Wednesday May 13, 2009. Palisades, New York.

It is second residence week indeed. And I never believed I would ever be sitting in class at 3 PM and writing a Blog!

Stating the obvious would mean saying that Term 1 is over but my real problem is that I can't get over it. First, I had great fun with all the classes in Term 1 (can't say the same of term 2 so far!). I was excited at the Residence Week, enthused by the Stats Quiz, disappointed by the Statistics mid-term and finally, devastated by the Accounting and Statistics final exams. I have been dying to see my grades on the other 3 classes till today and now that it's all here and I have done well in Leadership, Strategy and Economics, I need to really move on but I am unable to.

There's a million lessons learnt from Term 1. May be more like 2 or 3 but I think discrete lessons learnt that I can put to use are more valuable than worldly knowledge. All credit the Leadership class, which brought to light what my weaknesses are. Its funny that the exact same weaknesses proved to be my downfall in Statistics and Accounting. Want to know what's funnier? Sometime in residence week, I corrected my Statistics professor on a formula he had written in error. And then the next day, I solved a problem he had posed to the class with a lot of ease. My class thought (and still thinks today!) that I am a quant BEAST (a term I have learnt in business school). And the 2 courses that I have my worst grades in are full of numbers!!!

Tell me more. I am in session 7 of Term 2. Its 311 PM. Exactly 12 hours from the time I actually went to bed this morning after spending the whole night drawing gantt charts and trying to solve for operational cycle times, throughputs and utilization. Add to that Corporate Finance, Performance Measurement and Decision Models and this term is full of quantitative stuff. Even Marketing is full of quantitative stuff. Going by the results of Term 1, clearly I am not a quantitative person. And I know (deep inside) that I am not the Strategy or Leadership kind of person.

So what am I? I am an electron. Always agitated, jumping up and down, screaming for attention and trying to break away from my orbit and radiate. Trying hard, not to plummet into the nucleus and perish...

It's 320 PM and this class will be over any minute now. Residence week is half done. I leave this class with this question. Will I get this MBA? Or will this MBA get me?