With some free time during IAP (Independent Activities Period; MIT has off from Mid-December to the beginning of February) I have started facing the reality of graduation in a few months.
The first reality to hit is the repayment of loans. I haven't thought about it much since I first applied for them a little less that two years ago. I followed the advice to just take out the full amount of the loan and have confidence I would find a job to repay it. Unfortunately since I had only worked for two years prior to Sloan and it had been in education I had very little saved so pretty much took out the full amount of tuition and living expenses in loans. The good news now is with all of my fancy MBA skills I can create an amortization schedule and estimate monthly payments (I actually cheated and used the excel template). I can also use my newfound economics knowledge to make predictions on where interest rates are going since some of the loans have variable interest rates. I finally settled on the goal of paying them off within 5 years, or at least the variable rate portion. The good news is at the end of the day, unlike a car or a home, an MBA cannot be repossessed or foreclosed on. Nothing can take away the experiences at Sloan or the knowledge gained; that makes the loan payments a little more tolerable.
Looking ahead to the final semester, I am also thinking of what I still want to get out of the last few months of Sloan. One of the big experiences I am looking forward to is the Global Health Delivery lab. During the course of the semester myself and the other individuals on my team will be working with an AIDs prevention organization in South Africa to improve their distribution network. Over the past few weeks I have been reading all I can find on South Africa, the AIDs challenge, and the short comings of foreign aid (mostly to the likes of William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo.) We will spend the next few weeks working remotely with the organization and then spend Spring Break and the week before in Johannesburg.
I am also looking ahead to the Sloan tradition known as the BVI Trek. In between the end of classes and graduation a bunch of Sloanies head to the British Virgin Isles where we spend the week sailing around and generally enjoying the gap between the end of Sloan and the beginning of the real world.
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