Brit-Chick MBA

Sniff, cough, sneeze

2006-09-11T05:01:00.000-05:00

I woke up on the second day of classes with a burning feeling in my throat, a stuffy nose, and a general feeling that my respiratory feeling was about to go into revolt. A great way to start the year! Fortunately, most of my classes haven't got up to full speed yet, so I could spend some of the weekend feeling sorry for myself without falling hopelessly behind.

Speaking of classes, my selections for this semester are set. They are:

Strategy and competitive Advantage - this is one of the legendary Wharton courses with a professor who's renowned for being good but tough, and a 70 page final project. I'm really looking forward to it, but it's probably the course that scares me most this time out.

Managing Change in Organizations - this one's pretty self explanatory and looks like it's going to be really good.

Building Human Resources for entrepreneurial Ventures - a new course this year, that promises to be very interesting. It's a half unit and I'm taking it next quarter, so I'll have to wait a few weeks to find out.

Operations Strategy and Process Management - lots of lean manufacturing/service with some site visits and workshops.

Operations Performance Analysis - another new, half-unit course, taught by one of the faculty and someone form McKinsey. I'm really looking forward to it, but not sure how I'll cope with one 3-hour session a week instead of two 1.5 hour ones.

Marketing Research - this is my 'extra', non-major course this semester. I figure its a useful thing to know about and uses some of the stats stuff that I enjoy. Two different professors teach it this semester. I opted for the version without a big project (because all my other classes have big projects) and seem to have got the more interesting teacher into the bargain.

Unlike first year, the courses are very project-heavy and exam-light (I just have one take-home final). I've only had to buy one text book - although I've spent about $500 on bulkpacks - got to love those HBS cases and their royalties!

It's all beginning again

2006-09-03T18:37:00.000-05:00

After my last post moaning about my inability to get things done, I ended up having an increadibly busy but thankfully also very productive week. I then managed to end it by breaking the power cord for my lap top (well actually, it had pretty much broken itself, I just finished the job while trying to fix it), which meant a week away laptopless.

I got back from Maui a couple of hours ago, and despite having checked e-mail intermitently during the week, I'm still overwhelmed by the amount of things that I need to catch up with and take care of. The next couple of days are going to be super busy - thank goodness there are only two days' of classes before we get a weekend!

Right now though my priority is getting something to eat and then having a nice hot bath. The last time I was in water it was off a particularly stunning beach, and I'm feeling pretty salt encrusted.

I guess the vacation really is over.

All this leisure isn't good for me.

2006-08-20T08:31:00.000-05:00

I'm getting lazy. Not having much to do means that it's all too easy not to do much. I try to make myself get up at a reasonable time, but even if I manage that I still seem to end up pootling around doing not a lot, and before I know it I've been out of bed for two hours but still haven't made it to the shower. On the one hand, I should be enjoying this freedom, on the other, I do actually have some things I need to do, but it's proving hard to make myself get to them.

On the list of things to do is getting myself sorted for classes starting, which they do in seventen days. I'll only have two days between getting back from vacation and the start of school (and one of those is Labor Day) so there are things I'd like to take care of this week. It would be great if I could get the bulkpacks for my classes before I go away, but I suspect that they won't be ready yet, which'll mean that I'll be standing in line with everyone else on the 5th of September. My 10.30am class on the first day has a deliverable due (nothing major, but still a deliverable), so I'm hoping to get that taken care of. And there are little things like getting deadlines into Outlook (time consuming but necessary) and sorting out all the junk in my room so that I can actually use my desk for the purpose for which it was intended.

One of the most important things I need to do to get ready for classes is to finalise which classes I'm actually going to be taking. At Wharton, we select electives via an auction, using points to bid for the classes you want. For fall classes, the first three rounds take place at the end of the Spring semester, and the final rounds (another three for full-semester and quarter one classes, five for quarter two classes) happen in quick succession at the beginging of the Fall semester. When the auction started I was very clear about which classes I wanted. I bid on five of them and got four in the first round. I continued to bid on the fifth, in the hope that someone would sell it, but had another alternative lined up. As the summer's gone on I've changed my mind a bit though. One of the courses I'd won sounds really interesting but it, or rather the professor who teaches it, doesn't get good reviews. I'm always slightly wary of putting too much trust in what other people say. I know there've been courses and professors that I've liked and others haven't and vice versa. But I talked to people I know and whose judgement I trust who'd taken a class with the professor concerned, and they weren't impressed. Coupled with these doubts, I looked more closely at two half-unit courses that are new this year,and decided I was very interested in both of them. One of them clashes with the course I'd been dithering about, which has sealed its fate and I'm dropping it. The other one clashes with both my options for a fifth course, so I need to rethink what happens there as well.

So for next semsterI have three full unit courses set, and two half unit courses that I'm bidding on. I know that I'll get one of them (it has plenty of open capacity) and am fairly confident that I'll get the other. Now I'm just dithering about my fifth unit. I don't actually need to do a whole unit. If I just took a quarter unit communications elective (ifI could get a seat in one), with the classes I'll be taking in the spring I'll meet the graduation requirements. There are a couple of full-unit courses that have caught my eye though. Both look interesting and useful, both have points for and against them, both are outside areas I intend to major in. I really just need to get my act together and decide on one of them.

Dry Air

2006-08-15T15:55:00.000-05:00

My flight home from Vancouver yesterday was my first expereince of the new travel restricitons. Restictions in Canada were tight: no liguids, gels, or similar allowed through security, and within the secure area any liguids sold had to be in open cups. At O'Hare, where we stopped en route to Philly, sale of liquids within the secure area seemed unaffected (bottles of water and soda available, drinks with lids on them) we just weren't allowed them on the plane, not that anyone seemed to be checking. when I fly, especially on longish trips, I'm normally equipped with moisturiser, hand cream, lip balm and a water spritzer as well as a large bottle of water because drink service never seems frequent enough. It'll be interesting to see how things devleop in the coming weeks.

Some news stories around this whole thing have been amusing, for a number of reasons. I almost snorted in disbelief at the news reporter who asked a 'security expert' how you could use a sports drink to make an explosive, seeming having missed the whole 'disguised as' element of the 'liquid explosives disguised as sports drinks' story. My morning paper yester day reported tha tthe ban on taking liquid aboard planes in Canada had been extneded to aerosols and juice. Am I missing something, or isn't juice a liquid? Then there's Philly aiport announcing that they will be providing booties as everyone now has to have their shoes x-rayed. I've had to take my shoes off everytime I've gone through security at Philly, so is this reuirement really a new thing? Anyway, I'll be grateful for the booties.

Ona somewhat less amusing note, today's Chronicle of Philanthropy e-mail highlighted this story form the New York Post on the impact of the hand luggage restriction on orchestras travelling between the US and UK. I used to work with someone whose daughter was a professional cellist, and had to remember to pack the cello spike in the hold rather than with the instrument. The cello had to travel in its own seat, and was apparently offered an in-flight meal on occassion.

Vacation Update

2006-08-15T15:41:00.000-05:00

the past two and a half weeks have been a mixture of rest and work. I've just come back from 10 days in Seattle and Vancouver, neither of which I'd visited before and both of which were beautiful. (Not to mention warm but not hiot weather and low humidity, a nice change from Philly.) Before I went, I got a chance to meet the Wharton class of 2008 as a panelist at the International Student Orientation and then representing the Wharton Graduate Association(WGA) at a couple of events during the first day of pre-term. The heat that day was almost unbearable (I think the heat index was something like 115) but they were all gamely getting on with things and meetoing each other. They're now pretty much half way through pre-term and had the math test today - rather them than me. I've also been keeping busy with WGA things while I traveled, when technoloy would let me that is, rather than Outlook helpfully deciding that life would be so much better for me if it refused to send any e-mails. I'm one of the WGA's Executive Directors for Academic Affairs this year, which is a fun but busy job.

I've got another 12 days of semi-leisure in Philly, which I'm hoping to use, at least in part, to swee some of the city that I haven't made it to yet. Then it's off for a week of absolute vacation on Maui before heading back into the school year again.

The wisdom of fortune cookies

2006-07-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Last night I had a fortune cookie that seemed to be hedging its bets. It had two fortunes - "Idleness is the holiday of fools" and "Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you". For now, I'm enjoying my fools holiday and trying to leave trouble well alone.

And breathe

2006-07-25T18:19:00.000-05:00

Next Monday is Wharton's International Student Orientation for the class of 2008. I'm sitting on a student panel in the afternoon to answer questions, give advice etc. One piece of advice falls in to the 'well, duh' category: don't lose you're passport, it's a pain to get everything replaced. I speak from experience.

I'm not exactly sure what happened to it. I know I had it when I was doing my tax form at the beginning of April, but when I came to look for it in May it wasn't where I usually keep it. It wasn't anywhere else in the apartment either. All I can think is that it got mixed in with some papers and recycled.

Getting a new passport was relatively easy, getting a new visa a little bit more tricky. Legally, I was fine to be in the US without being able to produce a visa, but there are occasions when bodies want to see one to demonstrate legal immigration status, and of course I need one to leave and re-enter the country. Visas can't be issued in-country, so on Saturday I headed off for a hopefully quick to Toronto.

All the official messages stress that there is absolutely no guarantee that a visa will be issued, especially if you're a resident of a third country. My conscious mind said there was nothing to worry about - London had been happy to give me a visa last year, so why should this be any different? My unconscious mind seemed to be less sure - on Sunday night I had an anxiety dream where I was panicking because the semester had started and I was late for my first 9am class (not only am I never late for class, I don't even have any 9am classes next semester). When it came to trying to eat breakfast on Monday morning my stomach seemed to be with my unconscious mind.

As it turned out, the conscious mind was right. After a considerable amount of standing in line, the requisite finger printing, and an odd but light-hearted conversation with the visa officer about a) the pictures of birds in new UK passports b)Ben Franklin and c) his (the visa officer's, not Franklin's) meetings with Prince Charles, I was able to pick up my passport complete with new visa this afternoon. I took my stomach to tea to celebrate, and hope my unconscious mind will have a good night's rest tonight in the knowledge that it'll be back on its usual pillow in Philly tomorrow.

Seriously, don't lose your passport.

Freedom!

2006-07-21T10:13:00.000-05:00

Today is the last day of my internship. It's been a mixed experience.

I came into it looking to get an insight into a slightly different type of organization, how it works and the issues it faces, rather than to learn a new skill, demonstrate a new ability, or make a big difference to my resume. In that sense it's been a success. It's also really helped me to clarify what's important to me in a job and in an organization. Unfortunately, the internship itself wasn't very well planned and a lot of the work I was doing wasn't really appropriate to an MBA internship. I definitely got something out of it, and hard financial measures of the appropriate stuff that I did do show that there were benefits to the organization, but I'm disappointed that there was a missed opportunity for it to be more beneficial on both sides.

So, I now have just under seven weeks of freedom until school starts again on September 6th. I think the last time that I had such a long period entirely to myself was in the summer of 1993.

For all those planning on applying to Wharton . . .

2006-07-14T08:23:00.000-05:00

. . . the new essays are out. Looks to me like the changes are a flip of a compulsory essay to a 'choose from a selection' one, and vice versa, plus an extra choice in the selection section.

Good luck to everyone writing them.

I love this stuff

2006-07-07T11:11:00.000-05:00

This is an example of something which would have come as a huge revelation to me a year ago, and now feels like a completely natural way of thinking. Just one of the reasons I love business school.

Crash, bang, wallop

2006-07-04T15:01:00.000-05:00

We've just had a thunderstorm, yet another thunderstorm. I honestly think I might have experienced more thunderstorms these last few weeks than in my previous 33 years. well, maybe nit quite that many, but it feels like it. They've been pretty spectacular ones two - lightning that lights the whole sky and claps of thunder that made me feel that I ought to be running through a Transylvanian castle while being chased by something undead. Watching them from inside can be quite entertaining. Being outside in one is less fun - by the time I made it home on Thursday I was quite literally soaked to the skin and my umbrella had been bent in half.

Flying the flag

2006-07-04T11:21:00.000-05:00

One of the things I noticed after I was accepted to Wharton and decided to attend was the way in which being associated with the Wharton name changed the way some people reacted to me. I remember talking to a new trustee of the organisation I worked for and the subject of my palns came up. When he heard 'Wharton' there was a shift, slight but noticeable, in his attitude. Suddenly it seemed like I was someone to be taken a bit more seriously, to be listened to a bit more carefully.

In the year and a bit since I acquired the Wharton 'flag' I've struggled with how high to fly it and how vigorously to wave it. I'm aware that some people, whether because of bad experiences in the past or their own preconceptions, hear "I'm doing an MBA at Wharton" as bragging or arrogance, however non-bragging, non-arrogant, statement-of-fact tone its said in. It also gets a bit trying being told that "you'll be able to earn a huge salary and get any job you want" when you're not actually interested in earning mega bucks and have just rceived yet another internship rejection. As a result, in casual conversations where what I do is irrlevant or I think I might get a bad reaction, I've tended to open with "I'm at grad school at Penn" and only mention "Wharton" and "MBA" later if they ask for more detail or it becomes relevant.

My internship, and talking to others about their internship experiences, has brought this issue back into focus. I'm very aware that what I do while I'm in the office shapes people's perceptions of Wharton and Wharton students. In the odd moments when I think "I'm only here for a few weeks and I'm not looking for a permanent job with them, what does it matter what they think of me?" I'm aware that it does matter very much what they think of Wharton students. Which raises the question, that I've discussed with others in simialr situations, how do you comunicate the sentiment "I'm half way through an MBA at one of the world's top business schools, is the most useful thing I can do for you really the filing/photocopying/diary coordination?" without sounding like an arrogant bitch thrusting a flag into someone's face?

Happy Independence Day to everyone celebrating throwing off the oppression of the British flag.

No animals going two by two . . . .

2006-07-01T09:28:00.000-05:00

The picture on the left is the view fom my apartment on Wednesday evening. The boat you can see is where the edge of the river usually is. You can't see it very well in the photo, but part of the railway track is flooded as well. The picture on the right is the view from my office on Wednesday afternoon. The two lines of trees give a good indication of where the river banks are.

. . . . but there have been reports of Striped Bass swimming down the street in a town upstream.

I only had the minor inconvenience of a couple of disrupted journeys (the trainline I commute on runs behind the first lot of buildings you can seein the picture on the right, and it was flooded out) but many people had it a lot worse. Thankfully, the waters are now receding and in this part of the world the river seems to be mainly back within its banks, if still high, fast flowing, very brown, and a bit smelly.

Itchy feet

2006-06-24T21:22:00.000-05:00

Lack of posting in recent days due to combining having to go work with trying to see family. Somehow I think "Look, I know you've flown across the Atlantic to see me, but I really fancy an evening at home doing laundry, watching back-to-back episodes of Law and Order, and sharing meaningless thouhts on the world wide web" wouldn't go down too well.

Today, I did manage to do laundry and spent time with the relatives at Philadelphia Zoo. Watching a film in the big cat exhibit started me thinking about how much I'd like to go to Africa again. Then I started thinking about what I want to do when my internship ends (18 working days left, and counting). Apart from possibly a couple of commitments in Philly, I basically have August and the first week of September to do with as I please. Seeing some more of North America seems sensible while I'm here, but going further afield could be fun too. Anyone have any suggestions?

Frolicking in the Blogosphere

2006-06-20T05:49:00.000-05:00

The project I'm doing for work has involved a lot of wading through blogs, and, despite, knowing that there are an awful lot of them out there, I've been struck by just what a vast realm the blogosphere is. The project's also involved a lot of blog reading, the sublime ones and the ridiculous (or all too often rediculous, a misspelling that annoys me intensly) ones. It's all too easy to get pulled in and away from what I'm doing - which is justifiable in some cases, but less so in others. Freakenomics - potentially relevant, Overheard in the UK - probably not.

