North Carolina

Durham, NC is a small little town with nothing much more than Duke University. This, in my opinion, is a good thing because anything and everything that you need is close by. :). Groceries, Malls, Auto repairs, School - they're all within a ten minute drive. Given my dislike of automotive travel, I like this! North Carolina is beautiful much like New England was. However, the Fall season here leaves much to be desired. Leaves turn brown instead of the blazing yellows, reds and oranges we got used to in Shrewsbury. But all said and done, there is tons of greenery and there is a very country-side feel to this area.

In school, I have just gotten done with mid-term exams . I am totally immersed in the joys of SIP'ing. SIPs are Special Interest Presentations: a fancy term for a company presentation. At these presentation, companies tell us what kind of culture they have and what kind of jobs they have open and what kind of people they want to hire. It's also an opportunity to make a lot of contacts (which I've been dutifully doing). It's a lot of work too. Being social with an aim of making a good impression and/or throwing in insightful comments during conversations is not simple. But I'm learning from the experience and that's what matters. A pleasant perk of going to these SIPs is that you get tons of freebies from the companies. My notable collections of late include an umbrella (which is useful in this hurricane season) and a boatload of pens. The Boss is pleased because she has pretty much gotten a lifetime supply of complimentary lotions, skin products and other girly paraphernalia that caused me much embarassment to collect.

Speaking of the Boss, she's studying hard. She's taking an advanced calculus class and will write the GRE at the end of the year. She's pushing herself closer to her goal of getting an advanced degree while doing a wonderful job keeping house, home and hubby in order.

About being average joe

Something that I'm finding out here in b-school is that I am painfully average when compared to the rest of my class. There are some super whizbang brains here. And I don't mean they're bookworms who burn the midnight oil to get super grades. I mean, these are go-getters who party like there's no tomorrow and then still manage to ace their academics. After environments where I've been close to the best in class, it's been an eye-opening experience at the least. I was flipping through the resume book last night (Resume book for last year's class) and I have to tell you. Each and every one of them looked great. I mean, I thought my resume looked fairly good, but it pales in comparison with a bunch of what I saw yesterday. So much for standing out on that front.

Which brings me to the oft repeated mantra of business school. Networking. I must tell you guys about this but I'll save it for another day. Right now, I need to get back to studying....I need to - at least to stay average.

More B-School

So I had written a sizeable blog last week. For some inexplicable reason, it didn't get posted to the website. So I lost the entire posting. So here I am, a week later trying again:

As I mentioned the last time around, life is moving in fast forward at this time. Not that I have any complaints about it. I'm having an absolute blast with all the things that are going on. First, classes are rolling on at full swing. Just as in UC, these professors are taking no prisoners. They're throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us. I wonder why I get this feeling of unbearable amounts of work in school here in the U.S. In India, I always thought that it was quite peaceful in spite of our voluminous syllabi there. .

In the midst of all the academic activity, there's a flurry of extra-curricular stuff too. It seems every club had there inaugural meetings these past two weeks and I've been trying to go for them all. I know, it seems a bit much. But I want to get a feel for each of the clubs to determine which ones I want to invest my time in. So off I went to the Marketing, Finance, General Management, Indus (South Asian), International Business, Fuqua Times......Finally I decided to get involved in General Management, Marketing and the school newspaper, Fuqua Times. Let's see how much of a constraint that puts on my time. If I have time to spare, I'll see about some others too.

This has also been a time of sprucing up resumes. Some of you techies should see my resume now. It looks like a lot of HOT AIR. But having said that, I will also say that it looks like very IMPRESSIVE hot air. Oh well, all said and done, as long as it brings in a job, I couldn't care less what it looks like. :)

The Boss is busy with her advanced Calculus class. I'm being forced to remember some of my calculus when she asks me questions about dot products and cross products of vectors.

Durham is really warm these days. I can't imagine it getting cold in the winter for right now, it feels just like Madras. You will sweat no matter what because of the humidity. Oh, and have I mentioned that this is hurricane country. We dodged three already (Or rather, the storm dodged us) and there another one on its way from Jamaica. Darn it! When we were in Boston, those Canadians kept sending us arctic blasts. Now that we're in Durham, it's those Carribeans with the hurricanes.

