Sunday, September 27, 2009

Life Outside of School...If I Could Only Remember What That Is...

Darden has a reputation for having a very rigorous First Year program. Do not underestimate the implications of that reputation. I have class for five hours a day, starting at 8 AM, then I go to company briefings, then I prep my cases, go to club meetings, meet with my learning team, and come home to work on my resume or finish prepping cases. I get maybe, if I'm lucky, 6 hours of sleep. I can survive on that, but if you knew me in high school, you know what a lack of sleep does to me after a while. To head off those effects, I try to get a lot of sleep on weekends, but there are always tons of social events, more cases to prep, more job search stuff to be done....and a new town to explore!

While I haven't had a ton of time to really explore, when S came down to visit before classes started, we did go to Monticello (very cool!). J and A and I also drove over to the Williamsburg Outlets during Orientation (to stock up on lightweight business casual attire at discount prices). Beyond that, I've been spending most of my free time entertaining (I love having people over for dinner/drinks/apps/whatever), hanging out watching movies or playing Cranium, or just trying to find some time to catch up on everything I've got stored on my DVR (darn learning team meetings during prime time!). I'm hoping that now that I sort of know what's going on with school, I'll have a little bit more time to go do things like hike, drive Skyline Drive, etc. We also start getting random Reading Days (like last Friday, this coming Wednesday, and October 9!). Unfortunately, Reading Days are usually claimed by such fun school-related activities as company briefings, case prep, Career Coach meetings, conferences, etc., so I'm not sure how much of a respite they'll be. There's some talk of getting in a round of golf on Wednesday morning before company briefings, but we'll see if that plays out...(haha...punny!).

On that note, it's off to bed for me. Gotta get in that 6 hours of sleep, you know!

Retrospective: The Dreaded Career Search

Another thing I did not anticipate about Darden when I arrived: you have exactly 2.5 days to enjoy being unemployed, and then you start panicking about finding a new job. Surprisingly, this isn't because you are destitute; it's because the Career Development Center (CDC) will put the fear of God into you by immediately convincing you that you will never have a job ever again because there is a recession/you are a career switcher/nobody is hiring/the sky is falling/run, Chicken Little, run! OK, slight exaggeration. But still....

The doom and gloom and career-centric mindset started during International Student Orientation, continued through regular Orientation, became more intense during the first few CarMa sessions, and reached a fever pitch with the onslaught of company briefings, networking events, etc. that started a few weeks ago. To be fair, I think they really just wanted us to get on top of the job search sooner rather than later, but I thought I'd have a little while to just chill. Wrong.

We're currently in the midst of preparing our resumes (although resume drops don't happen until December, I've already been asked for mine a couple times). I'm having a bit of a hard time moving from a "look, I'm a great paralegal, hire me to work in the legal field!"-focus to a "look, I'm a great MBA student, hire me to consult/crunch numbers/develop a marketing plan/etc."-focus. I met with two second-year career coaches (one who was assigned to me when I picked the consulting industry as a focus, and one who will be working at McKinsey next year and had a similar non-quantitative, short pre-school career) and the consulting Career Coach last week, and I have a meeting with the "non-traditional careers" Career Coach tomorrow. Basically, my resume doesn't do a great job showing "results" right now, and I'm struggling to figure out how much I should/can (legally) share about what my jobs have entailed. I guess the good thing is that there are tons of resources available to me, so I'm going to keep taking advantage of them and "trusting the process," and hopefully it will all work out in the end.

Retrospective: Family Weekend

Last weekend was Family Weekend at Darden. On Friday, parents, spouses, fiancees, friends, whomever could visit a class with their associated student, come to First Coffee, hear from the Dean and the Director of Student Services, and (if they registered early enough to get seats) attend a mock class led by my LO professor, Scott Snell. The day ended with a Family Weekend Cold Call.