Safe arrivals

2006-06-20T05:43:00.000-05:00

The family made it here safely yesterday. They flew into Newark, and I'd ordered a car to pick them up from the airport, as with three of them it was cheaper than Amtrak. Instead of the the town car I'd asked for they got a stretch limo, which seemed to impress them. I wasn't sure whether to be impressed or worried by the fact that the driver did EWR to Philly in under an hour. They survived jet lag remarkebly well and still seemed wide a wake when I bid them good night, 23 hours after they's got up in the UK. I suspect that they might have gone to bed later than I did, and, given that their ac has thermostatic control and mine doesn't, I suspect they probably slept better than I did too.

It's good to have them here.

Putting out the welcome mat

2006-06-18T19:37:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow my mum, sister, and brother-in-law arrive for a ten-day visit. I've therefore spent a good chunk of the weekend running round getting things prepared for their arrival - collecting half a forest's worth of leaflets on tourist attractions, making my apartment a little bit tidier and a little bit cleaner, etc. Actually it wasn'tso much running as walking at a moderate pace appropriate for the temperature. Does anyone know of a place where the summers are reliably sunny bt with a temperature that doesn't get abovethe mid-70s and low humidity, because I think I want to move there.

I haven't seen the family since winter break, so its going to be fun having them here.

Visual images

2006-06-18T07:55:00.000-05:00

While researching blogs at work I stumbled on this blog for a book called Stumbling on Happiness. Reading through the sample writing on the website was enough to convince me that I had to buy the book, which I tracked down with some little effort. It's sort of pop-academia (other wise known as the 'where on earth in the bookshop are the likley to have categorised this one?' genre), in the vein of Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell, and I think is one of thosebooks that has the potentially to alter the way you look at the world. I'llpost more when I finish it.

One thing that confused me though was the image on the front of the book (also shown at the top of the blog). My first thought was "what does an upturned bowl of red currents have to do with anything?". Then I realised they were cherries. OK, bowl of cherries = happiness and upturned = stumbled, but to me an upturned bowl of cherries suggests lost happiness where as the premise of the book is more along the lines that you stumble but keep your bowl of cherries intact, or that it's the stumbling that alows you to find the bowl of cherries in the first place.

In a similar vein, while looking for the book I was directed to the 'Self Imporvement' section of Barnes & Noble (I eventually found it in Psychology) where I spotted a prominently displayed book entitled "All the Good Ones Aren't Taken" (link to it on Amazon here) with a picture of a cupcake on the front. Now, to my mind, a good cup cake is light and sweet but insubstantial, and is gone from your life in a few moments, which doesn't really seem to fit with the getting a good man theme that I presume the book is about.

For anyone looking for good cupcakes in the Philadelphia area, I recommend the Flying Monkey in Reading Terminal Market. Di Bruno Brothers has ones which look beautiful but taste less good. For anyone looking for good men, do let me know if you find where they are hiding - apparently they're not all taken.

And about time too . . .

2006-06-15T17:48:00.000-05:00

City Council bans smoking in city's bars and restaurants

Request for Requests

2006-06-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

Somewhat to my surprise, people appear to have continued to visit this blog despite my abysmal lack of posting over the last few months. I'm planning to do some summary posts of the first year expereince, but if there's anything in particular you want to know then please ask away in the comments section.

Mid-term

2006-06-15T05:51:00.000-05:00

Coming from the British education system, one of the biggest differences I've noticed at Wharton is the frequency of exams. In undergrad, I started courses in late September and finished them with the one and only exam (per course) in June. At Wharton, most core courses are only six weeks long and many of them have mid-terms, which means exams every three weeks.

I'm accomplishing my US work authorisation through Curricular Practical Training (CPT) which basically means you can work because you need to in order to fulfil a course requirment. In order to cover the academic side of things, Wharton provides an on-line summer course that's basically 'workplace skills'. You do an initial an assesment to judge your exisiting skill level, the computer program recommends which modules you should do, and you then do a short (ie <5min) lesson every day. It uses up a quarter course credit, or contributes a quarter course credit to those you need to graduate, depending on how you look at it, and its not a course I'd choose to do normally, but it serves its purpose and is certainly easier than the alternative way of getting work permission.

We have to do two modules and we were told that each of these was roughly 20 lessons, with an assesment at the end. My first module was only 15 lessons and assementless, but I logged on this morning to find that the second module was giving me a mid-term. It's the first time I've taken a mid-term before I've got out of bed. I'm pleased to report that I passed, although given that the questions were the same as on the initial assesment and I'm pretty sure that I gave the same answers, I'm not sure why the program, in its infinite wisdom, decided that this was a module I needed to do.

The adjustment back to the working world

2006-06-14T15:46:00.000-05:00

After almost ten months out of the office environment, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to feel about being back in it when I started my internship. Yes, school's work, a lot of work, but it's not the same. Plus I'd had three and a half weeks since the end of classes. Week one of those three was a reading week for exams and week two was the exam week itself, so it wasn't as if it was all vacation, but it was three weeks of not having to get up at a fixed time or be anywhere at a fixed time (for the most part, exams being an obvious exception) and generally being able to structure my days however I wanted to.

That first 6am alarm was a bit of a shock to the system, not helped by the fact that it was a grey and exceptionally rainy morning. The prospect of commuting again did not thrill me (after ten years of almost daily train travel, not getting on a train for weeks or even months at a time was a real tonic). And the office setting is rather less practical for taking a post-lunch nap, if I feel the need, than is my apartment.

All that said, I've slipped back into things pretty easily, although todays headache and sore neck and shoulders remind me that spending an entire day sitting at a computer and staring at a screen is not the most civilised thing in the world to do.

Good heavens, I've learnt something

2006-06-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

After my last exam (which was almost six weeks ago now, I'm shocked to realise) I had a not-entirely-sober conversation with a group of friends about what we'd learnt during the course of our first year in the MBA program. The consensus was 'a lot' - even if we couldn't necessarily remember the detail of absolutely everything, we at least knew that there was detail out there, where to find it, and how to use it. Since then, I've had moments of realisation when I've noticed that I'm thinking about something in a differnt way or looking at something in a different light compared to a year ago, for example seeing a news story about Wal-Mart asking its suppliers to do something and thinking 'oh, they're trying to use their rent chain'.

Over lunch with some colleagues the conversation turned to financial investment, and I found myself explaining arbitrage and diversifying risk, and actually knowing what I was talking about. Corporate Finance was probably the subject I've found least professioanlly relevant (not completely irrelevant by any means, but I learnt a lot of stuff I'm pretty sure I will probably never use in my working life), but I felt like there were a lot of things in it that I, as an intelligent, informed, adult ought to understand. And at lunch today I felt all grown up.

Where I am now

2006-06-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

I'm spending the summer (at least until the end of July) interning at a foundation just outside Philadelphia. For those who don't know, foundations are basically charitable organisations which exist to give away money. Having spent ten years as a fundraiser for organisations that constantly had to worry about where the cash was coming from and if there'd be enough in the bank to pay the next months salaries, it's a nice change to be somewhere that's struggling with how to use the resources it has available.

My official role here is working on strategic communications projects, but I'm also using the opportunity to find out more about how the organisation (and the foundation sector more broadly) operates, and treating it a bit like an anthropological study - observing how things like organisational culture operate. So far the overall exoperience has been a bit mixed. There was a huge event last weekend, and I spent my first three weeks doing basic admin for that, which wasn't exactly what I signed up for or the best use opf my abilities. Since that's been got out ofe way though I'm on to more fulfilling and intereting things.

The internship recruitment experience was 'mixed'. Post-school I want to do consluting in the non-profit/philanthropic sector. It's what I said I wanted to do in my admissions essays and what I've stuck with all the way through. There are very few internships available in this area though, and those there are generally want people with consulting experience (which is understandable, given the cost of supporting a non-consulting-experienced intern), so I decided to look at a mixture of mainstream consulting jobs and internal strategy jobs in non-profits. The mainstream consulting side of the equation meant the standard round of on-campus rectuiting Emloyer Information Sessions (EIS's), coffee-chats, networking events etc., etc. , which I didn't enjoy in the least. The whole experience just felt like a big time sink that I was getting very little out of. And it didn't help that I wasn't particulalrly excited about the jobs for their own sake, they were pretty much a means to an end. When it cam to applications and interviews, people seemd fine about my non-profit background, but less fine about a non-American without strong exisiting ties here wanting to summer in the US. I can understand the logic (they don't want people who just want to be with them for the sumer, then head elsewhere full-time) but I wish they'd give people the benefit of the doubt a bit more and not jump to conclusions - people were very happy to see me for London jobs, but I know that there's no way on earth that I'd every accept a mainstream consulting gig there. Anyway, between the wanting-to-summer-in-the-US factor and the second-round-interviews-in-the-same-week-as-a-major-extracurricular-commitment factor (advice to others: a 90-hour week is not good straight before a full day interview) I came out the other side of the on-campus recruiting experience with non job, but experience that I think will serve me well for full-tinme recruiting. Looking for non-profit strategy jobs couldn't have been more different - there are a lot of them around and they don't care where you're from as they're not looking to recruit you full-time. My biggest challenge was finding something where I'd be getting some genuinley new experience rather than just doing what I've done before for a different organisation. As it turned out, it took the grand total of two e-mails and a ten-minute interview to get this job which, now that I'm passed the initial admi work, is proving to be a great fit.

I'm still here . . . .

2006-06-06T14:14:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know its been a while.

Not quite sure what happened, but I just seemed to fall out of the blogging (and blog reading) habit. So, after months of a guilty conscience periodically telling me that I really ought to do something with the blog, questions from various quarters about whether I was still blogging and subtle, or not so subtle, hints that I ought to re-start, my summer-internship boss has given me a strategy project on blogging, and I've taken it as a sign.

So, I hereby give an undertaking to get back to blogging regularly about what I'm doing, and hopefully fill in some of what I've been up to during the past nine months.

Learning

2005-09-22T16:14:00.000-05:00

Thought I would throw a couple of musings out into the ether from the learning experience so far:

It's great to get things wrong

This is a lesson I really wish I'd learnt earlier in life than I did. Getting things wrong and then understanding why, or knowing what mistakes you're likely to make, seems more effecitive than just geting things right straight off, somehow. I remind myself of this everytime I'm doing a Mgec problem for the fourth time because I still can't get a sensible answer.

There are real benefits to working in groups

From the learning team and grop work perspective so far, I'm really appreciating the different expeiences and points of view people bring. No one can be good at everything, and even within subjects people have different stengths or approaches. Not to mention that there's always likely to be someone who understands things that you don't, or who's picked up on a detail that you've missed. I know that some people find goup work overly time consuming, but personally I'm not finding that it takes too much time over and above doing things alone, and I'm feeling real benefits that more than outweigh what extra effort is involved.

Kid in a sweet shop

2005-09-18T12:07:00.000-05:00

I was sorely tempted to start this post off with an "Oh, I'm so busy" moan, if only in the hope that it would frustrate b-skewl enough to get him posting again, but I won't. I'm certainly doing lots, but not feeling overwhelmed in the way that I thought I might. Whether this is due to having waived one of this quarter's classes, or recruiting not having started yet, or the full impact of deadlines not quite being upon us, etc I don't know. But, at least for now, I'm getting enough sleep and not feeling like I'm drowning, which is fine by me.

The thing that definitely does have the potential to get a bit overwhelming at the moment though, is choice. A big school means lots going on, which is great in lots of ways because it means that it's pretty easy to find other people interested in doing the kind of thing you want to do and you don't have to do stuff that you're not interested in just because it's the only way to be social though. But it does mean that there are an awful lot of options available. Last week and this week most of the clubs have been having kick-off events, the Leadership Speakers series has started, and Career Management has been running various sessions. A lot of the time outside class hours I could easily have been in three places at once. But as the physical realities of the world make that impossible, I wasn't.

I've been trying to make 'focus' and 'prioritisation' my watchwords, so I'm concentrating on only doing the things that really interest me, and the things where I think I can be most beneficial, as well as where I can get the most out of what I'm doing. The plan is not to overcommit, so I can make sure that I do whatever I'm doing well, and that I'm getting a good balance between academics and non-academics. I'm not too bothered about grades, but I'm very bothered about learning, and while I know that learning comes from non-academics too, this is pretty much the only opportunity I'm going to have to learn the stuff on the academic side, so I don't want to waste it.

So overall, it has been a bit of a kid in a sweet shop experience in choosing what to do, but I think I know now where I want my focus to be. And I'm pretty good at 'no regrets' decision making, so I shouldn't be spending too much time on asking myself "what if I'd done that instead?" unfortunately, most of the major things I'm interested in doing have a competitive application process, so I may find myself not doing anything major if I don't make it through. Fingers crossed though, and more details later when I know what I get to do.

Worth thousands of words

2005-09-17T16:45:00.000-05:00

I had a meeting this lunchtime in Rittenhouse Square and was distracted from going back to my Corporate Finance books by an open air art exhibition. The pavements (US, sidewalks) were lined with booths in which, mainly local, artists were displaying their work. A fair amount of it wasn't my sort of thing, but there were some gorgeous peices there. I spent a long time looking at a picture of some cows, while trying to keep the phrase "I can not spend three weeks' rent on a painting" running through my head. I succeeded in not buying it, although if it's still available in 20 months' time I may have found myself a graduation present - there's something about the skewed perspective that I like, it reminds me of MC Escher somehow. There wer lots of other pieces I'd happily have given house room to as well, but they were priced at the 1-month's-rent+ level, and so were easier to walk away from. I did however give in and buy a set of three etchings, which have the subtle slightly off-beat humour which I tend to find appealing. The art-loving part of my mind is still trying to convince the financially prudent part that the purchase was entirely justified, but compared to the cows they were a bargain.

Son et Lumiere

2005-09-15T19:54:00.000-05:00

For the first, and quiet possible last, time in my life, I have a home with a water view. I overlook the Schuylkill river, and the view then extends to University City. Unfortunately, there's a freight rail line on the near side of the river and a busy road on the far side. Neither of them are particularly quiet, but it took probably less than a day after I moved in for them to have virtually become white noise. And I love the view. As well as the river I can see a prettily lit bridge over it, the majestic-looking railway station in it's floodlit glory, and a big new glass building just behind the station. There are evidently plans to do something with coloured lights on the outside of the new building. A few weeks ago I was sitting on my bed trying to revise statistics when I looked out of the window and saw that said building was covered in little red lights. They then went through a whole sequence of colour changes, ran round the building, ran up and down it, etc. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with them when they're being used properly.

I really like the architecture in Philly generally. There are streets to wander through with lovely Victorian buildings as well as the very modern architecture of centre city. There are three glass skyscrapers not too far east of where I live, and dusk the rays of the setting sun give them the most beautiful golden luminescence. And when I watch the sunset from home at the moment, it descends just behind Huntsman Hall, making it glow like a beacon on the horizon.

Classes

2005-09-11T06:30:00.000-05:00

As promised, something about the formal education side of things.

The first year is almost exclusively taken up with the core curriculum, which is pretty comprehensively explained on the website, so I won't go into further details here. Each of the two semesters is split in half to form a total of four quarters, and the majority of classes are only a quarter long, which is going to make for a pretty intense learning experience. Certainly there's practically no time to catch up if you fall behind on anything.

This quarter my classes consist of Financial Accounting, Statistics, Managerial Economics (Mgec), Leadership and Teamwork, and Corporate Finance (which is a semester long course). The first of two marketing courses also runs this quarter, but I've waived out of it. In academic terms, I'm expecting this to be the most challenging of the first year's quarters just because the majority of it is new to me. I've done nothing in the realms of Finance or Economics before and have had limited exposure to statistics, whereas a lot of the areas coming up later in the year I've already covered to some extent. Of course, by the time I get to those recruiting will have kicked in, which will provide additional challenges. Looking at things now, I'm feeling reasonably comfortable about my ability, in an absolute sense, to cope with what I'm expected to learn, the challenge is just in juggling time to spend on learning it. A six week time frame means that homeworks, projects and exams have to be tightly squashed in, and there's not much opportunity for niceties like making sure that deadlines in different subjects don't come on top of each other.

