FIRST DAY OF SECOND YEAR A few thoughts and reflections on coming back to school
Yesterday was my first day back to school at Darden and with it came many crazy feelings, impressions,misconceptions, and... even a few epiphanies.
My general strategy for this year is to get in over my head and wait for "the process" to save my life. We are often told around here to "trust the process" and so, after surviving a monumentally challenging first year relatively intact, I have decided to up the ante a bit and take the majority of my classes this year in accounting and finance. This is in full knowledge of the fact that I still have huge holes in my knowledge base there, and that I will probably have to put in much more effort than the average Darden student just to keep up.
This quarter though, things start off fairly balanced. I am enrolled in Financial Reporting and Analysis (which comes with a super-awesome $250 textbook), Operations Consulting (covering Lean and Six Sigma in detail), Marketing Intelligence (a quantitative approach to marketing research), Entrepreneurial Thinking (a rigorous class built around cases from start-up businesses), and the Jefferson Reading Seminar (which basically means reading one book per week, plus writing a paper each week as well) on leadership lessons from the life of T.J. in the Founding of America). This last class is my only "fun" class but will also be very time-consuming.
In addition to all the normal coursework, I am also very involved in campus life. I am a
Vice-President of the Darden Christian Fellowship,
Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the Jefferson Society,
Chairman of the Darden Marketing Management Team, and
Organizer of a speaker-series called "Unsolved Business Mysteries" featuring presentations by prominent faculty members on their current research.
All in all, I feel very busy, but... c'est la vie! carpe diem! and I'll rest when I'm dead.
Finally, I'll just say that it's been great seeing all the First Years around Darden. I am no longer a Darden "newbie", but I certainly don't feel like I am their superior - in fact I actually envy them in some ways. They have a twinkle in their eye and an excitement that is as palpable... as it is fleeting.
But, I am already up to my ears in homework so I need to go, but it should suffice to say that I am excited to get going and look forward to another CRAZY YEAR in the Darden full-contact sport of learning business skills for the world of practical affairs.
Let's get it on. Posted August 26, 2008 COMMENT ON THIS POST
