Three-two-one

Sums up the topic of my post. Third quarter, second row (in class), first week.

Q3 classes began last Monday for the class of 2010. I have a whole new section – just a fourth of my class comprises of the familiar faces from Section D, the others being from sections A, B, and C – no section E since our new classroom is the Section E classroom – with the tap dancing blackboard.

It’s been a weird sort of week for me. There are a lot of people in my class I have never seen before and I’m only just getting to putting names to faces. It doesn’t help that I’m no longer in my perch on the last row, at the top of the class – the one I referred to as prime real estate in an earlier post. This time I’m in row 2, right under the teacher’s nose, uncomfortably so, if I may add – I got cold-called in 2 of 3 classes on the first day of the quarter! It’s comforting to have some familiar faces in class, but they’re all so far interspersed that they are almost lost in the sea of unfamiliar ones. In the Darden curriculum, a lot of the classroom experience is a function of the class dynamics and in this first week I’m still trying to put my finger on the pulse of it. This I know for sure – there’s an awful lot of ex/current bankers in my class – they’re the lot I’m somehow always intimated by, don’t ask me why! I miss my section D, but I get to meet a whole bunch of new people and they already seem like fun!

The subjects and the set up this quarter are deceptively laidback. Nearly every Friday is a reading day – more like a callback day for recruiting activities. We have strategy, more finance, decision analysis once again, GEM (but no P-Rod) and communication. So far all the classes have been pretty interesting. We also have a whole new set of professors, so that’s another thing you have to figure out – different professors respond to the class dynamics in different ways. While some are very cold-call-friendly, others are very voluntary-class-participation-friendly. I’m kind of undecided on which one is the lesser of two evils.

So why this week is weird is simply because I’ve been feeling oddly restless in class. And so have a lot of people. There’s two kinds of people in the classroom these days – one kind that have got jobs for the summer. They are the kinds that literally drag their feet to class (shout out to YG for the GS offer and to GC for McK).The other kind are the ones who also drag their feet to class but only because they are still looking for jobs and therefore would rather be hooked up (to the internet) doing something to further their efforts – that precious green light is being promptly switched off before and during every class, cutting us off from the internet. Thankfully classes (and comments) are interesting enough for me to zone in and out of my reverie often enough to actually type out enough notes!

It’s Saturday night and I stopped by Starbucks on the way back from dinner. A night of insomnia follows.