At least I'm feeling positive about all the courses, which is more than I could say this time last week. I hated Mgec during pre-term. It all seemed very conceptual, and I couldn't quite grasp what was going on or why it mattered. It didn't help that the professor we had for pre-term didn't seem particulalrly engaged or interested in making sure we were following him as he scawled equations over the blackboard. Thankfully the professor for the main course is very different. I came out of Thursday morning's class feeling interested and excited, and with a clear picture of why this stuff was useful. It probably helped that I aalso came out of the class financially better off. The professor takes the view that as economic decisions in the real world are about real financial profit and loss then economic decision in the classroom should offer that too. The homework problem had been about whether an investment was worth making, and we were given the opportunity to say if we'd make the investment and what pricing structure we'd use, and then invest $10 in it and receive the appropriate return based on our pricing decision. Four of us took him up on the offer, with two of us making money and two losing it. A class that's interesting and pays for lunch can't be bad.

V Bad Blogger

2005-09-10T05:46:00.000-05:00

It's been almost two weeks since I last posted, and I'm worried I'll get out of the habit if Idon't post soon, so here's an early-Saturday-morning summary of the last twleve days or so.

So, my last post was on th elast day of pre-term classes. The day after that was my 'learning team retreat'. 400 of us (half the class went on Tuesday and Wednesday, half on Wednesday and Thursday) had to get ourselves out of bed in time to get on a bus by 6.30am and take a 3 hour journey up to a summer camp site in the Catskill mountains. The main purpose of the retreat, we were told was to meet our learning team and start to build a strong foundation for working together during the year. (To explain, a learning team is a group of five or six people who work together during the first year, particularly on group projects for lots of classes. Teams all come from within one cohort(the group of c66 people we take all our first year classes with) and are apparently formes by random selection, which is then adjusted to ensure that there is sufficient representation of women, non-US nationals, and people from different proffesional backgrounds.) Over the two days we did a range of activities, from riddles to rope swings, spent a lot of time trying to keep dry (the weather was not good) and generally 'bonded' with our team and cohort members. I actually enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, but was not too distressed to head back to Philly once it was over, taking with me a pair of very sore arms and a bashed up finger from my failure to manage a rope swing. And I'm very happy with my team. We seem to be a usefully mixed bunch in terms of backgrounds and skills, but with a lot of shared interests and goals, which bodes well for the year ahead.

Coming back from a couple of days from relative isolation to see news reports of the devestation caused by Katrina was a huge shock. That the power of nature is sometimes unstoppable is hardly a revelation, but seeing the impact it's had and the problems that the richest naion in the world is having with dealing with the aftermath is something new. Needless to say, thoughts and prayers are with all those affected.

The day after the retreat was 'diversity training'. The issue of living and working with diversity is one in which I'm very interested (and was pretty much the topic of one of my application essays) so I was quite looking forward to this, and it pretty mush surpassed my expectations. We started with a group of actors who performed a numbr of scenes that were used as the basis for a group discussion (I realise that this may sound cheesy, but it wasn't) and then broke up ito cohorts to have a discussion led by an alumnus/almnae. The performances in particular were very thought provoking, and it was intersting to hear both the opinions that were voiced and who they were voiced by. One thing that becomes very apparent once you get people into the realm of serious discussion is that people don't necessarily think and react in the way that you might expect from their 'social persona', and the things you hear about being with a really intersting group of people and being able to learn from them start to feel very real.

Then it was the weekend. Hurrah! I went to the US Open with a group of peopl eon the Friday. It was very hot, but great fun, and provided an opportunity to discuss economic (just how do they get us to pay $5 for a litre of water) along with watching some great tennis. The rest of the weekend was whiled a way in pottering around, cooking, shopping, seeing a bit of Philadelphia, and generally re-grouping before the start of classes.

And then this last week has seen everything begin to start up properly. Tuesday was 'case day'. We had three case discussions (I only had to go to two, as one was focussed on marketing which I succeeded in waiving), designed to introduce us to cases, learn a bit about what is and isn't useful in case discussions, and, in the 'ethics' case, discuss the Wharton ethics code. In the evening we had 'Convocation', which consisted of us having to get togged up in business atire and sit and listed to speeches from the Dean (why the teaching v research arguement is bogus and why business schools are about much more than teaching people how to be good managers), one of the faculty (the phenomenum of student grades becoming less open while faculty assesments have become more open and why we should take advantage of all the opportunites we'll have to learn) and one of the alumni (the value of getting to know classmates and the alumni network). This was followed by us all heading sheep like to the University Museum for the Convocation Reception, where we got to experience possibly the worst buffet food service ever, and some mediocre food (of which there was hardly any left by the time I managed to get to the table.

I'm going to talk about classes, which kicked in on Wednesday and Thursday, as theis post is already pretty long and i can hear my breakfast calling me. For now I'll just say that I've enjoyed starting to get my teeth into real work, but I'm glad we only had two days of them before the weekend. I spent yesterday morning putting homework and project deadlines into Outlook, and it's very evident that things are going to get pretty crazy in a couple of weeks. And looking at my calendar for next week, when extra-currics start to get going, I can see things rapidly ramping up outside the classroom too. I'm excited that everything's getting going, but a little aprehensive about just how hard the next three and a half months are going to be.

Not quite sure how I managed that

2005-08-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

Just got an e-mail to say that I succeeded in placing into the 'fast' financial accounting course (it's only one quarter long, rahter than an entire semester). I hadn't been entirely convinced by my performance in the exam, so this is a bit of a surprise, although a very nice one. And, as I type, the e-mail letting me know that I passed (solidly) the maths retake has arrived. So the only outstanding result is the marketing waiver exam. We were told that 'he' can be a bit slow at marking them, so I'm not holding my breath, although hopefully there'll be a decision of some sort before a week on Wednesday, which is when we have the first class.

Pre-term almost over

2005-08-28T20:52:00.000-05:00

Exams are done (not sure how accounting went, but I'm pretty sure I nailed marketing) and tomorrow is the last pre-term class (Stats at 8am). The rest of the week consists of two days in the Catskills for the learning team retreat, then back to Philly for a diversity workshop, and then it's the holiday weekend.

From an academic point of view, pre-term is very much about getting people to where they need to be for the start of 'term-proper'. Math camp and the math exam are about making sure that we're are equipped for the math we need to do in quantatative core courses. We also have courses in Managerial Economics (known as Mgec - pronounced as 'magic'), Financial Accounting, and Statistics, which are three of the six courses that make up the first-half of the fall semester. Depending on previous exposure to the subjects, we have the choice of doing the introductory course, which assumes no prior knowledge, or a more advanced course which serves as preparation for the waiver exam (accounting offers a mid-level course as preparation for the exam to place into the faster half-semester accounting course). I've enjoyed getting back into classroom learning. The frustration of struggling to understand concpets has been more than paid off by the satisfaction of understaning something and that 'aha!' moment when it clicks. I've found the effectiveness of the teaching a bit mixed, but I think that is at least partly due to the nature of pre-term classes, and fortunately the professor I've liked the most is the one who'll be continuing to teach us next semester.

But pre-term is about much more than formal academics. There've been a whole host of optional activities, ranging from faculty lecturing on their areas of interest, to careers focussed events, to purely social activities. A particular highlight for me was a session on high performance leadership, which is something that I'm really interested in and want to see how I can explore further during my time here. And who could forget the revelation in a 'Time Management for Wharton MBA Students' session that MBAs reort the highest level of satisfaction with their sex lives (presumably that's after graduation, because I think the time and the energy for a sex life might be in fairly short supply during the course).

Away from the formally organised activities, there's been a whole load of planned and ad hoc social events. I'm not one for large, loud parties and being out till 3am on a regular basis, but if that's your thing, you can certainly do it. I've enjoyed having dinner with people, or going to the cinema, or just hanging out. I think one of the advantages of the class being so large is that there's always someone else interested in doing what you want to do, and I haven't felt the need to do things I'm not interested in just because that was what 'everyone else' was doing. Other notable aspects have been how friendly an helpful virtually everyone is. There's very much an atmosphere of people wanting to get to know others. And on Wednesday when I was juggling accountancy revision with struggling to complete a Mgec assignement, I had one conversation that started "Can I help, I was an accountant?" then walked round the corner and had another one that began "Can I help, I was an economist?". I know that it's early days and that work pressures, stress and sleep deprivation haven't yet set it, but it is good to be in that kind of atmosphere.

That's more like it

2005-08-24T19:04:00.000-05:00

Finished the maths retake about an hour ago, and there'll be little excuse if I didn't manage 100%. When I got my graded paper back from the first attempt (in the end they were available from last Thursday) it was pretty clear that there were two major reasons that I didn't pass. 1 - I'd made lsome really, and I mean really, stupid mistakes, and 2- my brain had evidently gone into a bit of a meltdown and I'd just failed to do a lot of stuff right that I knew full well how to do. Looking at the marks Ii'd been given, some hadn't been added up properly and there was one part of a question that I'd got no credit for where I thought I deserved partial credit. Had I been able to succesfully argue my case I might just have scraped a pass, but I didn't want to go down that route. For one thing, I deserved to have failed it, and for another, I was worried that my brain had freaked out so much. I don't usually get paniced by exams, in fact I often quite enjoy them. So I wanted to face the exam again and prove to myself that I wasn't going to panic.

Tomorrow offers a statistics quiz in addition to an exam so that I can try to place into the fast accounting course. I've got a marketing waiver exam on Saturday and some micro economics homework to wrestle with for Friday. I want to blog about some of the other pre-term stuff, especially the non-academics, but that's going to have to wait until the weekend.

No ego required

2005-08-17T19:23:00.000-05:00

I got together with some people for an economics study group last night. At one point during the evening the conversation turned to feelings about the transition from responsible, emplyed professional to student. Most of us seem to have got past the "why I am I giving up a good job and a steady income to go back to school and accumulate huge debts?" bit. But now we're struggling with "why did I give up doing something that I was very good at and where I was responsible for doing important and difficult things well, to struggle to understand things that I'm sure aren't that complicated really?" The feeling of conscious incompetence certainly stops heads from getting too big. Also, lots of us have moved from being in situations where we were seen to be particularly able to being among lots of other similar people, and therefore pretty average.

My ego check today was finding out that I'd failed the maths test. I'm in good company, I hear it's about 20% of the class this year, but I will admit that I'm surprised. The solutions were posted on-line yesterday, and although I'd seen some places where I'd realised I'd made a mistake, I'd also seem some where I'd got things right that I'd been in doubt about. Evidently though I did much worse than I thought. We can't get our graded papers back until Monday, for some reason (I'm not sure why the delay, as they've been marked), but I'm going to be interested to get that feebcak. Passing the exam is mandatory, so that mean's the weekend is now set aside to study (would be really helpful to have the marked paper as a guide for what I need to concentrate on), there's a review session on Monday evening, and then the retake on Wednesday evening. Second time lucky, I hope.

Things that go bump in the night, or in the corridor

2005-08-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

The plan to get a good night's sleep before the maths exam was slightly disrupted by one heck of a thunderstorm. When I was young, I was told that thunder was the sound of a giant moving his furniture. Last night, even him hurling it around the room would have been an understatement. Thor was seriously pissed off about something. I lay in bed listening to the crashing (and the constantly-sounding alarm of a car in the carpark below) and pondered on the fact that my metal bed frame was virtually in contact with my metal air-conditioning unit, which opens to the utside of the building, and what would happen if it took a direct lightening strike?

And then it was the maths exam this morning. Of the six questions, I'm pretty sure that four were fine. The fifth, in retrospect I think I got more of than I thought immediately after I came out of the exam room. As for the sixth, well I'm hoping that the fact that I wrote down the formula I was using will get me at least 1 mark, although I don't think the attempts to use it will get me any of the other 14. It has at least been comforting to know that lots of other people felt the same way, and the corridors of Huntsman Hall have been echoing to the mantra of 'partial credit'.

Concentration in the exam was not exactly helped by a. people who hadn't worked out how to disable the 'beep' on their calculators, b. someone a couple of seats down from me who had his phone on 'vibrate' and thereby treated us to the not-very-silent vibrate sound a number of times, and c. what I thought was an unreasonable amount of noise from the corridor outside. People who weren't connected with the exam I can't really blame (signs saying something along the lines of 'quiet please, exam in progress' having evidently not been deemed necessary) but the fact that the invigelator stood outside in the corridor having a rather loud phone conversation for a good few minutes, I thought was pretty poor.

Results come out later this week. Apparently c10% of people generally fail the first time and have to take it again. I'm hoping that I'm not in that 10%, because while I know that there are some things I need to do more work on I can do without the pressure of another test.

Resistance is futile

2005-08-14T21:29:00.000-05:00

One of the things that's struck me over the last week or so is how very natural a very radical change in lifestyle has felt. It seems a bit like I've entered a parallel universe where doing maths problems at 11pm or attempting to work out the price point for unitary elasticity at 6.30am are completely normal things to do, and where an 8am Stats class is actually rather fun (and I don't think it's just that I'm suffering from too much heat). I think that fact that it has been such a big and all encompassing change has actually made it easier - beacuse so much is different the entire package becomes the new 'normal'.

Along with settleing into the culture of being an MBA student, there have, of course, been some cultural experiences of being in a new country and a new city. Yesterday I had my first taste of both cheesesteaks (much nicer than I'd expected, but I still don't understand what all the fuss is about) and S'mores (possibly the only way to make Hershey's 'chocolate' palatable). On Friday, I'm going to a baseball game - I'm not particulalrly a sport fan, but I thought it was one of those things that had to be done.

But tomorrow starts with the maths test, so for now I'm headed to bed.

Getting into gear

2005-08-10T22:03:00.000-05:00

So, today marked the start of week two of pre-term and a bit of a change of gear. This morning was the last "math camp" class, which means that I've now been taught, or reminded of, the maths I need to approach the first year. The test is on Monday and I'm hoping that by then I'll just about have things straight in my head. At the moment I veer between 'this is fine' and 'kill me now', but the former seems to be becoming more frequent, so there's still hope. Tomorrow sees the start of Statistics and Financial Accounting, and also the end of my 'late' 9am starts. With the exception of Wednesdays, I'm in at 8 every morning, and I'm beginning to wonder whether 'Time Manageent for MBAs' at 8am on a Monday was really such a good idea.

With any luck today was also the last 'waiting at home for hours for a workman who turns up late', at least for a while. I dashed home from MGEC (managerial economics) so as to be there for the Comcast guy who was coming to set up our internet connection at some point between 3 and 5. He arrived at 6.30pm and left over an hour later, having failed to 'catch a signal' in one room and told us that we couldn't use our modem because it was being used by another account.The fact that the modem was physically with us and not eighteen blocks down the street (where this account is registered) apparently means nothing, and we have to get on to customer service to get it sorted out.

By the time Mr Comcast had left and I'd got something to eat I decided that I really couldn't motivate myself to go out to the Europa party that was happening this evening. While I'm all for meeting and getting to know people, having shouted 'conversations' with people in a noisy bar quickly gets tiring. In the last few days I've had a string of quieter social events (coffee with a goup of people, dinners with some of the S2S board regulars and with some of the other bloggers, drinks in a quiet corner of a bar where we were having a cohort social) and that's been much more my scene. Yelling over music and lots of other conversations just doen't work well for me.

Three days down, lots more to go

2005-08-06T18:17:00.000-05:00

So after months spent doing applications and more months waiting, the MBA experience has properly begun.