My parents came down for Family Weekend, arriving Thursday and staying until around 3:30 on Sunday. On Friday, they came to class (although they were scheduled to come to MC with me, and we were videotaping our 2-minute stories in small groups, so I prohibited them from actually attending that portion), went to the presentations, chilled with me at home in the afternoon, went to the Cold Call, and then took me to dinner. On Saturday, we hit up several wineries southwest of Charlottesville (Wintergreen, Cardinal Point (yep, trip 2 for me - but they have rieslings, which my family love), and Hill Top Berry Farm & Winery) stopped at a delicious roadside bbq shack in the middle of nowheresville, VA, and then came home to do random odd bits of home improvement (e.g., install latch for my screen door, hook up new television that was my early b-day present, install dimmer for the dining room light, replace all the lightbulbs in my house with CFLs, etc.) and eat dinner (homemade crabcakes, which I unfortunately over-Old Bay'ed, and sweet potato fries, which they actually sell in the freezer section of the grocery store down here - sometimes the South is wonderful!). On Sunday, we went to brunch, my mother altered a sundress for me so that it no longer fits like a tent, and then we got into a huge fight about installing a programmable thermostat (I swear my mother broke my A/C....but the landlord fixed it the next day). They left, and I scrambled to prep cases before meeting with my LT.

It was good to see The Fam, but over this past week, I realized that I really count on having some downtime on weekends; since I missed that over Family Weekend, I was realllly dragging this last week. But I managed to sleep for 14 hours straight on Friday night, and I followed that up by 12 hours straight last night...so I should be nicely rejuvenated for this coming week!

Retrospective: I Thank God Every Day That I Have an Apparently Functional Learning Team

Learning teams (LTs) are a huge part of the Darden experience. Basically, it is an assigned group of 5-6 people who meet each evening to prepare and discuss the next day's cases. Most LTs meet between 7 pm and 10 pm each evening, although that schedule can vary. My LT, for instance, used to meet at 7 and now meets at 8. Also, I don't think it has ever taken us 3 hours to prep our cases; we're usually done much faster.

Basically, the LT serves a couple purposes:
1.) It helps everyone prepare for class. The cases are not always (or ever) the easiest things to figure out on your own, and by meeting as a team, you're able to share insights, resolve questions, and generally come closer to "cracking the case" (or at least being able to discuss it or ask intelligent questions in class the next morning). Also, once company briefings and networking receptions start (around the middle of Septembre) and you have less time to prepare on your own, your LT should be able to help you get through the material.

2.) It gives you experience working in teams. Basically, this is the point of business school. If you are going to be an effective manager, you need to be able to work in and/or lead teams, and Darden especially is big on having you learn how to do this in a hands-on way.

As I said, my LT is highly functional, and we all seem to get along pretty well (we had dinner together tonight, we've done Wednesday trivia night at the Mellow Mushroom, there's talk of LT apple picking, etc.); not all LTs are running so smoothly. There are some interpersonal conflicts, some conflicts regarding goals for evening meetings (always getting the "right" answer vs. gaining some insight/focusing on the big picture, etc.), some scheduling issues (remember that a decent number of Darden students are married/have children), and other conflicts. While LTs are supposed to stick together through Q3, if your LT is completely disfunctional, you can disband (although apparently you still have to do StratSim together in November... I still don't know what this is, so more on that later). There are also various resources available to LTs that are having problems so that they can try to work through those problems. For instance, our LO professors have offered their assistance, and each LT has an assigned 2nd Year LT Mentor, who are 2nd Year students enrolled in a class on leading teams. They come observe our LT meetings periodically, and they are a resource to whom we can turn to confidentially discuss any team problems.

Like I said, though, my LT pretty much rocks, and I am quite, quite thankful for that, having been on some atrocious teams in the past. Here's to hoping we continue to get along!

Retrospective: Section E is AwesomE

Darden divides the approximately 310 students in each class into five sections (A-E) of around 62 students per section. Apparently, this is done rather randomly. Within your section, you are also assigned (randomly) to a particular seat for the quarter (or maybe the next two quarters...I don't quite know yet). For Q3, you are assigned to a different section (I-V). Your section is the group of people that you sit with for 5+ hours a day in class (you're basically assigned to a homeroom, and the faculty for each course come to you), hang out with socially, and are generally forced to bond with. Fortunately, given my section, this is not too much of a burden for me. :-)

I am in Section E. In case you didn't know, E is for awesomE. We are the reigning Darden Cup champs (more on this later, I promise), and we are generally awesomE. As far as I can tell from the scuttlebut around grounds, Section E is the chill, non-gunner section. I am a big fan of that reputation. Also, apparently we rock at softball. And at convincing our profs to show up and root for us when we play softball. And at things like keg/case races, flip-cup, beirut, etc. (Now, those of you who know me know that I generally play flip-cup or beirut with water, and I am not a fan of keg races. However, all of these activities have perhaps a larger prevalence at Darden than they did at Brown (which was a wee bit shocking to me). I'm sure I'll talk more about my feelings about that later, too.)

