choices and changes

I should be doing a hundred other things but I also have a hundred things to write about so I'm playing hokey on strategy & finance to write this post. Its been over three months at INSEAD and the world has changed. Without any real time to digest any thing we hear or learn about in class and absolutely zero connection with the outside world, it took some time coming & then it hit me. INSEAD is slowly, insidiously transforming us!
Reading my CV, I suddenly knew I would never have written it this way three months ago.Looking at my selection of electives, I wonder is that really me? are these really my interests? Some of the courses which would have attracted me earlier hold almost no sway on me now and I have no clue when this happened.
I also found myself applying for the European Entrepreneurial Accelerator program to do a project for a company. Again I surprised myself, I chose a company whose business plan would be Greek to me and surprise, surprise, it chose me! So I now have a real world project to do and I'll get a nice little credit for it.
Life is about choices and sometimes those choices can define me. I'm choosing differently now than I would have some time ago and I'm not really sure why.
Maybe all this introspection has been bought upon us since it is the season of choices. We the J08 as we are called, are moving into 3rd gear. We now choose our electives which effectively takes away all bitching rights. From now we cant crib about the course, the professor or the workload. It's all been laid out before us & we must partake of the feast. Indigestion would be very hard to explain.

The INSEAD life

The Montmilian ball lived up to its infamy, four hundred MBA wannabe's sinned over too much alcohol, too much dancing, too much poker and just too much everything. Barely four hours after the party finished the first pictures are already up on facebook - i wasn't joking when I said its an INSEAD obsession. This should tell you something about the drive people have here. Most normal people will require a few hours to recover post a party that rocked till 7:00 am but no not INSEADers!
Before you are awake, you have been tagged, you also have three lunch invitations and you are already behind the rest with the corporate finance reading due on Monday. when they said it was hectic, they meant it. When they insisted they need motivated, driven people who live on less than two hours of sleep(squeezed between classes or sometimes in class)and who partied as hard as they worked, well they meant that too.
This is just an MBA but for all of these reasons and many more INSEAD is so much more than just that and its very hard for anyone outside of our famed bubble to understand the irrational, illogical self inflicted way of INSEAD life.