School - The First Week

It one week into roughly 10 months of school and I'm already beginning to understand why people say INSEAD is soooo intense.  Looking back on this week, I can see my mistake - work doesn't prepare you for 'school' work - ha.  However, if I had been doing school work these last 4+ years - I wouldn't have context or concept of real business experience.  Now at end of my first full week of classes and full-on INSEAD activities I'm EXHAUSTED!  But since I think this might be a good way to share my misery, I'm going to quickly recount the situation and agenda.  

Our year is divided into 5 periods of which P1 and P2 are supposed to be the most intense and difficult in terms of work-load, social adjustment, and other MBA stuff.  The cool thing is that after a long week of school work, I got some good sleep on Thursday night and we had a Career Services Day on Friday.  With such a short MBA program, INSEAD has to get us started early on the job search so, maybe, we can finish on time.  They did say that nearly 3/4s of graduates had at least one job offer at graduation last year and the number went way up from there over time.  Besides the stats about graduates, etc, they walked us through some personal analysis - tests, etc.  Although, I feel pretty good about the thought I've done to date re: this, I don't think you can ever get enough, and it's helping me move on to the tactical stuff about landing my dream job. 

Yes, its all about landing a dream job.  I have to highlight that when I think of the school schedule and how painful it is to do statistics homework and finance review again.  Wow, but here's the list of my classes:

1. Prices and Markets (micro-econ)
2. Uncertainty, Data, and Judgement (UDJ, stat)
3. Leading People and Groups (LPG, org behavior)
4. Financial Accounting (accounting)
5. Financial Markets and Valuation (FMV) 

Honestly, looking at it I don't feel too bad since I studied much of the material in undergraduate, but there is definitely a different slant here.  There's a much more advanced focus on the applicability and usefulness of the info.  Using statistics to make informed general management decisions that relate to financial valuation and pricing is some how more interesting now that I've seen some of the actual decisions managers face. 

At any rate, I've survived the first week and I know how crazy it can get - so, now I'm on top of it... right?