Perhaps the most awesomE things about section E this year, however, is that there is a gentleman in our section named Asim (pronounced pretty close to "Awesome."). He has generously permitted us to emphasize this similarity in pronounciation at every opportunity we get (in fact, he is the first person who brought this up), and he has, in effect, become the section mascot.

Also, each section has various traditions. We found that the Section E traditions from last year's Section E were fairly lame, so we invented some of our own, which we and our faculty seem to be getting a big kick out of every day. Want to know more? Well, come to Darden and hope you have the good fortune to visit Section E.

Retrospective: Reflections on the Darden Q1 Curriculum from Someone Who Hasn't Quite Survived It Yet

I probably should have done more research on the Darden curriculum before I arrived in Charlottesville. However, I knew that there wasn't a lot of room for personal choice in the curriculum, and I figured that I was picking a school based in large part on fit, which for me had little to do with classes and more to do with people. (Remember, I was a sociology major at Brown. I'm touchy-feely and tree-hugging.) The faculty at Darden are consistently recognized as the best business school teaching faculty in the country. I figured if they're supposed to be that good, they could teach me just about anything. :-)

So, for those of you who actually want to know what classes I go to each day, here's my overview of the curriculum so far:

Decision Analysis (DA), or "Fun with Excel Models and Crystal Ball" - Let me preface this by saying that prior to coming to Darden, I don't think I had ever used Excel for anything more complicated than putting together a table of trial exhibits (because tables in Word are EVIL). Excel was embedded in our Powerpoint/graphics package at The Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named, but remember, I was in Legal, so I didn't really use Excel. Naturally, then, when I realized what exactly was going on with this class, I was horrified. Yes, I could make a spreadsheet. But it was not pretty, it was not color-coded, and I didn't know all the handy dandy Excel shortcuts. In fact, during the second or third week of class (and during the middle of my miserable bout with "the Darden flu"), I was cold-called and had to build a spreadsheet model in front of the whole class. My class oh-so-helpfully decided to nit-pick about the color I was making the input cells. I finally made the cells peach just to be a snot. After 7 weeks or so, my spreadsheets are slightly prettier, Crystal Ball (a simulation software made by Oracle that ties in to Excel and lets you run models to predict things like Expected Monetary Value for a particular decision given a whole bunch of assumptions) color codes them for me, and, I have found, usually there is an "Aha!" type aspect to each case that goes well beyond building the model. I think my Learning Team and I are usually pretty good at figuring out the big picture and getting close to the case-cracking "Aha!" moment. I still don't know all the Excel shortcuts; I may never know them, but I've decided it's just not a big enough deal to worry about.

Marketing (MKT) - Fairly self-explanatory, although I think I honestly expected more discussions about advertising campaigns and fewer mathematical formulas. We've had some interesting guest speakers from Heinz, Progressive, and Google so far, and we got to watch a bunch of Dupont Stainmaster commercials from the 1980's. Good times. I actually want to know how many Darden students switch to Progressive insurance during their first year, or how many of us went out and bought Heinz ketchup (and hot dogs, hamburgers, or french fries) after Thursday's case discussion.

Accounting (ACC) - We spent the first half of the quarter discussion Managerial Accounting (the stuff managers use internally to make business decisions - mostly focusing on issues like determining the price for which you should sell things), and halfway through the quarter we switched to Financial Accounting, which is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to senior year at Brown, when I thought it would be "fun" to take accounting. Fortunately, that prior background has probably saved me from major confusion or major embarassment in the last couple weeks. We dealt with journal entries and T-accounts last week, and this week we're moving into financial statements.

Operations (OPS) - We do a ton of simulations in this class, including one involving drawing faces, one involving building things out of legos, one involving playing doctor with a bunch of dolls, and one computerized laboratory. Basically, what I've taken out of this class so far is that the goal of any business is to make money (go read E. Goldblatt's book The Goal), Herbie's are bad, and there are also a bunch of formulas you can use to determine how many service center staff you need to have to keep wait times down to 5 minutes per customer. I don't know what else to say....operations is relatively foreign to me, but I'm muddling through. We'll see how the exam goes...

