second year, second wind

It's good to be back. Good to be meeting up with so many familiar faces and friends. Classes start tomorrow, but corporate presentations have already started for the second-years. The first-years have their industry immersion stuff going on, and LEAD I guess is keeping them extra-busy with their brand-new class-participation requirement.

Living at the I-house is cool, exactly the way I'd imagined it to be, and a lot like my undergrad dorms (except that we haven't TP'd anyone's room yet). It's a very social place, which is the point, I suppose. Plus, the I-house serves as one of the venues for Chicago's world-music festival, so I had the pleasure of walking into (free for residents!) a Garifuna Soul performance by Aurelio Martinez last night. Tonight, one of the first-year students from the GSB had organized a get-together of the 30-odd GSBers who live at the I-house. That number included a lot of exchange students from all over the world. It was awesome to meet everyone.

Classes-wise, I have:

Entrepreneurial Finance & Private Equity
New Venture Strategy
Pricing Strategy
Operations Management

I'm not sure if I'm recruiting or not. Tomorrow though, I'll attend a few presentations, I think.

Okay, here's how I'm rating the classes I've taken so far:

Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst.

Q1
Micro                     4
Regression                7
Marketing Strategy        1
Accounting                6

Q2
Competitive Strategy      9
Network Structures
  of Effective Mgmt       8
Investments               6
Strategic Leadership
  in Uncertain Env.       1

Q3
Macro                     9
Negotiations              6
Managing the Firm
  in the Global Economy   8
Fin. Statement Analysis   8
Corporation Finance       6

Note, the rankings have no correlation with my grade in the class! I rated the class based on how much fun I had in class, how much I learned, and much I liked the professor teaching the class.

BTW, this year on, grades at the GSB will include +'s and -'s. (So far, we only had: A, B, C...) We, as in the 2nd-years, will have the option of opting in for the +'s and -'s. Me, I think: why upset the apple-cart?

Deepti has been incredibly busy at Wharton. I think their setup is more hectic than Chicago GSB's. She's doing like 6 classes, and is basically in classes all day Monday through Thursday. That leaves little time for homework etc. And of course, that's on top of the other usual cohort activities and student groups and recruiting et al.