Day 1 started with an open air breakfast and lots of conversations along the lines of "Who are you? Where are you from? What do you want to do after school? Isn't it hot!" Or alternatively, "Good to see you again? What have you been doing over the summer? Where are you living? Isn't it hot!" Then we got to retreat to the air-conditioned comfort of a theatre auditorium for speeches from the Dean (see bskewl's thoughts on this), the University President, the Vice-Dean, and the President and Executive Vice-President of the Wharton Graduate Association. Next it was back to Huntsman Hall to pick up folders and course schedules, and wander round an information fair full of university and external organisations looking to offer us help and/or relieve us of our money. From there it was on to lunch with our cohort and an afternoon or orientation activities. As my cohort's timetable had a lunch break up until 2.30pm someone suggested that we orientate ourselves with somewhere serving marguerittas, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but possibly less so during the pre-term orientation that followed. Finally, pre-term orientated and campus scavenge hunted, it was back outside for dinner and more conversations similar to those over breakfast. I slipped off early to await the arrival or my bed, and got to spend a couple of hours inputting my timetable in to Outlook while waiting patiently for the delivery chap to arrive, only to get a phone call to say they were running late and did I want it delivered late that night or the following day? I opted for the latter.

Days 2 and 3 were the finishing off of initial orientation activities and the start of pre-term classes. I get to spend my mornings trying to follow maths in a lovely lecture theatre, the preservation of which's loveliness precludes the imbibing of caffeinated drinks within its walls
(unless you have caffeine reinforced water). The result of this is that by the end of the lectures my brain is really struggling to stay alert (I almost literally fell asleep during the section on logs, despite trying really hard to understand what was being said). MBA program staff are making a concerted effort to ensure thay we adhere to the 'concert rules' for classes (basically a code of acceptable behaviour), not always supported by the faculty (my pre-term Managerial Economics professor clearly isn't overly concerned by them). I transgresses on day 2 by being ten minutes late for my cohort orientation, but I did have a very good excuse, of which more below.

In and among all this I've been having a self-directed orientation with the healthcare service. When I dropped off my medical forms to student health they took one look at them, saw that I'd worked with a 'high risk group' and decreed that I needed a TB test. This wasn't unexpected. What was unexpected, was that when I went back to get the test checked I got questions about my travel history, a chest x-ray, a diagnosis of latent TB, a prescription for nine-months worth of antibiotics, and a good reason for being late to cohort orientation. Basically it seems that somewhere along the lines I've been exposed to a TB infection and my body's fought it off, but the result is that something now sits in my system. I don't have active TB and I'm not at all infectious, but if left untreated there's a 10% chance that it could 'activate' at some point. The antibiotics reduce that chance to 1%, and reduce my potential alcohol consumption to extremely moderate for the next nine months. I'm not one to get overly worried about this sort of thing anyway, but in among all the other changes and new routines that are happening at the moment, it's just feeling like one more thing to adjust to, like getting used to cooking temperatures in farenheit rather than celsius. And in a round about way it means that doing an MBA may have potentially saved my life (as I'd probably never have found out about it otherwise, unless I actually developed active TB), which is a comforting thought to reflect on when I contemplate loan repayments.

All in all, things are going good.

Pre-pre-term

2005-08-02T20:30:00.000-05:00

The last few days have seen me pottering around getting things sorted and getting myself settled. Like Iceman, I've hit K-mart, although for the more mundane necessities of storage draws, laundry hamper, pillows etc. I've ordered a bed, which arrives tomorrow (hurray!) along with a bedside table and desk chair. I've attempted to find an 'averagely priced' place for buying groceries, and tried, and so far failed, to find somewhere selling nice bread that isn't $5 a loaf. I've de-mildewed my shower curtain (oh, the glamour!) and together with the newly arrived roommate and a somewhat less than wonderful cleaner attempted to get the apartment set-up and stocked-up. Today I managed to open a bank account, and then headed off to student Health Services to spend an hour or two filling out forms, waiting to see nurses, and having needles stuck in me to either extract blood or inject vaccine. (I have to go back on Thursday to waive my arm in front of someone so that they can check my TB test.)

Yesterday, was International Student Orientation, some of which was quite useful, other bits less so, but it was good to meet up with some people again and meet others for the first time. And having spoken to several people who'd flown in the day before, I'm really glad that I allowed myself a week to adjust to the time difference. Having said that, last night was, to my shame, the first time I made it out to socialise, and I left pretty early, but I think there'll be time enough to make up for that in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow pre-term starts properly, with a day of talks, introductions, and a scavenger hunt (although with a forecast of 94 degrees and high humidity I hope no one's expecting overly vigorous scavenging), and then we get stuck in to the work on Thursday with maths from 9-12. We officially find out our cohort (group of c60 students that we have most of out first-year classes with) tomorrow, but the information's already been added to the on-line facebook, so it's been interesting to browse through and see who I'm going to be spending all those hours with over the coming year. And it's going to be even more interesting getting to know them.

Well, I made it

2005-07-28T18:54:00.000-05:00

The last few days before the move were pretty manic. I seemed to spend a huge amount of time moving heavy objects up and down stairs, and the rest of it in pretty constant motion of other sorts. But I managed to get things put/given/thrown away of packed up to go. One of the biggest issues was getting rid of rubbish. In an effort to reduce landfill the local Council had recently brought in a rule limiting refuse to one bin per household per week. From an enviromental point of view that's admirable, but from the point of view of someone needing to get rid of a sizeable quantity of stuff, it's a pain. So at 2am on Tuesday morning I was prowling the streets like some sort of mutant Father Christmas 'donating' the odd bag of rubbish here and there. I think I got about nine hours sleep over the course of three days and hardly ate anything, so by the time I made it to the departure lounge at Heathrow, having some how managed to check in 128kg of luggage and not had to pay any excess baggage charges, if
I could have found a way of eating and sleeping simultaneously, I would have done.

But I'm now installed in my apartment, I've unpacked (in the sense of having got everything out of the suitcases, although it's not exactly put away yet) and I managed not to melt in the ridiculous heat that we had yesterday. I'm pottering around and gradually getting things sorted out, and looking forward to my roommate arriving on Sunday and getting properly started next week.

Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye and goodbye

2005-07-24T16:09:00.000-05:00

I seem to have spent the last month steadily saying goodbye to people. Off-site colleagues who I wouldn't see again before I left, members of the trustee board, family at my sister's wedding last week. And there've been the 'lasts'. Last management meeting, last stewarding gig (for the incomparable Kit and the Widow, increadibly talented and lovely people to boot), last train journey. This week just gone has been particularly full of goodbyes and lasts. I finished up in the office on Friday, had by last day at church today, and there are farewell drinks tomorrow (hopefully in a rather nice beer garden, although as the UK's longest dry spell for 38 years broke this morning, we might have to sit inside the pub instead).

In the course of all this two things have particularly struck me. First has been how different it's felt leaving my job this time compared to previously. Every time I've changed jobs before it's been over the Christmas/New Year break, which has always taken some of the focus off a bit. But more importantly, when I've left jobs before it was because they were coming to some sort of end, even if it was just that I'd taken them as far as I could and it was time to move on. This time though, the leaving's caused by a pull rather than a push, and it feels strange to be leaving somewhere when I still have so much enthusiasm for what I could do there.

The other thing that's struck me, is my feelings about leaving Bristol, where I live (at least for another 36 hours or so). I've realised it's the first place I've lived that I've actually chosen to live in. Previously, I was where my family where, or where I was studying, or where my job was. But Bristol was a definite choice of somewhere I wanted to live, even if it maybe wasn't the most logically practical choice. And despite the undoubted problems of its impracticality, it's somewhere I've loved being. I think the huge pluses of being somewhere I actually want to be are something that I need to keep in mind when it comes to deciding where I go post b-school.

But for now, it's not much longer until I'm Philly bound. This computer is shortly to be boxed up and shipped off to my sister, so I'll be making only periodic contact with the world of the web until I'm in Philadelphia and have laptop and internet access sorted out.

TTFN.

Paper Mountains

2005-07-21T07:08:00.000-05:00

For the last 3.5 years I've been splitting my working week between home and the office, which are a couple of hundred miles apart. As a lot of my work is paper based, and our office servers can't be accessed remotely, this has meant constantly transfering physical and electronic files from one location to another. In this, my last, week, I've been entirely in the office so that I can get all the loose ends tied-up, or at least as many of them as I can manage, so I made a point of ensuring over the weekend that I sorted out everything that I'd got at home that needed to make it back to the office. Unfortunately, I seem to have managed to leave one fairly vital set up of papers at home, which means that along with everything else on my 'to do' list this weekend I'm going to have to get some work done and then send some documents in to the office using Royal Mail's 'do not lose on pain of death' service.

I've spent this morning clearing out my filing and have managed to add a whole load of stuff to the recycling pile, which has been pretty cathartic, and various other piles of paper are being redistributed to other people's desks. Suddenly it really feels like I'm leaving tomorrow.

Why didn't I just go to Cambridge?

2005-07-20T05:18:00.000-05:00

That's been a question that has popped, unbidden, into my head pretty frequently over the last couple of weeks (making the massive assumption that Judge would have been prepared to have me, of course). 'Why did I not take an extra week off work?', has been another one, even though I know I'll have the answer when I get my final pay packet next Monday.

Previously, I'd been somewhat incredulous about people who started to get cold feet about going to B-school at such a late stage, but now I'm beginning to relate. Why am I moving thousands of miles and plunging myself hugely into debt? Why am I leaving my organisation when it's got an interesting period ahead that I know I could make a significant contribution to? What if I can't get a job afterwards? What if something happens to my family and I'm a long and expensive plane ride away? Will I cope with the workload? Will I get enough sleep? Is this one huge mistake?

In the course of sorting out my computer files I re-read my 'Why MBA, why now, why Wharton?' essay, and of course the answers to the questions raised by last minute jitters are all in there. I know that if I phoned my boss right now and told him that I wanted to stay, he'd be delighted, as would my landlord. I suspect that if I applied to one-year UK schools to start in 2006 I'd probably get in somewhere respectable. But I also know deep down, that heading off to Wharton next week is absolutely the right thing to do, and I'm not going to change my mind. The next few days are going to be fraught in all sorts of ways, but once I've done all that I can at work, my remaining furniture has been dispatched where it's going, my books/dinner service/whisky collection/croquet set have all been safely stored, my clothes are in suitcases, and I'm in the car on the way to Heathrow, I'll be able to get properly excited about it all.

Six days and counting.

Too much to do, too little time

2005-07-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

I'm in the midst of trying to sort myself out at home for moving and at work for leaving, so blogging is having to take a bit of a back seat at the moment. Efforts to get things done are not being helped by a ressurgence of hayfever and hot and humid (for these parts) weather. (Moving a very large and heavy TV out of my flat and into a friend's car during the hotest part of yesterday was particularly unpleasant. At least we managed to get it down two flights of stairs without it falling and squashing me, which we felt would a - have been a bit of a waste of all the effort that had gone into getting to Wharton, and b - have made a rather nasty mess on the carpet.) Muggy night and early start this morning resulted in c2hours sleep last night, which also hasn't helped productivity today.

More substantive blogging soon, hopefully.

"Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

2005-07-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to know how to start a post about yesterday. We had a meeting of our Trustee Board and the AGM at our offices yesterday, so the first we heard of the bombings was when we got phone calls from people saying that they might be late. At that stage, it looked liked problems with the Tube's power supply, and we were breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't someone using the 2012 Olympic bid as an excuse for grabbing the worlds attention. No one was even giving a thought to a possible G8 connection. Over the next few hours, as the cause and the scale became increasingly clear, it felt distinctly odd being only about 20 miles from the explosions, and yet in the middle of quiet, leafy countryside where the only change was the large number of military helicopters flying past (there's a base not too far away).

News reports are painting a mixed picture - panic and quiet 'getting on with it', hotels being accused of profiteering and supermarkets donating food to Accident & Emergcy Departments and Ambulance Stations so that casualties and emergency workers could be fed easily. While the death total is still unclear, it loks like it's going to be under 100, which is mercifully less than it could have been. For those injured or bereaved, the scale is almost irrelevant, but I think everyone is aware of how much worse it could have been and thankful that, while it was the worst peace-time bombing in London, we weren't breaking international records.

Like Suzy, I know Bloomsbury well having been a student there. The bus that exploded can only have been metres from the statue of Gandhi in Tavistock Square, a place that has strong links with campaigns for non-violence. Fortunately, it was also close to the British Medical Association, which meant a ready supply of doctors. I may be a lapsed-adopted-Londoner these days, but I still have a huge affection for the city and pass through it regularly enough to share the 'there but for the grace of God' feeling with lots of other people.

A news reporter this morning was commenting on the eerie quiet of the now-running-again tube trains, and wondered whether it was a sign of people being scared. I beleive, and very much hope, that it isn't. Given the transport disruption yesterday ans uncertainty about when services would start running again, I think an awful lot of offices simply decided to close today. Come Monday I expect the rush hour will be as crowded as ever. When I hear Tony Blair yesterday talking about not being put off a mormal way of life, I thought it would be pretty fair to say that bombs and the threat of bombs are pretty much a normal way of life for London. Having lived there pre-IRA cease fire, I remember explosions, cordons and regular security alerts. While attacking transport at the hight of the rush hour and with no warning is a horific new tactic, London and the UK have know for a long time that we can't assume that we're safe, which means that such an attack doesn't have the same psychological impact as it might other cities. Certainly there's a definite sense that out of the shock and pain is coming a collective "fuck you!", to use a technical term, towards the bombers.

The statement from Ken Livingston, the Mayor of London, I think says very well what a lot of people are feeling. And check out qwghlm for the thoughts of an articulate and thoughtful blogger.

London

2005-07-07T06:33:00.000-05:00

I've been having a maniac few days and was hoping to find a few minutes to say how pleased I was with yesterday's Olympic decision. This morning's carnage in London makes that all seem pretty irrelevant though. Thought and prayers with everyone affected.

Result!

2005-06-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

Well, sort of.

The telephone call I was waiting for came, and the news was positive, although not quite as posistive as I'd have liked. I'm going to refrain from going into the intricacies of the situation, both becasue it's complicated to explain and because I probably shouldn't talk to the world about the details, but in essence, the positive news is that the organisation now has just over US$1 million more than we thought we were going to have. (NB US$ used for sake of international ease, and because it makes for pleasingly large numbers!) The less positive is that it's about $200,000 less than I'd asked for and a sizeable chunk of it that I'd hoped would be unrestricted (meaning we could use it for whatever we wanted) has been tied to specific purposes. Having said that, the purposes are such that it's going to be used for work that we absolutley have to do, and which we wouldn't get directly funded for from any other source, so it's the next best thing to being unrestricted really.

I'm not as cock-a-hoop about the outcome as I thought I'd be, or as I really should be $1 million is a heck of a lot of money, at least it is in terms of this organisation. It'll make a real difference to the work we do, and to my management-team-colleagues' ability to get a good night's sleep. It's also a bit of a personal validation. I was brought into the organisation to raise money, but for various reasons (some to do with the external enviroment, some to do with the organsiation itself, and no doubt some to do with me personally) I haven't had the success that I'd have liked. I know, and keep being told by colleagues, that I've contributed even more valuably in other ways and built a foundation which will make fundraising easier in the future, but the shortfall in cold hard cash coming in has still grated. And there have been individuals who've discounted external factors, failings of the organisation itself, the fact that a fundraiser should have been brought in at least a decade earlier, etc. and regarded the results as solely down to my personal inadequacies. So it's going to be good to lay this dragon at their feet and say "ha!". And I feel comfortable myself that if this were the only thing I'd achieved during my time here, I'd still have been a worthwhile expenditure.

So forget the 'sort of'. This was a great result - good for the organisation, good for the work, and good for me.

