You Should See The Look On Our Faces

My first set of finals are over and first year Mod 1 is in the books.  And I finally got to folding some laundry from last week.  It’s been a continuingly challenging experience to get to and be ready for finals.  I decided to make my first set of business school finals more interesting by flying to NYC on Saturday for a wedding and flying back on Sunday with the Managerial Finance final on Monday.  Despite this, it would be difficult to say that I would have been incredibly more prepared than I was had I not gone to the wedding.  At this point in any course you are only refining your understanding of the material, not greatly expanding on it.  However, this doesn’t deter one from long hours of studying, which leads to a week of bleary eyed test taking.  Have I mentioned being tired before?  I find the best thing you can do when you are tired is to remain active.  Some would argue for coffee, and I certainly noticed coffee cups becoming bigger and more prevalent as the week went on, but I prefer to fight through fatigue and concentrate without caffeine.  Either choice has limited a timeframe before the inevitability of sleep, but one is also more flexible for winding down.

Even as an undergrad finance major and with work experience in finance, I can say that the Managerial Finance final was pretty challenging.  It also set the tone for the three remaining finals.  No matter what your confidence level was walking into an exam, it was not as strong when you turned in the exam.  Although I infrequently login to Facebook, I was able to catch one fellow first year’s status message this week that said it all, “is amazed at how much information I've absorbed over the past 7 weeks…and how little that fact has been reflected on these final exams. Humbling. Wow.”  They were all challenging, but we got through it by congregating right after each exam daily to recap our struggles on the exam we had just taken, followed by quickly shifting focus to studying for the exam the next day.  Each exam offered varying degrees of difficulty, but the post-exam stunned look on everyone’s faces helped us appreciate that we weren’t alone in these challenges.  Upon completing all of our exams though, those faces changed from concern and confusion to satisfaction and care free.  Exhaustion from a week of exams was disregarded as we celebrated completing our first mod.

It seems like just yesterday we were in our first day of class, but that first day also feels like it was more than eight weeks ago.  That’s the interesting paradox of the mod system in B-school.  Everything is so fast paced that you learn a lot in such a short period of time, so you get from point A to point B quickly, but point A seems like a distant memory standing at point B.  That’s each day, week, and now mod.  To borrow and slightly alter a line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off I will say that, “Business school moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”  Before you know it, we’ll be in our last mod in business school.