Rawa Dreams

After an intense week we packed our bags and after a few hours of sleep on FridaY night woke up at 5 am to leave for a small paradise called Pulau Rawa in Malaysia. The island is tiny - it took us 30 minutes to circle it in a kayak. The water is unbelievably clear and the sand is really white.







INSEADers are hyper active and during 30 hours on the island we managed to snorkel, kayak, play beach volleyball, polo, Frisbee, hike, swim, jump off the jetty, get sun burnt. I personally could have used more hammock time with a book.

12 hours of sleep Saturday night helped and I am back in a 6-hour sleep mode in Singapore.

New Management Science

I invented new type of management – free passport space management. It involves a number of stages:

1. Stressing out about failure to persuade the immigration officer to stamp passport on a certain page
   
2. Choosing strategically a smiling immigration officer
   
3. Smiling intensively and asking in the sweetest voice NOT to stamp a blank page
   
4. Stressing out even more when the officer shuffles hopelessly through the passport
   
5. Standing on toes to see what's going on behind the counter
   
6. Hear the "execution", i.e. passport being stamped
   
7. Check eagerly the passport. Upon success, booking another trip immediately. Upon failure, rethink the next 4 months in Asia.
   

At this point of time I have 2 blank pages in my passport. I need one page for Thailand for visa-on-arrival and the second for non-persuaded immigration officer. So far I managed with my new management science to get a single entry visa-sticker to Indonesia on a used page and two entry/exit stamps to Malaysia on used passport pages. It is getting harder by an hour. Ideally I will save my extra space for Indonesia or Vietnam or Cambodia in the summer break.

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".