That decision day feeling

2005-06-30T05:58:00.000-05:00

Tuesday was decision day for the big submission that I was working on in May. It happened in a closed meeting and we have to wait to have the outcome officially communicated to us, but we should hopefully get an informal notification by phone today. It's got everyone jumpy - the Finance Director keeps sticking her head out of her office to check if we've heard anything, at least two of our trustees have phoned, and I'm sure the Chief Exec is quietly fretting about it too, but he's in transit at the moment so isn't calling me. I was going to say that I was somehow managing to keep a zen-like calm about the whole thing, but then the phone rang and my stomach leapt in the same sort of way it did back when I was expecting imminent notification of school decisions. I am being significantly more productive at work than I was then though, no doubt due to the "I only have three weeks left" factor.

Girls' Toys

2005-06-29T05:43:00.000-05:00

Like Aregon and MagaritaLuvr, I've been starting to get myself technologically equipped for school. Unlike some other schools, Wharton doesn't require you to have a particular brand of laptop, or even a laptop at all. In fact I talked to a second year during Winter Welcome who said she didn't have her own computer at all, she just used the labs in Huntsman. (The reaction of other students to this suggested that she was very much the exception to the norm.) We have been given minimum suggested specifications though, and there's a back-to-school sale with laptops, desk-tops, accessories and peripherals available at really good prices.

I currently have a three-and-a-half-year-old desk top, which I have no intention of taking with me, and no laptop, so I decided that an investment in portable computing was needed. The back-to-school sale offers to IBM T43 models, one of which meets the recommended specifications and one which comes in a bit under. The recommended specs (1GB of RAM and 80GB of Hard Drive) seemed a bit OTT, a perception that was pretty much confirmed by other people I talked to, so I've opted instead for 512MB of RAM, 60GB of Hard Drive and a cost saving of just under $500+tax (compared to the higher spec model). I pressed the button on the order today, and hopefully it'll be waiting for me when I arrive on campus. (US based students can have theirs shipped in advance, but those of us overseas have to wait.)

I've also invested (separately) in an external hard drive, as a security back-up, so I can move old files off my lap top, and to help me transfer data when I move. I freely admit that I'm a bit of a boy when it comes to technology, and a lot of a girl when it comes to lovely shiny things, so the Apricorn EZ Bus is a real winner as far as I'm concerned. Not that I've actually used it yet, but it looks and feels great, and the shipping was incredibly fast (less than three days from the US). I'm just hoping it won't cause airport security concerns if I pack it in my hand luggage.

The tangled web we weave

2005-06-27T02:27:00.000-05:00

My organisation is recruiting for a number of vacancies at the moment, one of which I'm directly involved in. In this context, it's been interesting to read blog postings in the last few days from iwhoelse on resumes and Hugging Trees on MBAs from obscure institutions. In lots of ways I really enjoy recruiting. I like the challenge of finding the best fit between job and person, finding out more about people through interviews, and having the opportunity to spot talent and potential. The aspect I always find depressing though is reading through so many CV's / resumes and covering letters that are really poor in terms of both content and format. So many people do themselves a disservice by not communicating themselves well.

This time one particularly stood out. While most people say too little, this applicant had said too much - a full page covering letter and multi-page CV, all in tiny font. There were huge amounts of information that was completely irrelevant or just didn't add anything, and lots of jargon which really said nothing. One thing that caught my eye though was an MBA from an place I'd never heard of, so I thought I'd google it. I came up with two possibilities, one a perfectly legitimate if slightly obscure school that doesn't appear to offer an MBA, and one an institution that offers qualifications on the basis of 'life experience' (essentially, mail order purchase, from what I could work out). This made me dig a little deeper into other elements, like the membership of an high powered-sounding professional organisation, the main qualification for which appears to be payment of a fee. One of the positions on the CV would have meant working with one of my colleagues, but she has absolutely no recollection of the person in question; some claims of achievements in other jobs were worded in such a way that I got a sense of an attempt to imply something that wasn't really there while not actually claiming something that was untrue. And there were other claims that I don't doubt to be true, but where I'd question the wisdom of including them to impress one of the few audiences that knows that they're not quite as impressive as they may sound. The sad thing is that if all of this hadn't been included , it would have been a strong application, and if we hadn't wanted the person for that particular job, we would probably have want to work with them on other projects. As it is, I think we'll be steering well clear.

I know the question of 'harmless exaggeration', 'embroidering the truth', outright lying, and verification procedures concern some people, so I offer this as a cautionary tale. Lies can and will be found out, and people can sense exaggeration and embroidery. It only takes one little thing to be 'off' for a question mark to be thrown over an entire application, and the benefits of very real skills and achievements can be rendered meaningless by an attempt to be 'a bit creative'.

Where on earth did the time go?

2005-06-27T01:31:00.000-05:00

Well, one month today I'll be in Philadelphia. A date that has seemed far away for so long has suddenly sprinted up on me. I look at everything I need to do at work and everything I need to do at home and I start to panic somewhat. But I always work better when I've got a deadline pressing, so I'm relatively confident that I'll be OK as long as I get my finger out.

At least I know I've taken care of most of the important stuff. My passport, complete with visa, is now back with me. I've registered for pre-term and yesterday I managed to get a realtively decent photo taken uploaded for the facebook and my Penn Card. The Penn Card is the student ID, the Facebook an on-line student directory with photographs. The one piece of advice I've got from just about everyone has been "get a good picture for the facebook becasue they'reused in all sorts of places". Now, I don't think I photograph particularly well and I hate having my picture taken. Apart from anything else, I never know what to do with my mouth - if I smile naturally the way my eyes crease makes me look like I've got a bad squint, and if I don't smile at all I look like a stuffed fish, so I struggle to find the optimum point somewhere between the two. Miracle of miracles though, I managed to get a pretty decent picture, at least one I won't be too distressed to have associated with me for the next few years, and it's now scanned and uploaded. The next major thing to do is find somewhere to stay for the first few days I'm in Philly until I can move into my apartment on the 31st.

Keeping in touch

2005-06-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

I'm in the process of writing a sort of reflections on the application process blog entry, which is turning into a sort of Fundraiser's Guide to B-school applications. It's looking like is going to be quite long, I haven't quite got the structure right, and I keep getting interrupted (by things like my job) but hopefully I should manage something soon.

Also distracting me, have been various mailings from Wharton (which I'll also blog about at some point soon), the most recent of which was the 'Wharton Insiders Guide' - "a light-hearted description of our program and life in Philadelphia". It includes an section for international, with general tips and specific suggestions from students from various countries and continents. In the UK section, along with comments on the availability of the two essentials for any British student no matter where in the world they are (beer and Heinz Baked Beans), was a recommendation to use Skype (a VoIP service) for calls home. This certainly looks interesting, and if it removes the need to have a land line solely to keep in touch with people on this side of the pond, it could definitely be worth it. I decided to set up an account (as its free) and have a play last night. It has a theoretically nifty facility to find possible matches with people in your Outlook Contacts (so you can see who uses the service that you know) although having seen the potential matches it found for mine, I'm not entirely sure how this works, as some as them seemed extremely bizarre. Of the sixty-three possibles, sixty very clearly weren't the same people as in my Outlook (and in most cases I couldn't see what would lead the program to think they might be), two might have been matches (not enough information to be able to tell either way) and one clearly was a match to my ex-husband, who I'm not sure why I still have in my contacts list, as I have zero desire to contact him.

Anyway, if anyone has any experience of Skype or VoIP more generally and would like to share their views, please stop by Comments.

Feels like something's missing

2005-06-19T15:09:00.000-05:00

Well the ten-day-run-arond is over. I was 'up north' for my sister's hen night this weekend, and made it home earlier this evening, somewhat delayed due to seemingly obligatory weekend engineering works. These necessitated a detour into South Wales, prompting the usual 'have we got our passport' jokes from fellow passengers. I realised that I am in fact currently passport-less, as it's with the US embassy getting its visa, and it feels really odd. It's not as if a week is a long time (the visa takes c five working days to process), but there is something odd about not having it around, not being able to leave the country if the need or urge should arise. Although maybe that's no bad thing - if I had the means I'd be sorely tempted to skive work, try to meet up with Poweryogi on the continent (he can't make it to the UK) and experience some of the excitement that seems to be following him around.

I'm beginning to feel like my flat has a revolving door

2005-06-17T12:41:00.000-05:00

Every time I've got home this week it's been to turn round and leave again within a few hours. This time I at least get over eight hours here, and hopefully more than five hours' sleep.

Today's running a round has been productive though. I have a US F1 visa, or at least I will have when my passport makes it back to me next week. The whole process was much quicker and less searching than I'd feared. I didn't need any supporting documents other than my bank statement, and the visa officer didn't even look closely enough at my I-20 to work out that the costs and funding listed were only for the first year, not the entire 22 months. I didn't feel the urge to enlighten her. I was out only an hour and a quarter after my apointment time, which I think is a faster turn-around than I've had for tourist visas to other countries. So providing the INS person who's desk I pitch up at when I fly in doesn't have an aversion to the colour of my socks, I should be fine.

Now, off to pack another bag ready for heading off again tomorrow.

Flying visit

2005-06-13T15:43:00.000-05:00

Well the exam's done. In terms of my performance, I think I'm happy. In terms of the exam itself, there are things I'm uncomfortable with, which I may or may not blog about at a later date. Now I'm at home, briefly. I've laundered clothes, swapped paperwork over, re-packed a bag, and in a little over seven hours I'm back on the road again.

Roll on Sunday afternoon.

Keep on moving

2005-06-12T14:34:00.000-05:00

Today is day 3 of a 10-day period that's being spent running about all over the country. Friday was spent traveling north, and almost ended in disaster when I lost my footing on a railway station staircase. I had visions of ending up in the same state as FutureMBAGirl (ie with a broken foot, not Texas), but fortunately, although my bag tumbled to the floor, I managed to fling myself at the handrail, and so suffered only a sore knee and ankle and a badly bruised armpit.

Yesterday was or annual work 'big event'. The last couple of years I've been in charge of organising it, but this year I was expecting just to be able to show up and look pretty. No such luck. I was running around just as much as when I'd been in charge, and I think it was actually harder because I hadn't done all the planning in advance. It's always a bit of a nightmare because the nature of the event means that we have to work in an unfamiliar venue, in a limited time window with lots of things having to be done on a just-in-time basis, and with three or four different elements happening in slightly different places. But, as always, we managed, it went really well, and I even managed to get lunch this year (although I missed pudding) which doesn't always happen. It was also an opportunity to say good bye to some people that I'm unlikely to see again before I move.

In the evening I headed back to my mum's (which is where I'm staying for a couple of nights) and another round of bridesmaid dress fitting. Standing in heels while people fuss about skirt lengths and side seems is not fun when you've been on your feet all day and are desperately in need of a long soak in a bubble bath. But today has been blissfully relaxing - sleeping late, pottering round, home-cooked Sunday Lunch, and no pressure. It's been particularly nice to be here because I'm unlikely to get the chance to visit again before I head to Philadelphia, and as my mum is planning on moving house there's every chance that this building won't still be 'home' when I come back for Christmas. It's not the only house I lived in when I was growing up, and it was only really my full-time residence for three or four years, but it's been 'home' for almost twenty. I'm going to miss 'real' things about it, like the spectacular view from the front windows, but I think I'm also going to miss the intangible security that's represented by knowing that there's a room here that's mine, even if I visit it too rarely.

But things have to move forward, and tomorrow I move on to London to do my CFRE exam and get my visa photo taken. Then it's another train home where I swap over clothes and paperwork and get a short night in my own bed before setting out on a three-day work trip early on Tuesday.

Having pins stuck in me might be less painful

2005-06-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

So I dropped my immunization form into my doctor's on Monday, thinking it would be nice and straight forward. No such luck. There was an aswerphone message waiting for me when I got home, which I returned this morning. Although the docotr was going out of his way to be helpful, I pretty much got the impression that he'd taken one quick look at the form and decided it was all too hard. He suggested that he get all my relevant records photocopied, I then pick up the copies and form, fill it out and then return with the form and the photocopies and get the necessary signature. The only way in which this makes it any easier for the doctor, as far as I can see, is that he doesn't have to fill in all the little circles for the dates of the jabs, which, as he seemed to think this would be a terribly time consuming job, was sensible from his point of view. As filling in the little circles took me less than five minutes, I'm not convinced.

The photocopies gave me most of the relevant information three times over, and quite a bit of irrlevant information twice, and do suggest that, as suspected, I need a measels jab. Now I was pretty sure this would be easy. I might not be able to get a single measels jab, as they're not generally available on the NHS, but I could have an MMR one instead. So I phoned the surgery to make an appointment. Turns out there is absolutely no MMR vaccine available in the area at all. No singles measels either (or mumps for that matter). Apparently this is down to the fact that the Government launched a big drive to get young adults immunized for mumps (because thye're a bit too old to have had the injection as infants, but didn't tend to get the infection in childhood because of herd immunity after the vaccine was introduced) without extra vaccine being available. So parents of young children are being urged to protect them with MMR, young adults are being told they need to be protected against mumps, I need to fulfil UPenn's medical requirements, and non of us can get a blessed injection.

I was told to phone back in a month and see if any vaccine had arrived. Failing that, I guess I'm going to have to get one done once I get to Philly.

Cautionary tale on references

2005-06-07T07:13:00.000-05:00

A story from today's news about a woman suing over the reference she was given for a b-school application. I do rather wonder about the logic of asking for a reference from a company you succesfully sued for sexual discrimination.

Edited to add: Another story on this, from Bloomberg, here. The fact that the reference was part of the settlement on the original sex discrimination case gives a degree of explanation. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, as not only is there the question of perception as to what makes for a fair reference, but also the fact that as no applications were actually submitted it's presumably somewhat hypothetical as to what the outcome of using this reference, or not providing a reference from that employer, would have been.

My name's britchick, and I'm a biblioholic

2005-06-07T02:40:00.000-05:00

I appear to have been tagged twice on this book thing. Does that mean I have to give ten books?
Current and recent reading matter is:

The Jane Austen Book Club - started on the train this morning. Not sure where I got this one from (I'm pretty sure I didn't buy it). I've only read a couple of chapters so am still reserving judgement on whether it's as 'chick lit-y' as the cover suggests. Edited to add: I got a little over half way through it on the train home last night and can definitely say that it's chick-lit, and contrived chick-lit at that. Not my cup of tea and I don't think I'll bother finishing it.

The Complete Fundraising Handbook - I have my CFRE exam on Monday and thought it might be worth doing some work for it.

Friends for Life: Relationship Fundraising in Practice - ditto

Lifeless - I'm a fan of crime/mystery novels, and Mark Billingham writes good ones.

Sickened - I don't usually go in for 'I had a terrible childhood' real-life stories and actually bought this thinking it was something else, but it turned out to be pretty good

All-time favourites:

Paul Scott's Raj Quartet - I first read this for my undergraduate dissertation, and go back to it every few years. I love the vastness of it and am fascinated by the inter-twining of the histories of individuals and nations.

Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" Trilogy - imaginative, complex and thought provoking.

The Complete Poems of John Donne - I love metaphysical poetry, and it's really interesting to see the equal but changing passions of the young man and the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral.

Diary of a Provincial Lady - very funny

The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark - a childhood favourite that I rediscovered recently.

Coming to a town near you

2005-06-06T01:35:00.000-05:00

If you're thinking of applying to Wharton next year, keep an eye on this page for details of student-run information events over the summer. And if you're thinking of applying elsewhere, the information session roadshow can start sooner than you might think, so it's worth keeping in touch with your target schools' websites.

