job market? what job market?

Some of us are in the midst of applying to finance jobs (or rather what's left of it).

Others postpone the job search till later.

Nevertheless we eagerly read the news about INSEAD corporate recruiters on campus whose names keep piling up in the wrong list. (another one)

And of course "black" humor



Personally I believe the crisis will be far from over by the end of 2009 and we are here for a rough landing.

Academics

Four weeks into the classes, half way through Period 1 and we start to feel the weight of the academic load. Classes move rapidly and the amount of the unknown, unread, not-calculated material increases in geometrical sequence. Thanks to our great professors and my daily minimum studying I feel I am still afloat. But I honestly expected the core courses to be 'mas o menos' repetition of my undergrad. Not really. One of the similar things between INSEAD and SSE (among many) is how we adapt the new words/concepts to daily communication. All of a sudden "sunk costs", "opportunity costs", "valuation" enter conversations over lunch. My $100 lost two nights ago was immediately labeled as sunk costs, thus irrelevant to the current mood. I know all that, but I still want sympathy! Active learning 101.

The classes themselves are a lot of fun. Either teachers make them interesting and entertaining, or us (e.g. bingo game) or the subjects themselves. Only last week we were eating M&Ms in Statistics class to demonstrate sample vs population statistics with counting red M&M before jumping into Central Limit Theory, confidence intervals (mind numbing material).

In Price & Markets Professor Dutt revealed the existence of a real cappuccino at Starbucks (called short cappuccino) vs. tall/grande/venti ones as an example to explicit market segmentation. Microeconomics is my least favorite subject, but here I am actually enjoying (maybe more the professor than the subject).

For Leading People and Organizations we were watching Twelve Agry Men before the discussion on leadership. Besides that it's an amazing movie, I guess it is the idea behind Mikhalkov movie "12".

Happy Chinese New Year

I successfully missed Chinese New Year festivities in Singapore by spending the long weekend in the rain forest of Kuching, Malaysia (Borneo Island). True to its name, it was raining or rather pouring most of the time. Some of us applied the sunk cost concept flew back to Singapore earlier. Others looked at the opportunity costs and stayed. It was good fun, especially the dinner in Topspot seafood food court (raw fish on the picture to the left was in fact grilled as well as prawns, red snapper, stingray, and crabs).


I completely organized myself with the due dates - synchronized on all my calendars and multiple work stations. I bought a lovely Acer Aspire One 8.9" "big calculator" as I call it for $430 to carry with me to campus to check emails and write assignments. ThinkPad is too heavy to be running around with.

I am continuing to filter my pictures from India. I will take myself out to a big dinner if I ever finish the mission (from 3,000 to the best 100).

My final achievement of today was installation of Qlock application with 4 different times zones on my desktop to keep track of my around-the-world network.

INSEAD

It has been 3 weeks since I started my MBA program at INSEAD. I have met more exciting, fun, interesting, chill people than I thought I would. Predominately due to that factor I am very happy here. Also perfect weather, pool, food courts with abundance of Asian dishes for $2 contribute somewhat.

First period consists of 5 core subjects (mostly analytical), out of which I exempted from Financial Accounting during the first week. So my workload is less. Also [so far] the course material is repetition from my undergrad, so my workload is even less. I am also not applying to any finance internships, so my "career" activities have not started, so my workload is even less. The result - I am not stressed the way I am supposed to be stressed if you listen to "the average" experience at INSEAD in P1.

But I am busy with the stuff I enjoy - talking to people, booking trips, reading, attending extra curricular activities.

Last weekend I spent on the "Singaporean beach", an Indonesian island of Bintan, a 45-minute ferry ride away. This weekend we are going to the island of Borneo, to Kuching, Malaysia. The experience hopefully will be more authentic and cheap. Tons of other ideas are floating around for the upcoming weekends and short break between our "periods".

To be continued...

Mozambique

I am currently going through three thousands pictures from India, which is a big task for anyone especially for someone as lazy as me. But I hope to finish something before New Year’s, otherwise they will be rotting on my hard drive for eternity. In one week I make my way to warm and rainy Singapore and theoretically become serious about my future and all.

But that’s in 7 days. Today I want to publish some photos from my second overland trip in Africa. After visiting Apartheid Museum & Soweto in Johannesburg, Lion park in the vicinity and watching dozens of DVDs at Mufasa hostel, I was ready for another group exercise only two weeks later to make a vow never to travel this way in my life. But since I only had two weeks at my disposal before moving on to India “14-day Discover Mozambique” trip with Nomad was perfect.







We headed south to Swaziland where we went on a game drive in Hlane Royal National Park. We parked right next to the lion family with the cutest cups ever, almost crashed head to head with an elephant and watch white rhinos at the sunset.



The next two days we spent at Tofu beach, which can be easily reach individually from the capital, Maputo, on a hostel shuttle bus. I did snorkel with a whale shark, the largest fish in the world – breathtaking experience I have to say. The fact that the animal is incapable of biting half of my body off did not really calm me down – the size does matter!





Traveling north of Praia do Tofu is as I understand a bit more cumbersome, but very possible with the right amount of time and patience. We, however, needed not to worry as our half-empty overland truck was jumping over potholes of horrible road on the way to Vilanculos.

I fell in love with Mozambique immediately as it was different from South Africa, Namibia and Botswana; in the latter two you hardly ever see a person with the density of population at 2 pps per sq. km. Mozambique was much. North of Tofu (basically everywhere expect closer to the capital) people seemed to live like Himbas but dressed – in huts, no sewage, no electricity. All women wore sarong skirts and carried everything on their heads. Mozambique is a country of countless banana and coconut palm trees that was still curious about us, tourists.

From Vilanculos we did our two day “sail away safari” on Dhow boat to different islands. We were spoiled by the delicious food served on the beach, crazy clean blue waters, dolphins and sun. Snorkeling near Bazaruto Arhipelago at the Two Mile reef was a dream comes true for me. I cannot think of anything more beautiful than color combinations of those fishes. Were even names for those colors invented in any of the languages?









We spent another two days on the beach at Barra Lodge close to Inhambane and with a stop over in depressing Maputo we came back to South Africa. A small incident did happen at last in my travels! My small camera (and a bottle of perfume!) got stolen from the overland truck on the border of Mozambique and South Africa.

The next two days we spend in Kruger National Park. I finally saw plenty of giraffes that were crossing the roads, blocking the road – in other words, picture perfect behavior.



We took Panorama route on the way back to Johannesburg that absolutely gorgeous as well as touristy. My favorite stop was at the Bourke's Luck Potholes.



And a very logical ending to my African travels was a visit to the Moholoholo Rehab Center where the founder was screaming at the top of his lungs about the worsening conditions of pretty much everything in Africa for the wild animals.



The next night I flew to a very different world of India...

The album on flickr as always