Leading Organizations (LO) - formerly known as Organizational Behavior. Basically, this is the touchy-feely class with which many people have a love/hate relationship. There's a lot of talking about feelings and self-awareness and "being in the box" and working with difficult people and managing up. We share a lot about prior difficult situations we've been in at work, difficult people with whom we've worked, etc. There's also a ton of role-playing: last week, I had to pretend to fire someone whose house had just burned down and whose daughter had leukemia. I actually really like this class; it appeals to my sociologist tendencies. Also, alums constantly say that this is the class that they "use" most often in real life.

Career Management (CarMa) - this class randomly shows up in our schedule. We started meeting in sections with one of the Career Coaches to discuss life themes, career objectives, and our 30-second stories. Two weeks ago, we broke into career-objective focused groups (I'm in the consulting group; more on that later) to discuss strategies for networking. We're also supposed to be working on our resumes now, and we'll discuss those in class on Thursday this week. Generally, I think the most valuable part of this class is forcing us to focus our attention on stuff like our resumes sooner rather than later.

Management Communications (MC) - This is another one of those "show up randomly in the schedule" classes beyond the five core class (DA, MKT, ACC, OPS, LO). We talked about email communications, story telling and knowing your audience, and then we each actually delivered a 2-minute story about a leadership experience (or, in my case, the reason I chose to pursue my JD/MBA - my section's prof let us pick any subject that might come up in an interview) and gave feedback to our classmates. On Friday, we had to turn in a short written story as a diagnostic...I don't know what we're ultimately going to do with those.

Retrospective: Orientation & Career Forums

Orientation at Darden lasts for about a week. The schedule is basically as follows:

Monday (optional) - pick up your name tag and t-shirt, First Coffee, mill around and meet people, first Career Management (CarMa) session, Q&A Panel with Student Services/Registrar/Financial Aid, etc. I only did the name tag pick-up, CarMa, and meeting some new folks. I skipped the Q&A because I was frankly so irritated by the Financial Aid situation that I was not in the mood to sit confined in a small space worrying about it any more (more on this later). CarMa was all about finding your life themes. I was unimpressed at this point.

Tuesday & Wednesday (optional) - Career Discovery Forums. Basically, these were 1-4.5 hour presentations (usually by alums working in a particular field) and Q&A sessions with a panel of folks from various career tracks, such as General Management & Operations, Finance, Consulting, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability/Non-Profit, and Marketing. I went to GMO, Consulting, Sustainability/Non-Profit, and part of Marketing. I thought the sessions were vaguely informative. The quality of the presenters varied. The Q&A sessions were not terribly enlightening. If you knew nothing about a particular area, these may have been rather helpful. Likewise if you were looking for folks with whom to network later. I personally think that cramming all of these sessions into 2 days was just too much. It was a ton of sitting around, plus the same boxed lunches each day. I would think about hosting one forum each day, first thing in the morning, so that they are interspersed with other Orientation stuff. Also, Tuesday was the day of the Business Etiquette Dinner, which was actually fairly educational. For instance, did you know that the appropriate time to bring up business at a breakfast meeting was right after the coffee arrives, whereas at lunch you can wait until after meals are selected?

Thursday (mandatory) - Dean's welcome, First Coffee, Section & Faculty Introductions, Welcomes from Career Management and Student Affairs staff. Standard orientation fare. Nice to find out with whom we'd be in class for the next three months.

Friday (mandatory) - Introductions from the Registrar, Financial Aid, Library, UVA Honor Committee, and Darden Outreach, followed by First Coffee, Introduction to the Darden Curriculum, Learning Team Orientation and Lunch, and Learning Team/Community Acitivity. Everything up to Learning Team Orientation was not particularly memorable. I remember thinking that it was really duplicative of everything we'd covered in International Student Orientation. I was really sick of turkey sandwich boxed lunches by this point. BUT, I did get to meet my awesome learning team (woot LT 31!). Then they shoved us outside in 95+ degree weather to run around and do team-building activities. Because really, who doesn't love spending time with virtual strangers sweating all over each other? It's not like you're going to have to hang out with them every day for the next 3 quarters or anything, right? :-) I think there was a Cold Call (read: free beer + food out in one of the courtyards) after this, but I went home for a much needed shower and nap.

Saturday (optional) - Fun activities, including tubing, winery/brewery tours, hikes, etc. The weather was fairly miserable, but I enjoyed the wine tour I did, which took us to Veritas and Cardinal Point. We even got to meet the winemaker at Veritas; he was quite informative.

Interspersed throughout this entire week were various gatherings at myriad social establishments throughout Charlottesville. I frankly do not have the stamina to go out every night; never have, likely never will. Plus, I find it really difficult to meet people when you have to shout at each other to communicate. And, smoking indoors is still legal in VA. Boooo!

