Why do you build me up just to let me down and mess me around?

Apologies to The Foundations for borrowing their lyrics ("Build Me Up Buttercup") for the title of this blog post, but....

Dear Darden,

I have a question for you: seriously?  Now, I've heard all about "Black November" at Darden.  It's like one of those "the school, the myth, the legend" kind of things around here.  I know that I'm not supposed to have any free time at all, that I'm supposed to be getting 3.25 hours of sleep each night, that I should be making 5+ networking calls a day, that I should be calculating WACCs and de-levering betas in my dreams.  I get it.  Really, I do.  I was expecting it.  And frankly, my November didn't start out too terribly wonderfully.  I didn't understand anything in either Finance or Global Economies & Markets.  I hated my resume.  I was grumpy, for a variety of personal versions.  In other words, I was ready for Black November. 

Then, Darden, you decided to lure me into a false sense of security and complacency.  You gave me a light caseload last week.  My learning team didn't have to meet after Tuesday.  We got to go on a field trip, fifth grade style, complete with busses and a lunch consisting of turkey sandwiches on white bread and chocolate chip cookies.  I can't remember the last time I had a sandwich on plain white bread.  It was nostalgic.   I had time to pay my bills, clear out my DVR, and watch a movie from NetFlix.  I went to TNDC for the first time since September, without feeling guilty, because I got to sleep in the next morning since class didn't start until 10:15 for a change.  I got to clean my apartment from top to bottom because I actually had time to do it, not because I was using domesticity as a procrastination excuse.  In my view, having time to scrub your floors on hands and knees, with Pinesol, at 3 pm on a Thursday afternoon when you don't have company coming is the height of self-indulgence, an activity typically reserved for the unemployed or ladies who lunch.  The rest of the world uses Swiffers.   This weekend, I had time to make coffee cakes to motivate my Section E-mates to get up and play Darden Cup soccer.  I baked bread.  I made chicken noodle soup, from an actual raw chicken and a big pot of water and some chopped up vegetables.   It felt like exam week, only so much better.

Then this week started.  Monday was Black Monday, in my view.  I don't know what happened to the stock market, but my levels of joy and satisfaction with life plummeted well below 10,000.  I had a paper due that should have taken me 2 hours to write.  It took me HOURS, and I finished it 20 minutes before the deadline.  It was a 4-page paper.  WTF, Darden?  You've robbed me of my ability to write papers, and I was a paper-writing fiend before you converted me to a spreadsheet junkie.  I realized this week that my resume still stinks.  I haven't written any cover letters, and I have three weeks until on-grounds job applications are due.  I'm behind on preparing for case interviews.  I have several networking calls set up for later this week, but I'm still behind the ball.  I REALLY have no idea what's going on in Finance.  My class participation has fallen off a cliff.  We have a marketing simulation (StratSim) from 1:30 pm-9:30 pm today and 9 am-9:30 pm tomorrow.  It's raining today, and it suddenly went from 70 degrees to winter.  I feel like I'm drowning.  I'd rather go back to working 90+ hour weeks at a law firm. 

Darden, I understand that this month is called "Black November" for a reason.  I just think it was really mean of you to make me think that everything was peaches and cream last week.  If you were a man, I would dump you, because I consider that false advertising, and it's a problem in any relationship.  Take that, Buttercup.

Love,
Me

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.