradual winding down of my time here hasn’t been food for reflection on my experience. As I’ve previously mentioned, the exhaustion-induced relaxation of P5 really forced me to think through the haze of selective memory and reflect on the occasional bad times I experienced. My anxiety stemmed at first from a near-pathological fear of failing classes and having to repeat one of the courses that were making me miserable (massively amplified by lack of sleep, overwork and a deep frustration at not understanding more than a fraction of what was being launched at me.) During P3 in Singapore, I often felt lonely and directionless — possibly brought on by the unfamiliar scenery and the difficulty in figuring out how to socialize with people without going to bars and restaurants, at the same time as being stuck on campus past midnight on most days. The next low came about when I realized that my finances were a shambles, something I postponed to a date when I may be better equipped to deal with it by taking out a low-interest subsidized French loan (thanks to my wonderful girlfriend for signing as guarantor), and lastly I suffered quite a bit from the uncertainty of my job situation and the occasional seemingly obnoxious apathy I encountered when dealing with many alumni (bad luck on my part, I suppose.) Receiving at least positive feedback from a few potential employers let me relax a bit on that count.
It wasn’t all bad — in fact, the negativity was mainly self-induced, the result of my own demons taking over from time to time. I’ve often wondered whether the over-30 crowd has a tougher time here, at least partially as a result of many of us seeing this as a last, great white hope for advancement and change. This would mesh perfectly with something I witnessed with numerous previously gregarious, likeable colleagues at past jobs, who irrationally and nearly overnight turned hypercompetitive, losing all reluctance to viciously backstab their former friends in the interest of advancing their own careers at any cost. While I witnessed very few, if any, incidents of overt perfidy among my classmates, I did realize just by watching my own state of mind how fear could have the insidious effect of suppressing scruples among the best of people when it comes to surviving in the world. Thankfully this is not a feeling I ever experienced; I honestly don’t know how I would deal with the ambition to succeed, somehow, at any cost.
It was a powerful experience, more so for some. Reflecting on the past ten months with friends, pinions vary between the extremes of “hated it, made me miserable, had a few bright spots” to “best time of my life.” To everyone’s credit, I’ve not heard that particular worn-out aphorism in a while. Maybe even the most upbeat of my classmates are too exhausted to be chirpy. As such, I won’t be judgmental about whether INSEAD was “good” or “bad” — I’ll decide 5 years from now. It’s too early to weigh the intensity of friendships, the exhilaration of the biggest challenge I ever faced, the seeming impossibility of surmounting my intellectual and academic barriers, the emotional chaos, the occasionally crushing workload and all the other bits that made up my MBA.
Early in the year, when I was at a low point, Sandra from career services gave me a copy of Snapshots from Hell, an account of a Stanford MBA student with a similarly random background to mine, living through his own purgatory; it picked me up and put things into perspective when I found most of my own difficulties staring at me from the pages. Since then I’ve had numerous conversations with friends and colleagues going through similar problems; even the most confident among us sometimes feel rotten from whatever brand of strain they’re facing on any particular day.
I’m not joining the grad trip to Turkey; my laptop propitiously decided to self-destruct, just as I had numerous hefty deadlines coming up. Considering what it’d been through, I’m surprised the little bastard held up so long. Nonetheless, there went my grad trip money. Thankfully, at least, a friend happened to be in New York that weekend and managed to pick me one up, saving me the near-50 percent markup I would have paid for a MacBook in Paris. I don’t know how the French live, honestly. That said, Karin and I have a mad amount of excess belongings to move back to Switzerland, I haven’t seen my father in ages, and I’m utterly and completely drained of energy. I don’t think I could face another night’s drinking after the last few weeks; my strategy of cramming as much partying and socializing as possible into a limited time is paying off. At the beautifully relaxed pool party I attended last night after our last class, I could barely muster the energy to carry on a coherent conversation; having used up the juice left over from the concentrated double-hitter of school and “networking”, it’s time to wind down and recover a bit, get my life back in order and, hopefully, settle into a slightly more relaxed pace for a while.
