1 - 4 month mark: share your rants, raves and war stories

Wow, you finance folk have it tough. I'm just coming back to school after taking a 2-week trip in South America with some classmates. I'm exhausted, but only because we kept partying at night and hitting the neat spots during the day. The fact that I've been stranded at an airport for the last 12 hours does not help, either.

L.

We have to live with that. The perception is that HBS students are arrogant, so we try and make efforts to counter the reputation. There are several initiatives we (the community as a whole) take on a daily basis to counter this, but some facts we just can't change.
One big complaint with some employers, for eg, was:

- "I come to HBS year after year, interview your students, make X offers and only very few accept. I feel that your students are arrogant."

We could argue about this caselet all day, but reality is that if the opportunities are there, students will take them. They'll follow appropriate procedures, send a decline letter and not accept offers they will not honor, but other than that, I know of nobody that would take a job they don't really want out of politeness.

L.

that makes me wonder if HBS gets more offers per student than other schools. Because students obviously turn down offers, provided they get more than one. I have two hypotheses:

1. Employers think you guys are hot, so they all pant after you like dogs in heat. You all get lots of offers, and can obviously only do one. The outcome: sad recruiters with sour grapes.

2. Employers think that you think that you're hot. When they get turned down, they call you arrogant. When Team-Fuquans turn them down, they think, "golly, that sure was a nice fella. hope he'll apply with us next year."

There's some term for that -- expected something or another.

Sounds familiar. A close colleague graduated from Haas in 2002 (worst year imaginable) and still managed to get into GS. Overall he's a modest guy, so when he says he took four day took road trips to Kirkwood and Northstar every other weekend and still managed to pull off a 3.5, I believe him. Indeed, intensity levels here on the west coast are low; lower yet if you study up in the great PacNW

So I've been in school for just about 1 month now and can finally join in on the rants/raves!

Raves:
-feeling that I'm finally moving forward in life
-I have fabulous group members
-the fact that I'm surrounded by motivated, intelligent people who actually want to be there and come to class prepared
-Profs that understand and acknowledge that you have other classes, actually know your other professors, and are willing to accommodate their classes at times because of that
-The feeling that I'm learning useful, practical knowlege rather than just how to analyze a poem or other useless undergrad-type stuff

Rants:
-Having to buy a laptop (yeah, I knew that I would probably have to break down and buy one eventually, however, I didn't think I'd have to have one for my very first day - I'm taking a stats class)
-Having to learn how to function at both work and class on much less sleep than my body is used to
-the horrible, horrible Operations Management midterm I just took last night. Seriously, it seems that no one I talked to had prepared properly for that test. Probably because the prof. had given us absolutely no clues as to the format of the test.

I would now like to share the best piece of advice I have heard yet. In one of my classes, an abbreviation of a term was being thrown around as if everyone in the class knew it (it wasn't anything from the book or readings - it was a conversation based around a comment made by a student). It took me a few minutes of feeling stupid, but I thought that I finally knew what the abbreviation meant. Then, a classmate sitting next to me leaned over and asked if I knew what it meant. I told him what I thought it meant but that I wasn't positive. After class, he asked another classmate who confirmed that it was what I thought. I was so proud of myself for figuring it out. However, I then said that I was so happy that I wasn't the only one in these classes who wasn't already a business expert.

He told me, "Don't worry, most of these people just act like they know all this stuff."

Fake it til you make it.

See... now I wanna know the term...

It wasn’t anything terribly exciting or difficult. People were talking about POS technology, which finally dawned on me meant Point-of-Sale. However, it’s just not a term used in my line of business and somehow I was able to reach deep into the recesses of my brain and recall it from my days working retail.

I am a programmer and I work with POS technology daily. Of course, it doesnt stand for "Point of Sale" when I say it

Unfortunately, your meaning was all I could think of at first!

Thanks for the info guyes!

Bumping the thread