As you were

I'm now back in the working world, sort of, having just begun the customary internship between the two business school years. Suddenly life is a lot like it was for the four years before I moved to Boston, and a lot like it will be for a long time after graduation. Most of my classmates had a few extra days to travel and are now traipsing through Iceland and Japan and other locales exotic to those who aren't from them. I started work early and so will wrap up a few weeks before school starts in September, getting my vacation at the tail end of the summer. Not surprisingly, there are a significant number of HBS people in Manhattan, where I'm working, and some have already been meeting up with each other. Seeking familiarity, I suppose. Switching cities and environments so drastically in the course of a week makes the contrasts with the student world much more apparent. There is something to be said for a discrete 80-minute class two or three times a day, interspersed with the kinds of social and recreational activities that "normal" life just doesn't afford you - tennis (at 2 PM) anyone? Being out of the section environment after such an intense immersion in it for nine months is also quite a change. If you're thinking about business school, seriously consider what the section (or cohort, cluster or other synonymous title) experience is like. There's something to be said for Harvard's approach, which is stricter than most if not all MBA programs: no electives in your first year, no testing out of the required courses, every class taken in the same classroom with the same 89 other people. Sections form their own identities and norms, which can be quite distinct and are probably completely unpredictable at the outset. One section adopted an enormous stuffed lion as a mascot early in the year, sometimes placing it in a seat in their classroom, replete with the requisite name card. Another section would have one of its members wear the giant head of a panda costume to school-wide events, where it could be seen bobbing gleefully above the crowd. There are chants, and cheers, t-shirts and "minners" (more on these forthcoming), drumming/knocking/dancing on desks and so on in a profusion of creativity that's fascinating to watch. These culminate at the end of the year, where the last few days are marked by attempts to jam in one final tradition. Faculty are always applauded at the end of each class, but after the final case discussion they are traditionally presented with gifts. On our final day we wrapped up our entrepreneurship class with one of our most memorable section experiences, which captures much of the essence of what was unique about the first year. For a peek inside, check out the following clip of the presentation. It's rife with inside jokes that people outside the section won't get at all, though I assure you they were hilarious, and there's a lot of noise, but it will give you a sense of the classroom vibe. Most of us were not aware it was coming, so our reactions are spontaneous.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=e54pWYKdmZs

Ninth inning

Apologies for being so derelict in posting, as my anticipation of a less-busy second term didn't seem to pan out. Friday marked our last day of classes as first-year students ("RCs" in HBS parlance, since our initial year is taken up entirely by the Required Curriculum), and with it concluded our in-class section experience. In the next year things will be different, as we are given complete freedom over our course schedules, and the 17 hours and 20 minutes we spent together in our group of 91 each week will be atomized over dozens of electives. HBS has a number of norms in the RC year, one of which is the giving of gifts to faculty on the last day of classes, accompanied by more or less elaborate or humorous presentations. Our section ended with some fairly spectacular ones, including an original rendition of "To Be With You" by Mr. Big, performed by two classmates in a surprise conclusion to our course on entrepreneurship. I'll try to post more detailed thoughts on the first year shortly.

Big Easy

I'm in New Orleans as part of a winter break school service trip. It's the night before the big college football championship game, featuring the Ohio State Buckeyes and the home-state Louisiana State University Tigers. The streets are a zoo, with thousands of fans and tourists milling about decked out in full team paraphernalia, spontaneously breaking out into team chants. The touts and scalpers are out in full force, and vendors are doing a thriving business selling t-shirts and tchotchkes. New Orleans' liberal alcohol laws mean that open containers of various intoxicating beverages are in the unsteady hands of many. There's currently a trumpet playing a solo from somewhere on the street outside my hotel room, and I can hear it clearly even though we're on the fifteenth floor. Appropriately enough, they just struck up the strains of "When the Saints go Marching In." Once the tourists go home though, New Orleans still has a lot of work to do to get back to where it should be, and that won't be easy.

Debrief

Semester one is officially over. This is the most intense of the four terms, both in the number of classes and in the flurry of extra-curricular activity. Most of this has settled down, and the second term will probably be a bit more relaxed, but not by much - overscheduling is a perennial trait of MBA students.

All quiet

The student center is nearly deserted, with the only sound that of the fireplaces burning softly in the background, on yet another icy Boston evening. For first-year students four out of five final exams are behind us, and the one that remains is the most qualitative of the lot, meaning that most people are taking it easy tonight. Tomorrow will be marked by packing and flights and cabs as we scatter, literally, to the four corners of the earth. At lunch a classmate mentioned how remarkable it is that at HBS we're pulled together from incredibly varied places for an intense period of time, dispersed in an instant, and then pulled back just as quickly, come January, for another term. The new seating charts were released today, and unlike the first time around we have the context gained from a full semester to interpret them. I'm down in front, seated in the evocatively-titled worm deck described in a previous post. My view of the class will be different, but change in perspective is a good thing. As an elementary school student, I played the role of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, one of whose lines comes to mind: "They have made worms' meat of me..."

Home stretch

All first-year students had their last case discussions today. During the next two days we have wrap-up classes for each of the five courses, and then we go into finals, one per day, roughly four hours each, for five days. And like that, the first semester, half of our first-year experience, draws to a close.

Break through

Today's Leadership and Organizational Behavior case was one of the most powerful discussions we've had yet as a section. For the first time, our conversation reached the point where, in the wake of an especially personal comment, someone had to break out the Kleenexes and pass them among the rows. After a standing ovation we fell completely silent. Some of us were dabbing at eyes and all of us were pretty hesitant to follow that contribution with any of our own. Our cases in the past few LEAD classes have turned markedly introspective, which is important but rare in the daily bustling about that is an MBA student's life. For a moment we glimpsed an entirely different level of what this learning experience and section can be. Considering where we're starting from, that's a very high level indeed.