All in all, Orientation was about what I expected; definitely not the highlight of my life, but relatively informative, and a good chance to meet some new folks.

Retrospective: International Student Orientation (yep, they let US students come, too)

This year, Darden invited US/domestic students to attend International Student Orientation (ISO). I figured it would be a good opportunity to get used to sitting in "class" again, to meet some new folks before full orientation started, and to prevent myself from using my copious free time do something stupid, like go buy tons of unnecessary housewares for my new apartment. The schedule also suggested that there would be some good coverage of the job search process, and I thought I could benefit from every bit of help or insight I could get in that area.

I did get used to sitting in the same chair for protracted periods of time, I did definitely meet some great new people (some of whom I now consider my closest acquaintances at Darden), and I spent far less time and money at Target than I probably would have if I didn't attend ISO, but I also became completely petrified of the entire job search process. Yes, I know there is a recession. Yes, I know that finding a job is never a piece of cake. Yes, I know that it's important to start early. But I feel like a ton of gloom and doom was thrown at us all at once (more on this later), and I don't even have to worry about things like visas or sponsorship.

I also, frankly, think that ISO could easily be consolidated into a shorter time period and merged with Orientation for everyone else. By the end of the three days, I felt like everything was becoming a little bit repetitive, and certainly I heard a lot of the same content again during full Orientation the next week.

Retrospective: Moving, My Favorite Activity....EVER

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate moving. Absolutely HATE it. I think I would rather have my teeth ripped out one by one than move. OK, that’s probably an exaggeration, but only a little one.

When I was in college, I used to start packing up my dorm room by the middle of April. Moving stressed me out, and I tried to minimize that stress by starting early on the packing, which, to some degree, made me feel more in control of the situation. When I moved to Boston, I was able to do so piecemeal, since I still had an apartment in Providence for 2 months after my Boston lease started. This made the situation slightly less miserable, but it still wasn’t fun. Once I had moved everything to Boston, I vowed that I was never moving again until I was out of graduate school and could afford professional movers (I actually intentionally chose an apartment that was walking distance to Boston College, on a bus route to Boston University, and a short walk and then a bus ride to Harvard). The best laid plans….

When it became clear that I was going to move to Virginia, I almost instantly started freaking out about the move. I have a lot of stuff. I have heavy furniture. I hate moving. This was not going to be good. I also had no earthly idea how exactly I was going to get everything from Boston to Virginia (about 600 miles). Clearly, it was too far to make numerous trips as I'd done when I moved from Providence, and I had waaaaay too much stuff to cram into the family minivan as I'd done through college. So, I knew I was going to have to rent a moving truck. I also realized that there was no way in hell that my parents and I were going to be able to move all my furniture by ourselves without at least two hernias and probably a nervous breakdown or two or three. So, I was going to have to hire movers.

I really think that most moving companies are a huge racket. To hire a full-service moving company would have cost me upwards of $4500 (still assuming that I did my own packing), which is simply ridiculous, and goodness only knows when and if my stuff would have shown up in Charlottesville. Renting a Penske truck (with a AAA discount and my mother driving, since I’m under 25) and hiring movers to load in Boston and other movers to unload in Charlottesville, and including two stops in CT (one to pick up more stuff that I had in storage, and one to acquire a car from my grandparents) and one in DE (to sleep and pick up yet more stuff at my parents’ house), I was able to do the whole thing in about 18 hours and for around $2k. It was still expensive, but I was generally able to retain my sanity, nothing was broken, and nobody got a hernia. Therefore, I consider the expense well worth it, and I definitely recommend hiring professionals, unless you have a whole posse of able-bodied individuals around to move all your stuff.

Also, if you’re looking for movers in Boston, Intelligent Labor in Cambridge is amazing. Truly amazing. They were literally running between my apartment and the truck. 5 stars.

Retrospective: Quitting My Job, Or, What Not to Do When You Quit Yours

I’d like to offer some helpful do’s and don’t’s for those of you who are planning to quit your job to return to graduate school. These may not all be applicable to everyone’s situation, but here’s my perspective.

1.) DON’T underestimate the amount of time that training your replacement will take.

