Phase Shift

If at first you don’t succeed, call in an air strike.

Gone baby gone, love is gone, and exams as well. Finally, the elephant in the living room is out of the way, leaving us to get on with our precious lives. Compared to the last batch of academic carpet bombings in October, I at least have the satisfaction of seeing expressions of shocked disbelief similar to mine on my classmates’ faces this time around.

In short, it was a massacre. Little Big Horn, Roarke’s Drift, Stalingrad, you name it. I had a convenient panic attack about my (abysmal) financial situation the night before my strategy test and lay awake from 4 to 7 staring at the ceiling and hoping for it all to go away. My subsequent mad rampage, fueled by multiple cigarettes and cups of coffee, resulted in 14 pages of mad ramblings in 2 hours after which I just couldn’t deliver anything more. Handing in the completed exam, I found myself in hallways completely devoid of INSEAD students, with a massive surplus of energy (and exam-driven psychosis, no doubt) for the remaining scheduled hour of the test, after which I collapsed on a library sofa.

The remaining exams were as up-and-down; our managerial accounting prof (Jake Cohen, a likable intelligent and thoughtful individual who is prone to an arrogant shtick during his core courses) was apparently called in to see the dean after his exam. The beast, at first sight, was ridiculously easy, lulling me and most of my colleagues into a vicious sense of false security. I understand his reasoning — the INSEAD exam system is a terrible way of measuring subject matter comprehension, especially when it counts for anywhere from 50% to 100% of one’s grade — but given the fact that the school insists on determining where you stand based on a curve, a dead-simple test may not have been the best choice.

Monday was a far-worse double-whammy; the combination of a completely incomprehensible and impossible Chinese finger puzzle of a finance exam (of course I left early — there are limits to one’s cluelessness) and a group leadership paper during which most groups self-destructed didn’t do miracles for morale. Make it end, make it end. Thankfully the marketing test was pretty doable — as with strategy I either aced or completely failed it, time will tell.

The after-examstravaganzas were about what you’d expect — a bunch of exhausted and dazed b-school students blowing off steam, getting legless and trying to wrap their heads around the fact that what’s supposedly the most difficult part of it is over (except for all the exams to be re-taken; talking to a student in the class before mine who’s not being allowed to graduate due to — one asssumes — academic criteria didn’t exactly help.) I gatecrashed the E2 section party, #2 so far. They needed help with all the champagne anyway. Dinner at Houston’s with about 12 people, followed by karaoke and silly drinks until around 1 a.m., at which point people started noticeably fading. Such is war.

On top of that, our final marketing presentation (which we insisted on giving to the class, over the prof’s — probably justified, in retrospect — objections) flopped as a gag, although several colleagues mentioned afterwards how much they enjoyed it. In short, I don’t think it would be such a popular move to turn the McLaren-Mercedes F1 team into a white trash NASCAR/US-style wrestling bad-boys clone, hiring Danica Patrick to start fights and ram people, and having Tyler Hamilton get caught in public, drunk and with hookers. However, Lawrence’s idea of ditching Mercedes altogether and creating…McLaren-Hummer F1 Racing had a certain appeal to it.

My group’s last hurrah, dinner at a great restaurant in Bourron-Marlotte, was far less melancholy than I would have expected, given that we would soon cease to exist as the drilled, crack academic unit that had breezed through the past 4 months (bwahahaha right.) Rather, I think everyone realized that things pass, and that the whole nature of this program is one of temporary ups and downs in every regard. Sic transit gloria INSEAD. Good times.

Nonetheless it is difficult to get one’s head around the idea that there is little left to do right now. Singapore and holidays are around the corner, and maybe it’s finally time to engage in all those little luxuries I’ve been putting off for lack of time (like shopping for corn flakes. Wa-hey.) Merry fucking christmas, 8-hour nights and warm showers beckon seductively.