This weekend is campout weekend at Duke. So most of my friends are out camping on campus. (One goes to campout to score the opportunity to buy season tickets to the Duke basketball games. If you want to included in the opportunity, you need to give attendance at random time points during a two night and one day time frame). While most graduate students go to campout in tents, the Business School students do it in style - renting RVs, bring big screen tvs, sattelite dishes, massive bbqs and of course generators to run all this stuff. Then it's truly a marathon booze and dance party from Friday night to Sunday morning, interrupted only by the whistles of the attendance call.

When the Boss finishes her calculus homework, we're going to head there to partaaaaay. You guys decide if I'm really going to party!

PS : If you're wondering why I'm not actually doing the campout thing, it's because my back is still rather sore and I'm being overly (as usual) careful.

What's the probability of understanding Price Elasticity of Demand?

The long weekend came and went - too quickly for comfort of course, as usual. I guess some things never change. However, it was a welcome break from the pace of school, even though there was plenty of studying to do at home.

The Boss and I hung out trying to catch up on what happened during the week since we hardly saw each other. We managed to go to (yet another) a party hosted by a fellow first year student. This was the first party that I enjoyed, and I suspect that it was because the number of people was a lot smaller, allowing for more intimate (I mean this is a clean way) interaction. I actually had meaningful conversation with a number of folks.

Over the weekend, we spent a delightful evening with Mr, Mrs and Baby "Liv Onaan" (Onaan translates to Garden Lizard in Tamil/Malayalam.). Some of you will be familiar with this term. If not, don't forget to ask me about it. It's (only in retrospect) a funny story. Anyway, I digress. They were celebrating Lord Krishna's birthday and had lots of yummy stuff to eat. We participated in a puja and of course the best part was dressing up Baby "Liv Onaan" like Lord Krishna (complete with peacock feather and all). She was sooooo adorable.

Hurricane Frances, which threatened to hit North Carolina has petered out into loads of irritating rain showers. There's no dearth of water over in these parts. Apart from the rain, the air is full of it. This area is just as humid as Madras is.

About growing pointy hair

I bet some of you have no idea what the title is getting at. But then again, maybe you do. :)

In any case, I haven't been able to update my blog lately because of the deluge of work that I've hit in my first two weeks in Business School. But after a week of classes, and going into the long weekend, I decided that it's time to put some pen to paper (figuratively).

The first week of school was a course. Yes, a five day course worth 2 credits. They call it Integrated Learning Experience. I went into this with a great deal of scepticism but found myself enjoying the learning experience. It definitely was a learning experience because we had all kinds of weird stuff to do as a team. The entire course focused on team building and leadership development. First of all, we were all split up into teams of five people each. Incidentally, this team was going to be the team with whom we would work out all our homework assignments. We were to be graded as a team too, and I was terribly apprehensive about the kind of team that I was going to be put into and whether we'd be able to work together. It's very much like joining a new team in a new company. Very strange to begin with. But it turns out that all the guys (yes, we are an all male team) are great people and we get along (so far) quite famously. Career wise, we're pretty diverse with two engineers, sales, purchase and finance in the mix. Good stuff! One whole day was spent at the Triangle Training Center. Another day was devoted to Difficult Conversations and Ethical Dilemmas (yes, terminations included). We had plenty of pre-assignment readings to go through for this one that included writings by Abe Lincoln, Machiavelli amongst others. Very interesting. We also had a session on Leadership Development and another on Cultural Personalities. The Culture session was really insightful into the different cultures in the world. The strange thing was the the culture tendencies of most of the students were one particular called Linear Active. This was in spite of the fact that say Asians are NOT usually Linear Active. I found this stuff just fascinating.

This week was the beginning of classes....like, real classes. :). I'm taking 4 courses this term (not semester, we have two terms a semester). Added to the humungous amounts of work they're throwing at us, we have to also organize our lives enough to take part in the various clubs and meet people. I have been forced to rely on my PDA to keep up with the pace of life right now. I hate to say it, but if I was a snooty sort before this, I've become even more of a snoot. LOL. For example, if someone were to come up to me and ask if we could hang out sometime, my response would be to whip out my PDA and say "Let me check my schedule"! Can you imagine?!! I can't believe it myself. The Boss hardly sees me these days and she's not pleased about it. My schedule is approximately like this: Leave home at 7AM and come back at 11PM. It's a whirlwind. The second years say that it'll get a lot better as time goes along but for now, I'm really riding a roller coaster that going really fast!

Having said that, I'm enjoying myself...not the stress so much, but the experience and the people...well, most of the people. :).

Well, it's back to my Statistics assignment now. I have to figure out how to advise a 65 year old woman on some investment decisions. Woo hooooo.