Jet lag

What’s new on campus? I guess I am going through the hardest week of P1 at INSEAD. A number of cases are due, price games, individual cases, a quiz on Friday, another exemption exam also on Friday. Besides that I am organizing a trip for 10 people, participating in a student club and try not to fall back with other classes. Final exams of P1 are looming in two and a half weeks.

Interestingly enough my most productive hours aka when my brains seem to be awake are from 8 pm till 11 pm. Can I still be jet lagging five weeks after the landing in Singapore?

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...