Home Stretch - Last Week.5 of Class!

We’re on the last week and a half of classes here at Darden. And things have never been crazier! Trying to find time on people’s calendars for an hour long meeting to discuss our project has been impossible! We’ve come to the stage where we are – counter-productively perhaps – splitting up and meeting in batches to get our work done. It’s that insane out here!

Meanwhile Q4 – about which I haven’t written much lately – has been awesome fun from the academic standpoint. Yeah you’re thinking, who even goes to classes anymore in Q4. But trust me, all of us do, and all of us are engaged and MOST of us are reading our cases! I’m doing four classes – Data Analysis and Optimization (awesome!)with Casey,one of my favorite Darden professors, Marketing Analytics (love it!), General Managers Taking Action (carried forward from last quarter) and Hot Topics in Ops & Technology, which is another speaker class and is my third class with Prof Tim Laseter. I absolutely love my courses this quarter and I feel like I’m getting so much out of my ‘technical’ (ie spreadsheet) courses that I get a real kick out of ensuring I'm fully prepared for these classes! This quarter I have also officially relinquished all my club responsibilities at DSAS and the Blog Club making it hard to remain in denial about leaving this place.

Of course, since this is Darden, if you’re working your brain off at school, you’re also socializing like crazy and Q4 is the pinnacle of it all. Dinners and I-got-a-job celebrations are spilling over into the weekday evenings and the result of it is that every day I push the limit on just how late I can wake up in the mornings and STILL make it to my classes! And I haven’t been late to a single one of my 8AMs (although I did ‘forget’ to wake up for one).

The weather has been kind of erratic, oscillating between cold, rainy and sunny and the pollen count super high so Halls and tissues and sniffles are commonplace these days. I think we’ve all just decided we’re going to carry a jacket to school anyway, just in case! We have concluded our headshots for the Yearbook, pledges for the class gift (100% of our class pledged!) and ordered for our diploma frames – so yeah I guess we’re definitely getting out of here soon!

This weekend is the Alumni Reunion weekend and there’s a festive spirit going on in Flagler, with the tent put up and the banners up. Again, it reminds me of last summer when I watched the Class of 2009 gear up for graduation. And it signals to me that the end is near. In fact, same day next month I will be wearing the cap and gown and getting my diploma. And I still remember sitting on the other side of this great two year experience wondering if I would make it out of here in one piece.

I’m putting up these pictures I took on my phone a few weekends ago when the weather was awesome and I was sitting by TJ’s fountain and contemplating life, the universe and everything in between. That’s correct, I still don’t have an offer and I’ve hit the panic button.