It's cold.
Finals are tough. Everyone has a different way of coping. Some people procrastinate as much as possible. They watch youtube videos featuring MIT Sloan, movies relating to econ topics (Nash equilibrium/"A Beautiful Mind"), they watch all the reality TV they can. For the non-procrastinators, there are other ways of coping: caffeine, study groups, cornering your TA as she tries to go to the restroom and bombarding her with questions.
Living somewhere between the two extremes, Sloanies seem to be productive procrastinators. While studying for finals, we apply for grants, we make optimization models for what classes to take next semester, we launch new projects or companies, we make itineraries for our Independent Activities Period (IAP) priorities. Will I be able to travel to the Philippines to work on an Eco-tourism marketing project with Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development (SEID)? Should I work at a local incubator for start-ups? Should I take classes? I've been thinking about a mobile media programming class and another on the nuts and bolts of business plans, a martial arts class and a statistics class for human behavior. All of this is to say that I just learned that the Hayden Library is open 24 hours a day, and will be till Friday. If only I'd known earlier, I would have been a much more productive procrastinator.
The 2007 Talent Show was a nice break from all the planning and studying. Sloanies are incredibly creative and talented!
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Photos by Jeremy Gilbert, MIT Sloan MBA Candidate, Class of 2008 | |
True to its reputation, this "core" semester was very busy and very intense. There are really tons of opportunities to do the things that you only dreamed about doing years ago when you closed your eyes and dreamed real hard. With these opportunities comes stress. How will you take advantage of the things there are to do with only two years to do them. Planning the Energy Week leading up to the Energy Conference and scheduling time to prepare for Earth Day. The Silicon Valley Trek for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation (E&I) students. Preparing mentally and financially for the trip to Ghana. Your non-academic life is in there too. How will I plan the Andrea Harvey Memorial Fund concert in the spring? Will I be able to dance this year for the Build a School in Africa fund-raiser? All of these competing priorities make you realize what you really want to do. You can tell by the choices you make.
Despite the stresses, there are pleasant surprises at the end of the semester. You find yourself bonding with friends on Skype late into the night. You start to enjoy accounting's particular logic--you can explain capitalizing leases with a small brimming confidence. You go to presentations and start to value the training you got in your Communications for Managers class. You see how everything is really about organizational processes. You look up from your Data, Models and Decisions review slides and realize that you do have a viable business idea, and you think it through via your E&I homework. There are pleasant surprises. The biggest of all is that you really have, throughout this fast-paced semester, learned something.