At the Consulting Firm That Shall Not Be Named, I was the only person in my position, and, while I certainly never considered myself irreplaceable, I performed many tasks that none of the attorneys with whom I worked would ever in their right minds want to do (thinking cataloguing and filing electronic copies of contracts and filing annual reports with various states), as well as some that I’m perfectly sure they could do but which would not be a productive use of their time (think running relatively routine daily compliance/conflicts checks, answering tons of questions regarding the Firm’s ethics/professional standards policies, or sitting in on numerous meetings where some other administrative group or another needed a “legal perspective” but also wanted to cover plenty of information that really doesn’t matter from a “legal perspective”). So, despite a hiring freeze, my position was considered sufficiently “essential” to merit hiring a replacement. Apparently, I’m so essential that the Firm was willing to have my replacement, M, start 6 weeks before I left (July 31). Now, when I heard that I’d have 6 weeks to train my replacement, I thought, “This will be great! I’ll have plenty of time to finish some projects, train M, write a manual about how to do the job, say my good-byes, etc.” Wrong. M is extremely bright, but there are a ton of nuances to conflicts/compliance/ethics work, and I had apparently forgotten just how long it had taken me to get up to speed on everything, plus my job had gradually evolved into what it was by the time I left. M got stuck with everything all at once. By my last day, I was still scrambling to finish up projects, transition things to M, and salvage my personal effects from my computer. Word of advice: plan on “transition” taking much longer than you expect.

2.) DO start documenting your job responsibilities or compiling a how-to guide NOW.

I guess this may only apply if you are in a “new” role or a role for which your company does not already have a “manual” documenting your responsibilities. If you are going to compile such a guide, do not do what I did and wait until your last few weeks at the company. You will invariably forget things that you do and how exactly you do them. Someone new walking into your job will not necessarily have the institutional knowledge that you have and will benefit from a detailed how-to guide. I had originally planned to do this early on, but I was busy, so I kept putting it off. Then, I was scrambling to try to remember everything. If you start now, you’ll be able to capture 9-10 months of work activities. I recommend looking at time sheets, emails, etc. every couple weeks, identifying major responsibilities or projects, and writing down how you did them, names of essential contacts, etc. This documentation may also be helpful to you when it comes to be review/feedback time.

3.) DON’T, under any circumstances, work up until the day before you plan to move.

You will be stressed about moving, you’ll want to see friends before you leave town, and you will benefit from at least a few days “off” before dealing with the hassles of moving, getting settled in a new place, and orientation. I worked until 14 hours before the movers were supposed to show up. Bad, bad idea.

4.) DO network at least a little before you depart.

I wish I’d had more time to do this, but (if you haven’t sensed a theme from this post yet) this is another area in which I feel like time snuck up on me. Ostensibly, if you’ve been at a company for some period of time, you’ll have formed connections with at least some of your co-workers. Take the time to go out to lunch, grab drinks, etc. before you leave. Thank your mentors. If they were particularly influential, you may want to keep in touch with them later, and this will be much easier if you’ve cultivated the relationship before your departure. Also, you may want to return to the company after school, and I would imagine this is easier if you do some work before you leave.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Re-committing

I'm beginning to sense an unfortunate theme related to this blog: I post for a bit, then I get caught up in life, and I stop posting. Well, I am quite disappointed with myself, and now I am officially committing not to do that any more. Starting this weekend, I am going to be making a concerted effort to post more frequently, and at least twice a month. That's my commitment to this blog and anyone who reads it. As I stated at the outset, I started this blog because I wanted to keep my friends and family up to date on my life at school and because I wanted to share my Darden/UVa Law experience with anyone who may be considering either school or the dual degree. The last 7-8 weeks here in Charlottesville have been completely crazy, but it's just not OK to stop blogging.

So, I'm going to try to make up for my poor prior performance (ahh...alliteration!), by diligently posting some retrospectives this weekend, covering the following topics:
1.) Quitting My Job, Or, What Not to Do When You Quit Yours
2.) Moving, My Favorite Activity....EVER
3.) International Student Orientation (yep, they let US students come, too)
4.) Orientation & Career Forums
5.) Reflections on the Darden Q1 Curriculum from Someone Who Hasn't Quite Survived It Yet
6.) Section E is Awesome
7.) I Thank God Every Day That I Have an Apparently Functional Learning Team
8.) Family Weekend
9.) The Dreaded Career Search
10.) Life Outside of School...If I Could Only Remember What That Is...

Yup, I'm committing to 10 full-length posts this weekend alone. It's the least I can do for being a slacker for the last couple months....