Tuesday, September 09, 2003

Last's night nightmare er, dream

I was suddenly back in First Year, surrounded by books and the 50-70 pages a night we'd have to read per class (And Dr. Z! Remember Dr. Z and his 100 pages! Even now my brain is staggering under the weight of memory!). I just remember reading as quickly as possible (trying desperately not to catnap in between pages -- slows it down, y' know -- jotting notes down and going to class thinking, "Please, please don't call on me, I can't remember anything about what last night's reading assignment.") Anyway, in my dream, there were lots of books, all of them $100+ and those packets from Copy Corner and all of them were screaming at me, "Read me now!" I didn't necessarily think at the time I was absorbing anything because we were reading so much and so quickly, but every now and then, I'll get a flash of something -- something that we'd read or just a snippet of information and I'll get all puffed-chested and proud.

In retrospect, the MBA is all a blur -- this swift, blue-read-yellow caped blur, maybe. There are moments I do remember: Dr. S's 5-hour long accounting final, those back-to-back presentations, those finance cases from heck (whatdya mean I gotta use the CI to figure out what a dollar was worth 20 years ago?), group projects from heck (never helps when most of your teammates won't talk to each other), and Dr. C's socratic method of "So I didn't call on you for the question you wanted to answer, but here's another from left field just for you and because I like you today, how about you talk for the next 15 minutes because I'm just going to keep asking questions until you keel over because that's how they do it at Harvard and we're just as good as Harvard" (well, no, but the dream of Harvard certainly inspired him). I remember really, really long days starting at 6 and ending after midnight. And perpetual crabbiness. Especially when it rained and we all had to walk through that lake pooling right outside of Wehner. There is nothing more miserable than spending an entire day in wet jeans and sneakers.

But... it's done. It's over. We did it (::high fives R and V::) and it's really about breaking it down into chunks, not getting overwhelmed by sheer volume or other RL things going on, and taking the time to just have some quiet moments to oneself and letting other not-so-important things go. That first year was an incredible challenge and honestly, my brain and people skills never had to work so hard. Anything else these days seems like cakewalk. Now I realize, that was probably the program was really about. It's not just about two years more of theoretical and practical work; it's about a whole lot more. Any lessons learned that's less than that misses the point.

Updates/uproar/upshot: I'm now taking a class on Wednesday nights from 6 to 9 pm. It should be good and starts tomorrow. Also, I'll be spending the next few days furiously polishing the SNW story so I can send it off either Friday night or Saturday morning for an edit. Right now, it's an unmitigated mess and it's going to take a lot of work to get it in shape. I guess that's what I get for waiting until the very last minute. Allegedly, comments should be coming back today (because I know all of y'all are just clamoring to leave lots of comments ::grin::).

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