To be honest, I’m ambivalent about the grad trip; rather, I’m a bit sad about missing my housemates’ sailing excursion on the Cote d’Azur the weekend after the final bash. My mother and grandfather are coming to town, though, and I’ve been neglecting Karin in favor of living out my relationships with friends and classmates to the fullest — it’s hard to not spend what little time remains of the year with great people you may never see again. It’ll be nice to pass a few days with family, and enjoy summer in Paris with Karin. It’s a bit of a corny admission, but had she not lived nearby, I can think of multiple occasions when I was close to just sitting in my car and driving off, or worse. Sometimes, much worse.
Listening as a skill was a bit in short supply when I felt down; I realize that everyone’s too overwhelmed to listen to the bitchy rantings of just one guy who’s having trouble keeping up, but it’s good to just have someone to dump on. I’ve tried to make it a point to be there for others who’ve felt down; maybe someone can take a hint from this and do the same for their classmates occasionally. It helps.
Dean Antonio unveiled a memorial recently for two classmates who drowned in Bali last fall. We of the Fonty crowd never knew Steven and Fabrice, who must have been great guys by all accounts. It was a bit of a weird feeling when we found out about it, knowing that people in Singapore who’d soon be our friends were suffering from such a blow. Apparently people left candles burning on their seats the week after they died. I don’t know whether I could have handled that, I felt gutted just thinking about those who’d grown close to them. I am just eternally thankful to whatever gods are out there that we lost nobody in our circle (and crossing my fingers for the grad trip) to traffic accidents or other stupidities — not a stretch, given how the local maniacs drive. Rest in peace guys, I wish I’d known you.
Sandra-she-of-career-services made an interesting comment today, to the end that the weirdness only sets in two months or so after graduation, when, according to her, you look around one day and wonder, “where the hell is everyone?” Maybe she has a point, but I’m determined to not miss people. I’m busy putting together my skype contact list; maybe Facebook will turn out to be semi-useful after all. If there’s one major thing I’ve learned from INSEAD, it’s the idea of regularly doing things with groups of friends as a matter of course rather than the exotic, rare pleasure it’s always been for me.
Cabaret came and went; poor Ben the organizer was the incarnation of tension during the week before the event. I’ve never seen him so on edge, even during stressful academic periods. The show was, on the whole, very entertaining, despite a few acts of questionable humor value. Or and I decided (something I had already started planning upon seeing the upper box seats during the cabaret last fall) to put on a Waldorf & Statler act, and to unleash the full fury of the FRED peanut gallery on our unsuspecting co-performers. Judging by peoples’ feedback after the show, the idea of hurling the hilarious abuse we’d stored up for months was terribly funny and well-received. I just wish somebody had actually laughed.
Over beers recently, I tried to help our English colleagues from the December intake come up with ideas for the British week in fall. The most promising one, in my view, was the “Dunkirk day” event — bus the entire INSEAD student body to the English channel, and ferry them over (but make sure to leave the French behind.) I love the concept of using a national week at INSEAD to cause offense to as many groups as humanly possible. Go to it, boys, that’s the spirit that built the empire. It’d mix nicely with the flagrant disregard for political correctness that’s contributed so much to making this an enjoyable experience.
Not much to report on the subject of academics, I suppose; we gave our final presentations in the media companies elective follow-up; these turned out to be 5-slide summaries rather than the elephantine 40-page full-bore strategic recommendations paper I’d been working on. I’ll still finish it, although I’m a bit loth to actually schedule a presentation date with the company concerned, since they acted like a bunch of weirdos the first time I visited — and generally behaved pretty unprofessionally with many of my colleagues looking for work there (missed deadlines, lack of communications, etc.) Maybe I’ll just mail it with an addendum for explanations.
Our power & politics class unfortunately missed a lot of its innate potential, mainly through the professor’s not-terribly-interesting presentation style and because of the fact that, craming a 16-session full credit course into the last 8 weeks of P5 due to the lecturer’s time constraints forced the school to schedule 8 double sessions, mostly in the evenings and late in the week. Not good if you want people to pay attention. I don’t know what it was about it, but as with many of my courses here, I would have felt more comfortable just being handed the readings and a few outlines by way of explanation. I’ll take some time to go over many of the lectures (hooray for bulk scanners) this summer.