Avoiding being a pin-cushion

2005-06-05T15:00:00.000-05:00

Another bit of paperwork that I've been working on getting out of the way is my medical and immunization history. The medical history is self reported and mostly straightforward, although there are a couple of places where I'm not sure what they're asking. Loss of Vital Organ-No/Yes, is pretty clear but does Prescription Medications - No/Yes mean am I currently taking any or have I ever taken any? The immunization form has to be filled out and signed by a nurse or doctor. The way that the National Health Service works means that your General Practitioner (primary healthcare provider) records follow you round from doctor to doctor, so even though I've been registered with eight different practices over the years, the current one has all my records since birth. Even so, with the help of a very handy vaccination record card that my undergrad university provided and my mother's comprehensive records of childhood jabs and illnesses, I've got together a list of all the relevant dates so whoever fills out the form doesn't have to search through everything. It looks like I'm only missing one measles jab, which may have to be made up with an MMR as single vaccines aren't that readily available over here. I've never been squeamish about needles or injections, but they do tend to result in sore arms and resultant lack of sleep, which I can do without.

Lots of bits of paper for one vital bit of paper

2005-06-05T02:37:00.000-05:00

My visa interview is in just under a fortnight's time. As this is the penultimate stop of ten days spent running round the country for work and family commitments, with an exam and the visa interview thrown in for good measure, I've been getting my paperwork together this weekend. I have everything I know they'll want (application forms, I-20, financial information, proof that I've paid the $100 SEVIS fee), things they say they might ask for (degree certificate, transcripts, demonstration of links to the UK, old passports showing travel to the US), and then an assortment of others bits and pieces they're probably not going to want to see but it won't hurt to take along just in case (GMAT scores, copy of marriage certificate, divorce documentation, Deed Polls showing changes to surname). All I've got left to do is pay the visa administration fee (£60), which I can take care of at a local bank tomorrow, and get my photo taken. The specifications for the photo are very precise, which means one from a machine won't do. A photographer very near to where I live does compliant photos, but when I popped in to ask about it yesterday I was informed that it would cost £25! While I've pretty much got used to the entire going to Business School process eating up money, that seems a bit steep. There's a place a few minutes away from the US emabassy that does lots of passport and visa photographs, so I've dropped them an e-mail to see if their rates are any more reasonable. If they are, then I'll stop in when I pass through London next week.

Inside information

2005-06-02T14:13:00.000-05:00

While looking for some statistics to contribute to a pointless discussion on the B-week forums, I came across this article on the factors involved in admissions decisions. It looks at the charateristics of admissions 'hits' and 'misses' and what schools can do to get more of the former and avoid the latter. In many ways it doesn't say anything that schools and admissions consultants haven't been saying over and over again to people who've bothered to listen, but I think seeing the information pulled together and from an admissions professional's perspective puts a bit of a different angle. Could be an interesting read for anyone approaching applications.

RIP a good and faithful servant

2005-06-02T11:22:00.000-05:00

Sometime between 8 and 8.30am BST today my computer screen died. A postmortem has yet to establish a definitive cause of death, but old age is suspected (3.5 in lcd-flatscreen-years being approximately equal to 82 in human ones). Resusitation was attempted by all the usual means (turning off and turning back on again, changing fuses, trying different outlet sockets, attempting to try diferent power leads, etc), but to no avail. Now I know that all things must die at somepoint, but did it really have to be less than two months before I leave the country, and on a day when I really, really needed to get things done? Still, as the man in PC World said, at least monitors aren't as expensive as they used to be.

Trust me, I'm a spin doctor

2005-05-31T11:14:00.000-05:00

Due to running round meeting ridiculous deadlines last week I missed what could have been an interesting TV programme. Entitled "The Dirty Tricks Election" it followed an undercover reporter who worked as part of Labour's campain team during the recent general election and 'exposed' what I believe is known in the US as 'astroturfing', ie faking grassroots support. I did manage to read an article about the programme the day after though, which expressed the writer's shocked reaction to learning that the people pictured at poster unveilings were in, fact, party workers and that letters written to newspapers came from political activists etc, etc.

My reaction to this was "well, duh". It is, after all, pretty standard behaviour for any campaigning organisation, although I realise that everyone might not know this. Those news stories you see of Greenpeace protesters 'invading' oil rigs or chaining themselves to Range Rovers, well the people in orange are members of staff I'm reliably informed by an ex-employee (of Greenpeace, not me). I've been involved in campaigning in previous jobs, and yes I've encouraged supporters (or 'activists' if you prefer) to write to newspapers and provided them with materials to help. I've written to newspapers myself. I don't think it's that suprising that people who are motivated enough and interested enough in an issue to put pen to paper are also motivated and interested enough to get involved with an organisation that campaigns on that issue. And if you're motivated and interested enough to work for such an organisation, does that mean you have to be condemned to silence? If the people at the poster unveilings were rent-a-crowd actors or the letters came from professional writers and non of them cared tuppence for the issues, just for the fee they were paid, then I think everyone would have a right to be outraged. But as far as I'm concerned support from someone who genuinely holds an opinion about an issue remains valid support even if they are part of an 'activist network' or an employee.

What angered me about the whole thing was the horror from journalists. Are you really teling me they weren't aware of this? Of course they were! And if they weren't thenI'd seriously question their professional competnecy. News-generators and news-reporters are very much two sides of the same coin - one wants coverage, the other wants something worth covering. A poster unveiled with a crowd of cheering supporters makes for much better pictures than a poster with just couple of rather dull politicians there. A letters page with letters is a heck of lot more desirable than one without. The media is perfectly aware that politicians, and others, attempt to manipulate it, and will let that manipulation happen if it suits.

And it's not as if the news media has much right to the moral high ground either. Another thing that too many people aren't aware of, or just don't think about, is that the majority of news-outlets are commercial concerns. They exist to make money just as much as a car manufacturer, or a bank, or a retailer. They have outright owners or shareholders who want profits. To get profits they need advertisers and/or sales. They need readers/viewers/listeners to generate the sales and advertising reveues, and they need 'attractive' stories to get those people. So, given the choice between something that reinforces their audience's world view or one which suggests it's wrong, which are they going to opt for? A fair and balanced but maybe slightly bland story, or one that takes a narrow perspective and produces a 'newsworthy', if skewed picture? Hmmm, tough choice. I'm not saying that there aren't journalists and editors and news-outlets with high principles and motivations much more noble than making a name for themselves/keeping there job/making sure the chairman's happy. I know that there are and good journalism has done a lot of good. But there's too much bad, or just lazy, journalism around too, and too many people who sit on their high horse while seemingly ignoring the stink coming from the stables.

Just had to share this one

2005-05-31T03:10:00.000-05:00

Today's Dilbert - hope for every British accented male heading to a US business school

Warning, cuteness ahead

2005-05-30T01:56:00.000-05:00

If you're missing the pictures from Megami's blog (which appears to have disappeared!) then pay a visit to Kitten War (no violence involved). It seems this is the current 'thing' in the blogosphere - may even be getting more traffic than Poweryogi!

Happy Birthday to me

2005-05-30T01:34:00.000-05:00

When I was young, I used to have three birthdays. The day itself always fell during the school half-term, and that was when we had our fortnight family holiday. So I had birthday-number-one when I had my party before we went, the day itself, and then birthday-number-three when we got home to a waiting pile of cards and presents that had come by post. When I went to secondary school that half-term holiday changed to one week rather than two, so we stopped going away then, and I had to make do with just one celebration like everyone else (except the Queen). But because the last Monday in May is a public holiday, I was 23 before I actually had to work on my birthday, which I think is pretty good going. The downside of coinciding with a holiday though is that there isn't a post delivery today, which people seem to have forgotten, so I'm hoping to come home to an avalanche of cards tomorrow!

Potentially a nice note to end on

2005-05-29T07:26:00.000-05:00

The deadline that I was complaining about last Monday was met succesfully on Wednesday evening. Despite my moaning, I actually quite like working under pressure and running on adrenalin, and I don't mind putting in long days doing something that I enjoy and find interesting. What was annoying about the whole thing was the fact that it needn't have all been turned round so quickly if the other organisation involved had got their finger out earlier. At least I had the luxury of being able to drop everything else that I was doing, my colleague who needed to put some financial information together had two other deadlines on the Wednesday and was struggling to keep all the plates spinning. But we both now have the satidfaction of knowing that the submissions are in, and it's looking hopeful that things will work out the way we want. It'll make a huge difference to the organisation if they do, and will be a bit of a personal coup as well, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The decision comes at the end of June.

More on maths

2005-05-29T02:39:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned previously, maths in general, and calculus inparticular, has been on my mind. Last sumer, I read Snapshots from Hell ( supposedly an account of the writer's experience at Stanford GSB, but with small print that points out that it's not entirely factual). Somewhere in the book he reproduces a page of calculus equatiosn( can't remember whether it was differentials or integrals). I saw them and immmediatley my stomach somersaulted, my knees buckled and my pulse began to race, and although the symptoms may be pretty similar, it's safe to say that I wasn't falling in lust.

I've done calculus before, but a long time ago, and I wasn't very good at it. At least I don't think I was any good at it, but the memories aren't very clear (psychological protection from trauma I imagine). I think there were three major reasons behind the difficulties. Firstly, I was lazy. Up until 16 I'd pretty much breezed through education without having to put in much intellectual effort to get good results, and it took me a while to realise that I was going to have to start working harder. Secondly, I'm not big on memorising things. Ask me to learn and understand a concept and then apply it, and I'm fine. Give me a list of formula to memorise, and I struggle, mainly, I think, because I get bored. So I failed to memorise things like trigometric identities, which caused problems. Thirdly, I couldn't see the point. Sure, questions were shaped around 'real world' problems like calculating the speed and acceleration of a car, but I could never imagine a scenario where would need or want to do that. All in all, it wasn't a combination of factors destined to result in success.

This time round, that needs to change. In order to start to make that change and overcome my fears, I bought Calculus for Dummies last weekend. I've just about reached the end of the section on differentiation (integration is still to come), and things are beginning to improve. I get what differentiation does, and I can see how it's going to be useful. I can also see that there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do it. More generally, over the last decade and a bit I've learnt how to put the effort in to master things, rather than expecting to pick them up instantly. Memorising by heart still isn't really my thing, and I have found myself looking at formula and thinking "do I really have to remember that?", but I guess I'll have to get over it. Now I need to sort out some practice problems to make sure I really am understanding things and that the learning is sticking. So all in all, I'm feeling rather less faint, rather less sick, and rather more hopeful that second time round I might just master calculus, rather than letting it master me.

Now this brings back memories

2005-05-29T02:22:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Anand for the picture

Number crunching

2005-05-23T22:35:00.000-05:00

Over the last few months asI've slowly been preparing for the start of b-school, there's been one thing constantly rumbling in the back of my mind - maths. I don't consider myself mathematically incompetent by any means, but it's fourteen years since I was last in a maths classroom. The GMAT made me realise how much I'd forgotten, and I know that a lot of the stuff I reminded myself of while preparing for the test has floated out of my brain again.

So, I've been sort of doing a distance learning maths course to get those mathematical muscles in my brain working again. 'Sort of' becasue it became apparent early on that, with everything else happening, I wasn't going to be able to get all the assignments in on time (and I'l have left the country before the exam). As it's the learning I'm interested in rather than the qualification, that's fine with me.

Yesterday, while ploughing through numbers for work, I had a bit of an "aha!" moment. I looked at some figures, thought "how do I calculate what I want to calculate?", and then this little voice in my head said "it's obvious, you need the fourth root of that divided by the other". A small victory perhaps, but a sign that my synapses are starting to fire in the ways that I'm going to need them to. Now if I can just get myself to the stage where I can look at a differential equation without feeling faint . . .

Your lack of planning is not my emergency

2005-05-23T16:13:00.000-05:00

Except, of course, when it is.

I've been working on something at work which has entailed months, literally, of trying to get someone to respond to letters, followed by a month of trying to get them to return phone calls. This afternoon I finally managed to have the conversation we've been wanting to have since December, and it amounted to - I need a metric tonne of information from you by the end of Wednesday .Oh joy!

I would like to formally express my appreciation of on-line pizza ordering systems, which mean I can order dinner while discussing budgets with a colleague; digital cordless phones, which mean I can take delivery of dinner while discussing presentation strategies with my boss; and Radox "Calm Me" Seaweed and Watermint Arromatic Bath Essence, which means I have a hope in hell of getting some sleep.

Night night.

Number wars

2005-05-23T02:40:00.000-05:00

In the last few weeks, the UK media has been giving a significant amount of space to the growing popularity of a game called Sudoku, or Su Doku, or various other spelling variants. To explain this game briefly, it consists of a grid nine squares wide by nine squares tall, which is divided into nine sections of three squares by three squares. The object of the exercise is to fill in the grid so that each row, column and nine-square section contains the numbers 1 to 9. The initial grid has some of the squares already filled in with a number, and you then have to use a process of logic, deduction and elimination to complete the rest of it. Apparently the game originated in Japan and fulfilled a similar function to the crossword puzzle (crosswords not being viable in a character based language) and it started appearing in newspapers over here late last year.

I first came across it when reading a newspaper someone had left behind on the train (my usual newspaper doesn't carry it). During the General Election campaign I swapped newspapers to get an different perspective on issues, and started playing it on a semi regular basis. It can be quite fun, although I've found that there's a pretty narrow challenge range that I enjoy doing - the easy and moderate ones are too easy to be interesting, and currently the very difficult ones can be just too frustrating and/or time consuming. As I've done more and got better at doing them I can sense that there may be a point where even the 'fiendish' ones aren't enough of a challenge to make it fun.

What's been more interesting than the puzzles, is watching their use by newspapers. As Sudoku's popularity has increased it seems to have become an increasingly important part in their circulation wars. The Times offers one puzzle, with different degrees of difficulty, and a prize draw for correct entries e-mailed in before noon. Then The Independent starts offering four puzzles a day - easy, moderate and advanced on the inside of the paper, with a 'quick' one on the outside. The Times sets up a 'Sudoku by SMS' service. The Independent launches a national championship. How far this will go and how long it will take before people get bored with Sudoku (as I suspect they will) remains to be seen. I wouldn't be at all surprised if when I land back in the UK in December I find newspapers with five pages of news and fifty five of Sudoku.

On blogging

2005-05-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

Another thing on the list of things I've been meaning to blog about is a reflection on why I blog, and now seems like as good a time as any.

I started blogging for a number of predominantly selfish reasons. Back in February 2004 I knew no one who was applying to Business School and barely anyone with an MBA. I was approaching the B-school application experience from the isolation of my corners of the world, and I could see the advantages to connecting with other people putting themselves through the same thing. I'd stumbled across the B-week forums (thankfully after I'd taken my GMAT, decided the result was good enough, and thrown my books away), found blogs via there, and had seen the mutual support there was between bloggers, as well as, of course, finding their experiences both informative and fascinating. So blogging seemed like a good way to make the application experience less isolated. I also thought it would be a method of working through my ideas and practicing putting them into words before I shaped them into essays. More altruistically/egotistically, I thought I could maybe add something to the totality of B-school blogging viewpoints. There weren't many women blogging (how things change!), few non-profit types, no Brits that I knew of. And then there was the "well, why not?" factor, which has been the rationale (if you can call it that) of some of my best decisions in life.

The experience of blogging has been, to unashamedly use a cliche (and split an infinitive), everything I hoped it would be and more. The application experience was far from isolated. I've felt part of a very real, if virtual, community with which I've shared problems, wrestled with ideas, pooled advice and passed on lessons learnt. I've felt genuine excitement and disappointment for my fellow bloggers as decisions have come in, and have been immeasurably buoyed by them and everyone who's left me a comment or sent me an e-mail. I think my applications were better for having blogged, and I think the blogging process has enriched me just as much as the application process. I've also got a written record of the whole thing that I can look back on. Not to mention that there's something strangely addictive about pouring words into cyberspace, and a wonderful freedom to having total control over something which, as hbar observed in my comments, is very akin to a newspaper column (except without an editor to write me a pay cheque, or a sub to make it look like my GMAT verbal score was justified).

