first impressions
So far I have been through eight cases and I am currently working on preparing two for tomorrow. And so far I can confidently say that I wish that my education up until this point had been entirely case method. (Except for film school, I’m not sure how that would have worked…)
Being in a classroom for 80 minutes where there is a perpetual ping-pong of conversation going on between prof and student, and also between student and student, has kept me so much more focused and alert than I ever have been during a class before.
So you can tell I’m liking it so far?
The class experience has been different from anything I’ve ever done. From what I can tell one of the other big differences from my past educational experiences is in the preparation for class. I spend lots of time preparing, with the same anxiousness I would have had in high school about making sure my homework was “right.” Except that now that doesn’t matter any more. I can bring in a balance sheet, and if it doesn’t balance, it doesn’t matter (insofar as I’m not going to lose points for it)… as long as I understand the concepts and can reason my way through an argument in class, I’m fine. This is a weird paradigm to get used to.
I finally made time to go to the gym today, and I felt really good afterwards. Think I need to get into the habit of doing that more often.
The people here are beyond amazing. Everyone in Analytics has a wild story about something (whether it’s work, their education, their personal interests…). I’ve had more fun just meeting people in the last few days than I’ve had in a while.
Someone said to me the other night that they’ve heard b-school described this way (and I’m starting to agree):
Where undergrad was a lot of people who looked similar on paper (impressive GPA or extracurriculars, etc.) but were vastly different in terms of personality and aspirations, the b-school crowd seems to be much more similar in terms of personality (no, everyone’s not the same, more on this later) and aspirations and wildly different on paper (in terms of work experience, home country, etc.).
I hope to be able to go into more detail about some of these things soon, but at the moment I wanted to squeeze in an update between case prep and my learning team meeting tonight.
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Sounds fascinating. They say that the case method “isn’t for everybody,” but how can you go wrong? It’s all about the argument.
Congrats, man. Glad you like it so far…