Marketing (brand management), on the other hand, was worthwhile, if only for the counterintuitive insights it provided into why most of my (rather common-sensical, I like to believe) instincts about brands and products are plain wrong. I ascribe it to the stupidity and malleability of the average consumer — something the course did nothing to dispel. Surprisingly, few of my classmates had ever heard of P.T. Barnum — “there’s a fool born every minute”, indeed. After some of the objective information my various marketing profs presented, I’m no longer hell-bent on making sure they refer to “customers” instead of “consumers” — in my eyes, a customer is an autonomous person, who has a strong set of rights vis-a-vis a merchant, and who, as the adage says, is always right. A consumer is a sheep, to be fed crap in return for his money. I understand now where the frequent use of the latter term originates.
The job situation is looking a bit less grim; my one promising prospect, with a travel-related company for a position as head of market research and strategy for France (as best as I am able to translate the profile from French) seemed to be interested in continuing their talks with me. This is the firm, you’ll recall, to whom I proposed a case-based presentation in lieu of a second round interview — something they loved. The process so far resulted in a sort of pseudo-offer by phone (or at least, “how much salary do you imagine?”) I told them, and was met with a counter-proposal far below what I had originally envisioned, near the bottom end of the range of the acceptable for INSEAD grads, especially with my experience. I told them, very frankly, that the salary was not so much relevant for me, as long as it met certain basic standards, as the ability to pay off my loans, which they reacted positively to. We’ll see.
Encouragingly, I’m receiving calls and expressions of interest from other outfits in France that I contacted, either through friends or, in the case of a large media conglomerate, through the excellent “media trek” to Paris organized by Etienne and the media/high tech club. This particular company was highly welcoming, giving us a tour of their production facilities, and expressing a strong desire to stay in touch with INSEAD. They handled both this event, and my subsequent talk with an H.R. representative (contrary to my previous idea of never ever dealing with H.R., I decided to start trying different approaches for various companies, just to see what works best) with a friendliness and style that I’ve rarely seen from potential employers. Good form. I maintain that I will reserve judgment on the whole thing until 5 years from now. Maybe, in retrospect, it will turn out to have been the best investment I ever made, and the best time of my life. I’m open to (and hoping for) the former, but the jury’s going to be out for a very long time on the latter.
As I write these lines, sitting on the dock of a beautiful and tranquil forest pond in the Vosges, my colleagues are on a beach in Turkey on the graduation trip. Despite more than half the class not attending (due to a mixture of bankruptcy, exhaustion, lack of time and desire to see other stuff in Europe, but mainly bankruptcy), my negative reply when asked whether I would come along was always met with wide-eyed incredulity — something I never learned to comprehend at INSEAD. It’s a very sweet reaction when someone expresses dismay that you won’t be participating in an event — no, really, thanks, it is — but it does give one the feeling that many students can’t comprehend that someone would want to go off and do their own thing rather than join the group. It’s something I first encountered in Singapore, while deciding to go to Sarawak on my own after all the prospective attendees had cancelled, rather than on some other trip. The fact that I’d decided my travel plans were more important than some group event seemed to baffle many people. It’s something my housemate Andy, as I’ve mentioned previously, described as “FOMO” — Fear of Missed Opportunities; the average INSEAD student seems to frequently be paranoid about missing out on something better. I love the group at school, but life doesn’t entirely revolve around INSEAD. Let that be my lesson as an old fart.
I don’t think I would have managed to survive the grad trip, in any case. My plan (successfully executed) over the past few weeks was to indulge in 100% of the parties, dinners, barbecues and other social activities around campus, with the goal of growing so utterly sick and tired of “student life”, so completely physically and mentally worn out, that I would love a bit of down time to get my life back into order. One of the last great hurrahs was the epic Monday designated “International Bloody Mary Day” by Peter and colleagues. With a table on the lawn in front of one of the larger amphis (queue for the drunks to stand up and applaud the final P3 economics lecture when it ended), we ploughed through 6 bottles of vodka starting at 10 a.m.. Apparently one of the boys went and liberated another one from one of our professors while I was sleeping it off under a tree — just in time for me to re-join the fun. It’s a hard life, and I look forward to losing the 20 or so pounds I’ve managed to put on this spring.
To those of you, dear readers, poking around this humble blog and coming away with the impression that INSEAD is all about getting hammered at parties, honestly, it’s not. However, after a while, the academic life becomes fairly routine. It’s difficult to engage outsiders with a captivating description of something that, to you, is a regular part of every-day life. For me, the social life around school was merely the most prominent, exotic aspect of the whole shebang, followed closely by the difficulties stemming from the overall stress and workload.
And goddamm, that was hard.