Even though I know how much I've gained from reading about the application and student experiences of other people, I still find it strange that people read and respond to these blatherings. It is, of course, terribly flattering and a great ego stroke to have people formally say that they like what you do, but I get worried by terms like 'best'. I'm with wakechick on this one. To my mind, the 'best of blogging' is in its totality, rather than in any individual contribution. We all come from different backgrounds, have different perspectives, and are looking in different directions. The person who's a bit like us speaks to us, as does the person who's studying where we want to study, or going to/coming from a career that interests us. But so too do the people with a completely different take on things, those who surprise us with an idea, or who challenge us to take a fresh look. The viewpoint of one person on studying for the GMAT, or writing a particular essay, or preparing for an interview gives us a certain amount of useful information, but it's when you combine it with those of other people that you get real value - what does one person say that another doesn't touch on? where do people agree, where do they differ and why? what can I take from this mass of information that is relevant to me? One person alone can only contribute so much, lots of people together give much more.

To anyone reading b-school blogs, I'd say keep up with as many as you can get away with without being fired / made to sleep on the sofa / causing your cat to leave you. And to anyone writing one (or thinking about it), the intrinsic rewards add more than extrinsic recognition, nice as that is.

Good luck!

2005-05-19T04:35:00.000-05:00

To all the Wharton r3s and waitlisters waiting for news later today.

Yes, I'm the one with 'hobbit' feet, dodgy ears, and the accent

2005-05-15T15:03:00.000-05:00

Over the last few weeks I've kept thinking of things that I really should get round to blogging about, but it's been pretty difficult to sit down at a keyboard and do it lately. Hopefully I'll manage to over the next few weeks.

One of the things I've been thinking about is the issue of anonymity (some earlier thoughts here). It's raised its head in the b-school blogging community from time to time - Would things we blogged come back to 'bite us'? Did adcoms read blogs/'triangulate' them with applications/let them influence decisions? Did anonymity equal honesty while identifiability equaled caution-related blandness?

Unlike some others (bskewl springs to mind) I've always taken a pretty relaxed view on whether I could be identified from my blog. My guiding principle was that I wouldn't share anything that I wasn't happy to have people know about me when they met me, whether in person or in the form of my application. I honestly don't think that this has caused me to self-censor. Have I shared every aspect of my life vis the blog? No I haven't, but then a lot of my life isn't relevant to it. But I've never felt "I shouldn't say that", or "this is something I'd better leave out, just in case". And I'm a big believer in the value of context. I'm female, I'm British, I work for a non-profit. I think all those elements add to my blog and it would be the poorer if I'd attempted to cover them up. I knew from the outset that those three characteristics in combination would put me in a pretty small subset of applicants, although I didn't realise how small a subset they would make me part of once I added WG07 into the mix. So I suppose it's a good job that I'm not too worried about anonymity, because realistically I had zero chance of maintaining any.

As I observed earlier, it is kind of odd being recognised as britchick and having people know things about me when I know nothing about then. It's also been occuring to me that in lots of ways I'm a pretty private person, so despite what I've said about only blogging what I'm happy for people to know, I realise that I've shared much more with a group of heaven-knows-how-many mostly complete strangers in cyberspace than I ever would with casual aquaintances in the real world. On the whole though, I think the good about that outweighs the bad. After all, what does it matter? Plus, I know that I'm not always the most personally forthcoming individual in person. Maybe knowing that some things are already out there in the ether will make a bit more open, or seem less reserved. Similarly, while I'm told that <insert real name here> and britchick are pretty consistent, I know that there are things I like about britchick which don't always come through in <irnh> as much as they could, but which I've noticed becoming a lot more evident while I've been blogging. Maybe I've got to know myself as much as other people have got to know me.

The big issue about identifiability and blogging that's been on my mind relates to blogging as a student. As an applicant, this blog has been about me in isolation - my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. No one I know in my day-to-day life is aware of its existance, so they're certainly not reading it, and by and large I'm not blogging about other people. But while an applicant's experience is largely solitary, a student's is communal. Come August, what I'm blogging about is going to be the major aspect of my life, and there are going to be other people involved.

There's a school of thought that says that if you are an identifiable student blogger you can't be honest - self or peer-pressure censorship will turn your blog into little more than a bland marketing channel for your school. Whereas, the same train of thought goes, complete anonymity leaves you free to be honest and critical, and this therefore makes you blog more 'valuable'. I don't buy into that logic. Firstly, there are identifiable bloggers who criticise when they feel the need (see the latest post form Future MBA Girl, for one example). Maybe school culture and individual resillience have a big part to play in how possible it is to this, but it certainly doesn't seem to be impossible. Nor do I think it is fair to value a 'wharts and all' approach above all others. Blogs are a very personal endeavour - no one has a right to demand or expect that someone include things that the writer doesnt, for whatever reason, wish to. I think every blog adds to the sum of knowledge for applicants or other interested parties, and argueably what an annonymous blogger feels they can bring to the table in terms of increased candour is offset by what they necessarily lack in terms of context.

So how do I think this is going to affect me as I blog as a student. Well, I don't intend to adopt an uncritical 'Wharton is perfect and everyone should come here' line. That's not my approach to anything. But I'm not necessarily going to rant about every frustration or disappointment in detail either. It's not that I feel obliged to 'defend the brand' or fear that I wil be ostricised by my classmates if I talk out of turn, but I do feel strongly about respecting other people. As I mentioned earlier, school is a communal endevour. While I want to blog about my experiences, thought and feelings, I also recognse that these will be tied up with the experiences thoughts and feelings of other people, and I have to respect that. And I recognise that when you talk about 'a school', unless you are specifically talking about the building, you're really refering to people. So hitting out at 'a school' is hitting out at individuals. Iif there are things that I don't like or people that I have problems with, I'm not going to be opting for a detailed rant on the blog as a first resort. I'll be seeing what I can do about it in the real world, and then maybe reflecting on the experience, or expressing my frustrations about not being able to do anything. If that sounds to bland for you, then sorry but this is my blog nad it's going to be on my terms.

Hurray for OIP

2005-05-11T03:07:00.000-05:00

Got back home from a looong day yesterday, to find an e-mail from OIP apologising for the delay in responding and confirming that a new, corrected I-20 is on it's way. Maybe I should send them a cake anyway, to say thank you.

Nice surprises

2005-05-09T02:26:00.000-05:00

I do like it when things I'm not looking forward to turn out better than expected. This weekend just gone I went uo to my Mum's for a dress fitting for my sister's wedding. I wasn't enthusiastic about the trip, to say the least. It's not that I don't like visiting, I do and I feel guilty that I don't do it more often, but this was not a well timed trip. It'd been requested at short notice, I had a commitment on the Friday evening (which meant a pre-dawn start on the Saturday morning), and as both my personal and work 'to do' lists seem to be expanding exponentially I could really have done with the weekend at home. But needs must, so I packed a bag, set my alarm clock for a time which is uncivilized on a workday, let alone a weekend, and resigned myself to two 'wasted' days.

Things didn't start well. Having avoided my Ipod since I started having ear problems, I'd decided to take it along with me, but it turned out not to be working properly. I spent just enough time messing around with it truing to get it to work that I had to sprint to get my bus. I arrived at the station, planning to pick of reading material for the journey, only to find that the newsagents opens three-quarters of an hour later on a Saturday than it does during the week, so there was no chance of me getting a newspaper. This meant facing a five hour trip with no music, nothing to read, and the prospect of a load of football fans on the train, as I'd discovered that one of the teams from my city was playing away against one of the teams from a city enroute.

But once we set off, things started to get better. There were no obvious football fans, the at-seat audio was working and the shop (which is what we seem to be calling the buffet these days) had something worth reading that I hadn't already read. I even managed to get a half decent bacon sandwich and cup of tea. And sitting down for several hours doing nothing did me the world of good. Watching the world go by is very soothing, and there is something about the journey home, watching the lines of the lanscape gradually harden and the changes in the stone, that never fails to lift my spirits.

Once I was at my Mum's there was nothing that I had to do, except stand in heels, on top of a pile of telephone directories, keeping my arms out of the way of pins and trying to make intelligent comments about waist and neck shapes (none of which is as hard to do as it is to type). By the time I got home again yesterday evening I'd been away for 37 hours, of which eleven had been spent travelling, but I felt very refreshed and invigerated, which I really hadn't expected. Far from being a wasted weekend, I think it was exactly what I needed.

Too much information? Or too little?

2005-05-06T16:42:00.000-05:00

As I've worked my way through the matriculating procedure and things at Wharton have come on-line I've gradually been getting more and more information about August on. ID's for the Penn and Wharton systems let you in to a whole host of information including, among other things, the exam timetable for the end of the first semester. So nice to be able to dread evening exams a week before Christmas, seven months in advance! On other fronts I have somewhere to live, and a roommate who is doing a terrific job of trying to sublet the place for the two months before we arrive, and I've booked my flight.

The one cloud on the horizon is the paperwork for my visa. I got my I-20 a couple of weeks ago, but when I gave it a second look I realised that some of the funding information is slightly wrong. It may be of absolutely no significance that it is, but I'm not sure and don't want to find out that it is a problem by having my visa application rejected. So I've been trying to get in contact with the Office of International Programs to find out whether I need new paperwork issuing or if I can just go ahead and set up a visa appointment. So far an e-mail, an e-talk posting, a second e-mail, and a phone message (all their lines were busy) have resulted in zero response. A third e-mail went today. I'm sure they're fantasticaly busy, but it is rather frustrating to sit and listen to the silence. If e-mail number three doesn't work then I may see if I can find a Philadelphia bakery that will deliver them a large chocolate cake with a print out of the e-mail sat on the top - do you think that might get someone's attention?

Morning after

2005-05-06T04:53:00.000-05:00

Despite having been an unexciting campaign, election night itself was actually quite lively. A combination of the 'Iraq factor', a lot of tactical voting, and interesting challenges from independent candidates made for some pretty varied results. At the time of writing there are just under thirty seats left to declare (the majority of which are in Northern Ireland, where the political parties are different, so it doesn't majorly impact the overall shape of the House of Commons) and it's looking like a Labour majority of somewhere between 60 and 65. Small majorities are much healthier I think, it keeps to Government on its toes more and makes for better legisltaion.

Locally, the LibDems took my constituency, which I'm very happy about, and with a respectable majority. I was talking to people involved in the campaiging last weekend and they thought we might miss by a couple of hundred votes, so it's wonderful to see all their hard work pay off. The constituency where I grew up remained Lib Dem, and with what can only be described as a stonking majority. When I was growing up it was a safe Conservative seat, and although local politics had been moving towards the yellow part of the spectrum for some years, when the Lib Dems took it in 1997 I think the general national backlash against the Conservatives and the vileness of their candidate (the sitting MP had retired and a senior party member had been parachuted in) both had a significant influence on the result. I was a bit worried it might turn back to blue this time round, and I'm extremely glad that it hasn't.

So, on balance, I think a good result, although there've been some individual casualties that I'm sad to see lose. It's going to be interesting to see how things play out over the next few years, even if I'm watching from a distance.

Plus ca change?

2005-05-05T08:16:00.000-05:00

Today is General Election day in the UK. This is the first national election that I've voted in where my vote will actually influence the result (previously I've been in constituencies with large majorities) and where the party I support actually has a cat in hell's chance of winning the seat. Despite being pretty sure that there was very little in it between the three main parties where I am, I did go and check out the figures in case it was going to be worth be voting tactically rather than by belief, but in a tactical voting situation I'm honestly not sure I could have brought myself to vote for either of the other two anyway.

One of the least edifying aspects of the past few weeks has been the way that race and immigration issues have been played. The British National Party trot out their traditional rant of sending 'immigrants' 'home', thereby emptying the country of everyone,except possibly three people in the depths of west Wales (and at a guess exiling me to somewhere in eleventh century scandinavia), but the stuff from some of the mainstream parties has been worse because it gets taken seriously. My last job was in an organisation working with refugees and asylum seekers. I heard horrific stories of the experiences of clients and colleagues in their home countries, and witnessed the discrimination and abuse they too often met in the UK. Knowing that reality, it disgusts me to see the way the issues are whipped up and distorted by politicians to play on people's fears and prejudices. And it's even worse when the majority of it comes from the Leader of the Opposition, himself the son of refugees who entered the UK illegally to escape Nazi persecution.

Last night, I watched a TV programme about Somaliland. The picture it painted of the of the rebuilding being done in this officially un-recognised state was heartening, but the stories of its recent past and of the past and present of Somalia were some of the worst I've ever heard. Sadly, too few people make the connection between those fleeing such horror and the individuals in their comunities that get portrayed as 'scrounging illegal immigrants'. If there was the political will, there's a lot that could be done to help people make those connections and grasp the realities a bit better. Sadly though, pandering to the scaremongering of some of the popular press seems to be the more attractive option. And whatever government we have tomorrow, I very much doubt that there will be much that changes on this.

Single, breathing, MBA student seeks . . .

2005-05-04T04:05:00.000-05:00

As Iceman was recently observing, the issue of sex/dating and business school is a bit of an obsession for some. Personally, I've been wishing that I could charge £10 to everyone I've had a conversation with about my post b-school plans and whether I intend to come back to the UK who's gone on to remark "and of course you never know who you might meet out there!" or something along those lines. It could have made a sizeable contribition towards the costs of the next two years.

Anyway, this post was inspired by today's Dilbert - substitute classmate for co-worker and you have the dilemma which seems to be on a lot of people's minds.

On a scale of one to five . . .

2005-05-03T06:10:00.000-05:00

I've just spent the last half-hour doing a very long questionnaire over the telephone for some Home Office survey about the voluntary sector that I agreed to take part in (it seemed like a good idea at the time). I'm a big fan of feedback and evaluation, but it can get very dull when lots of the questions aren't relevant or when the responses don't allow you to give an appropriate response. The organisation I work for isn't particularly straight forward and so we don't fit easily into the categories that the survey wants to put us in. And the poor market researchers don't necessarily understand the issues, and have to conform to what they have in front of them, so the phone surveys always seem to teeter on the brink of a battle of wills - me getting bored and annoyed and trying to give them an answer that is helpful but not too awkward, and them trying to get me to sit in one of their boxes like a good little girl. Today's survey was about partnership working, and it also doesn't help that the organisations we work with tend to be even more obscure than we are. I honestly tried to say "it's not an acronymn, it's Latin*" without sounding patronising when asked about the name of one of our partners, but I'm not sure I managed it.

For a while I was a member of an on-line surveying site that was used for various market research projects. My involvement mainly stemmed from professional curiosity - it was interesting to see who was asking what, and in some cases see products come to market that I'd been surveyed about. The last straw for me withdrawing though was a ridiculously long survey about choclate that demanded, among other things, that I state the emotional need that was fulfilled by my last chocolate bar purchase. Already fed up with the number of questions I was being asked, I reacted badly to not been able to give an honest answer of 'I was hungry and it was the only thing available'.

I seem to have been filling out a number of b-school related surveys yesterday. The Kellogg Women's Business Association (not sure if I have the name exactly right) sent one about DAK, which I filled out as best I could given the length of time since the event. Wharton sent one about WWW, flagged up one on E-talk about use of their various on-line resources (hopefully this was also publicised by other channels, or there'll be a rather skewed sample) and there's a request for feedback in the latest blog entry on the technology they're using. In typical fashion, I filled in the WWW one and then remembered a couple of things I'd meant to say but didn't. So on the off chance that anyone involved with the surveying reads this, here are a couple of further observations:

Water bottles - (we got these with our info packs for the weekend) a nice alternative to t-shirts in many ways, and if more practical use, but rather in the awkward side for anyone without much space in their luggage (and/or who is having to rationalise their possesions before moving several thousand miles).

Entertainment at the closing dinner- the Whartones (accapella group) are very good, and the museum dome was a lovely venue, but big boomy accoustics and fast close harmony don't work together. We couldn't here much at the other side of the dome, and it must have been a pretty horrible singing experience.

I think that's it, although I'm sure something else will occur to me as soon as I press the publish button.

*One of my colleagues has just pointed out that is, in fact, Greek, so I now feel even more unfair.

R&R needed

2005-04-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

The bag hasn't turned up yet, so I'm contemplating having write it off and claim on my insurance. Fortunately my tendency to either be really organised and file things or completley disorganised and not get round to throwing things out means that I seem to have receipts for most things. Yesterday I survived the twin embarrasments of turning up to a meeting of our Board of Trustees in jeans and doc martins (my meeting clothes being in the lost bag) and almost leaving another bag on a train. My excuse for the latter was that I was briefing a journalist by phone as I got off the train, so was a bit distracted (and I'd told the colleagues I was travelling with to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't forget anything!).

Fortunately, an extended weekend starts in half an hour (Monday is a public holiday) so I should have an opportunity to get my brain working again, along with starting to sort through my stuff and decide what to take with me, what to store and what to find a new home for.

Adult supervision recommended

2005-04-26T06:05:00.000-05:00

There are some days when staying in bed and pulling the duvet over one's head would have been the best course of action. today is one of those days for me.

I have three back-to-back office based days and so am spending the next two nights in a colleague's spare room. For a variety of reasons I really wasn't with it when I was travelling in this morning and I managed to leave my weekend bag sitting on a station platform. I didn't realise until I was getting off the train, thought 'I musn't forget my bag', and then thought 'I didn't put my bag on this train' - one of those horrid sinking-feeling-in-the-stomach moments.

There aren't any news reports of a security alert, so I'm hoping that means it hasn't been subjected to a controlled explosion, and I'm currently waiting for a phone call to let me know if it's been found and is available for me to pick up later today. If so, I'll have a 2.5hr round trip this evening, if not I'm going to have to do a shopping expedition tonight to get some essentials, and hope that I'm able to be reunited with it at some point.

I'm now going to go away and kick myself very hard.

First time for everything

2005-04-25T13:01:00.000-05:00

I just had a doorstep visit from a political canvasser, the first, I think, in the fourteen years I've been entitled to vote. We keep being told that the female vote is considered as key in this election, and if that thinking was behind deploying this chap on the campaign trail I wouldn't be at all surprised. What my mother would call 'a very nice young man', which is a type we seem to be well supplied with round here (a combination of the demographics of the local population, schools and the university intake). The concert I was stewarding at last night had an audience full of the younger versions - looked liked heavens knows what but said please and thank you and did what they were asked when addressed in a firm tone of voice.

I've just re-read that last sentence - I think I'm getting old.

Why I'm not taking 3 months off

2005-04-25T08:02:00.000-05:00

As it's aroused some curiosity, I thought I'd comment on why I'm working right through to July. Like lots of other people, I've heard the 'take as much time off as you can' line, but I've decided it's not for me. Maybe this is a good sign that I'll be able to avoid the herd menatality during school, maybe I really am missing a huge oportunity - who know's? But for anyone who's interested, these are some of the reasons behind the decisions.

As with so many things in life, one major issue is money. I'm not in the situation where working for another three months just means adding to the savings in the bank. Working for the next three months means that I'll have money to live on for those three months and, hopefully, have the wherewithall to cover the 10% contribution I have to make to my student budget this next year. I'm pretty confident that I've got myself to a position where needs and means will match, but there isn't sufficient slack to stop earning for three months.

There's also the issue of my responsibilities to work. I officially have a six-month notice period, although I'm sure I could have negotiated that down if I'd wanted to. But I work for a small organisation that's going through a big period of change at the moment. Staying means that I can continue some work that will stop once I leave, put somethings in place for once I'm gone and take a bit of weight off my colleagues' shoulders. I've had a huge amount of support from my boss and colleagues throughout the apploication process and it would seem rather unfair to dump them in it now that I've got in.

Then there are other responsibilities. I'm currently flat-sitting for a friend, and disappearing off travelling would cause him problems. My sister's wedding in mid-July limits when I can head to Philly, and the need to have dress fittings etc, not to mention being there on the day without sunburn, insect bites or tropical diseases, also somewhat restricts heading off for any length of time beforehand.

Maybe most importantly though, I think my biggest priority for the next few weeks is spending time with people that I won't see a whole lot of for the next two years. I've seen a chunk of the world and I know it will still be there to see, realtively unchanged, in the future. But come 2007, who knows where I'll be heading or where other people will have gone. So right now, staying here and enjoying friends is a higher priority than spending more time on aeroplanes. And as I can do that while continuing to do useful things at work and earn money, why not?

Time out?

2005-04-25T02:04:00.000-05:00

In his most recent post, missing presumed busy blogger bskewl was musing on overcommitment. Having barely stoped since I got back from Philadelphia last week, it's an issue that's also been on my mind. I'm not sure that it's been a case of overcommitment, more reasonable commitment that then had a load of unavoidable extras piled on top. I've met up with some people I hadn't seen for a while, heard some great music and had an interesting conversation about the physics of the musical tuning of vacuum cleaners (don't ask!), but that doesn't change the fact that it's Monday morning and I feel desperately in need of a weekend. The fact that this week isn't going to be much better doesn't help. Still, I guess it's all good training for August onwards.

In case it's been preying on your mind . . .

2005-04-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

Delisile's post had me worried, so I thought I'd better report that, as of yesterday afternoon, I am the proud owner of a pair of silver sandals.

The beginning of the downward slope

2005-04-22T09:09:00.000-05:00

Three months today will be my last day of work (yes, I am pretty much working up until the end) and I'm really beginning to feel the leaving process cranking up. Yesterday was my final meeting for a trustee board I sit on and last night I said goodbye to the friend who's flat I live in (he currently lives in France and is unlikely to be back on this side of the Channel before I go). And earlier to day I got an e-mail from someone wanting to know when I'm leaving so that they can organise a "proper send-off". I suspect the next thirteen weeks are going to go horribly quickly.

Seeing ourselves as others see us

2005-04-21T06:15:00.000-05:00

I picked up a copy of the latest edition of US Marie Claire for my journey home on Monday (my brain not feeling up to dealing with the book I'd concientiously taken out with me). There was an interesting article in it where they'd got this guy to correspond with three women via e-mail and to draw what he thought they looked like based on those e-mails. He then met up with each of them and compared his impression of the 'virtual' them to the reality, and the women compared his e-mail impression of them to their impression of themselves. It finished off with a couple of paragraphs about how little things you say can significantly shape people's impressions of you and how e-mail was a great opportunity to show yourself off at your best (this being a glossy women's magazine, it was of course being looked at in a dating context, because that is obviously our major concern sigh).

The article was an interesting read, especially having just being through Welcome Weekend and met a number of people who I'd been e-mailing or exchanging messages with on the boards, and having met up with a few fellow bloggers in recent weeks. Personality I think comes through very strongly, especially when you read enough things from people over a period of time. Appearance less so, although personality indicators might mean that you rule some things out and decide that others are highly likely. And I know that I've made incorrest assumptions about people based on things they've said, and that some people have done the same about me. As for showing myself off at my best, I've pretty much taken the approach here that this is me, like it or lump it. I'm too long in the tooth, and have had too much experience of someone getting upset/angry with me because I didn't conform to their view of what I should be, either to play games and pretend to be something/someone I'm not, or to get upset if someone doesn't like who and what I am.

Having said that, I have found myself pondering the whole issue of anonymity/identifiability that I know lots of the mba blogging community has struggled with. I knew when I started out that my most obvious characteristics, indeed the ones that led to my name here, would put me in a pretty small pool and make me pretty easy to identify to anyone who wanted to make the effort. As it's turned out, it'll need minimum effort ( as far as I can ascertain I'm currently the only British female in the Wharton class of 2007). And I've always taken the line that I wouldn't share anything that I wasn't comfortable with people knowing about me when they encountered me in either human of application form. But it does feel a bit odd to be greeted as 'britchick' by someone that, afaik, I haven't actually met (and when I haven't even opened my mouth and potentially identified myself by accent). Sort of like having a flashing neon sign above my head. And, if I think about it too much, it's strange thinking that people know things about me without me having the sort of reciprocal information you generally get through 'real world' interaction.

How all this feeds through to blogging as a student, and blogging about what will be the main part of my life, rather than the isolated aspect of it that applying has been, I'm not sure. Something to think about, I guess.

Forms and their functions

2005-04-20T07:19:00.000-05:00

When I got back home yesterday there was a letter waiting for me with details of how to set up my PennKey, which basically seems to let me access a variety of Penn's on-line services. On Monday I got an e-mail to say that my I-20 was on its way (if I'd known it'd be processed so quickly I'd have picked it up in person), and I've just arranged for it to be redelivered to me tomorrow (DHL's on-line tracking showed that they'd tried to deliver it today, but there was nobody at home). This means that I'm all set to start filling out the paperwork (if you can call an electronic form that) for my visa. I'm beginning to think that I should go and plant a tree or two somewhere to compensate for the volume of paper that this whole process is consuming.

Home Sweet Home

2005-04-19T12:54:00.000-05:00

I left the "should've brought sunscreen" weather of Philly yesterday and arrived back to the "now where did I pack my umbrella?" weather of the UK today. I was sat at 30th Street station yesterday afternoon waiting for my train to EWR (flew via there rather than Philadelphia International for frequent flyer related reasons) when it dawned on me that the next time I'd by in Philadelphia it would actually be home. It was a slightly odd but also exciting and welcome feeling. And then as I got the bus from Heathrow this morning I started thinking that the next time I was there could well be when I'm flying out. That left me feeling ever so slightly panicked. I'm looking forward to everything, I'm well on the way to having a place to live (two buildings identified - one a front runner that I'm actively negotiating on and the second a back up) and I know it's going to be a great experience once I'm there, but there's still a bit of an apprehension. I think it's just that change can be unsettling ( as well as exhilarating) and also that moving on means having to leave some things behind that I'll be sad to let go.

Speaking of moving on, the Wharton Admissions Blog announced yesterday that Alex Brown of the Adcom is leaving to pursue other opportunities (although continuing to support the admissions office in a consulting capacity for a few months). Alex, you'll be missed!

WWW

2005-04-18T09:02:00.000-05:00

Wharton Welcome Weekend ended yesterday, but I'm still in Philly enjoying the sunshine and looking at apartments (I see the last one in a couple of hours). It was a great weekend, much bigger than Winter Welcome which gave it a bit of a different feel because of the logistical needs of an event on that scale, but just as fun. The amount of work that must have gone into organising it was phenomenal, and the energy and enthusiasm from everyone involved was just a knock out.

I won't post a blow by blow account, because I don't think i could do the weekend justice, but I will strongly recommend that everyone go to the welcome events for the schools they're admitted to if they possibly can. A good proportion of this weekend's events overlapped with the ones in February, so I don't think I'd have missed out on much in concrete terms if I'd opted not to make the trip again, but from a social and fun point of view it was worth it, even if I didn't manage to stay out and party as long as I might have wanted. (In typical fashion, I spent the fist few days battling to stay awake in the evenings on account of jet lag, and have now pretty much adjusted to the time difference in time to go home. But hey, I'm sure an overnight flight will help to mess things up nicely in the other direction.)

I really enjoyed meeting up with people I'd first met in February, putting real names and faces to electronic aliases, and getting acquainted with lots of people for the first time. Managing to see fomer blogger Riter and current blogger Iceman were particular highlights. And I met another Brit to add to our small band and a third fundraiser (having met a second via E-talk) which was fun.

OK, now I have to go and see if I can fit my WWW water bottle into my rather overfull bag.

On the way to Welcome Weekend

2005-04-12T10:17:00.000-05:00

I suppose I’m officially in transit to Welcome Weekend. I had to be in the office today and fly out tomorrow, so going home in between didn’t make much sense. I was at a seminar in London this morning, so decided that I’d dump my bag at the place I’m staying tonight rather than drag it round with me. Slight problem when I got to the hotel and found that they didn’t have any record of my booking, but they let me leave my bag anyway, and it turns out that I’d gone to the wrong hotel – I’m at one from the same chain a couple of streets away.

Having left the bag I then had the joy of a rush-hour journey across to London to the seminar. On the days when I think “I could really live in London again” public transport is always the thing which makes me have second thoughts. At least today the man whose armpit my nose was stuck in had showered and used deodorant and the person breathing in my face was sucking mints, so it could have been worse. I don’t think the seminar could have been though. Not only was it not really about what it was meant to be about, it wasn’t even a very good session on its actual topic. So I left early and headed to the office to get things tied up for while I’m away. It looks like it’ll be a latish finish here tonight, before heading back into London to get myself to the right hotel. Then tomorrow, I’m getting my hair cut before setting out for Heathrow.

PS For your amusement, humorous Wharton Jornal articles on WWW here and here.

We're shopping

2005-04-10T15:21:00.000-05:00

Spent a good chunk of Saturday touring shoe shops looking for a pair of silver sandals to wear to my sister's wedding in July. Now I know a day of shoe shopping would sound like heaven to a lot of women and I like shoes as much as the next girl (unless she's Imelda Marcos), but I don't enjoy the process of shopping for them that much. The problem is that I have very wide feet, which rather limits the available range of stylish yet reasonably comfortable footwear. This means that I have very few pairs of 'f*** me' shoes, a sizeable collection of 'don't f*** with me' boots' and a real problem when being a bridesmaid requires me to conform to a certain set of requirements. If anyone can suggest places in Philly that might stock strappy silver sandals for someone with feet of Hobbit proportions, please let me know and I'll have a look next week (for Welcome Weekend). Failing that, there's a localish shop that specialises in clothes and shoes for transexuals/transvestites that may well do delicate footwear for those with less than delicate feet.

The amount of available time for shoe shopping when in Philadelphia is going to be largely dependent on the amount of time taken up by apartment shopping. I sent off e-mails a couple of weeks ago to try to set up appointments to see some buildings and responses were either practically instant or non-existant, so I've also spent some time this weekend following up the non-responders. I'm hoping that by the time I leave on Monday evening I'll at least have a couple of buildings that I know I'll be happy to live in, and then I can sort out the details via phone, e-mail etc if necessary. Hopefully finding a suitable roof for over my head will be somewhat easier than finding suitable shoes for my feet.

Still not a clerical error

2005-04-07T08:59:00.000-05:00

I got another change of status e-mail yesterday, which confused me somewhat as I didn't think there was anything left to change, but my record had indeed been updated to show that my officila transcripts had been received and my employment verification completed. I think that is now everything done.

Spent yesterday evening having great fun (what is the emoticon for sarcasm?) filling in my CFRE application forms. This is the standard US qualification for fundraising. After discussing it's benefits and relevance with a US fundraiser who's also a Wharton/Kellogg admit I decided that it was probably worth shelling out the $how much?! and as there's only one London presentation of the exam left before I move, and the deadline for applications is next week, I really needed to get the forms done. Compared to B-school applications the forms are really unclear and badly laid out and I seemed to spend ages scrolling forwards and backwards transfering points from one section to another and trying to check that my addition was right. (You have to detail your activities in the areas of Education, Professioanl Practice, Professional Performance and Service, with different types of activities getting different numbers of points, and there's a minimum points requirement for each section.) Assuming the application is OK I get to sit the exam in the middle of June. Hopefully this shouldn't be too taxing - it's marked on a 200-800 scale rather like another test that we're all too familiar with, but, judging by the sample questions ,considerably less demanding.

And they're off

2005-04-05T11:45:00.000-05:00

It's now official and we're having a Generla Election on May 5th. An announcement had been on the cards for yesterday but was delayed because of services to mark the Pope's death. With parliamentary business to be finished in the next couple of days, the Papal funeral on Friday and a hastily rearranged royal wedding on Saturday I expect there are going to be an awful lot of diary managers who will be glad when this week is over.

I feel like I ought to burn some shoe leather on the campaign trail, especially as the constituency I live in is a three-way marginal, but I think I should consult my own diary and be realistic about what I can fit in.