It's Time for Updates: 3. Home Sweet Home

Before starting my internship(s), I decided to allow myself 3-4 weeks to relax. I think I deserve it – heck, we all deserve it – after this challenging spring session. As second year students now, while we aren’t receiving any bail out money, we are at least getting a reward. For some, it’s a trip abroad or a fancy new computer. For me, it is allowing my mom to spoil me with her amazing cooking.

So I set out on a long, 18-hour trip to Romania via Germany. Before I even got home, I got a huge wake-up call in Germany. Yes, I knew from my accounting and finance classes that the Euro is dominating the Dollar, but my transactions were on paper, so who cares if the direct quote is 1.3 or 1.6. Minor details. Well it matters when I’m stuck at the airport in Frankfurt and I have two hours to kill. The very “nice” lady at the check-in is telling me that I’m too early for my departure. I try to explain that I just got off the plane after a 11-hour flight from L.A. and I would
really appreciate it if I could go to my gate and just relax there. She looks at me with a blank stare and then she moves on to the next person. Shoot! I guess I shouldn’t even try to ask to speak with a supervisor. So I decide to check whether I get wireless and take care of some e-mails. Yes! I do get wireless, however, the fee for one (yes, one) hour is 8 Euros.
What?! T-mobile in L.A. is $5.99, here it comes at a premium and it’s almost $11. I go to business school, so a little cost–benefit analysis is telling me that checking my e-mail at that price is a big no! So I decide to go back to my friendly airport worker.

My second treat was going home to Sibiu (Romania) to visit my family and friends. It was three weeks of bliss and I was glad I got to see everybody and travel a little bit. It’s always good to go home because my mom still treats me like a child and does everything for me. So I was pampered with lots of love, attention and especially homemade cooking that I missed. It doesn’t matter how many times I make my mom’s recipes, they just don’t taste as good as when she makes them! And I’d say I’m a pretty good cook. But it always tastes better when mama makes it.

I also missed my town and its old buildings so I took many walks and tried to experience it through tourist eyes. You can see some of the pictures I took in my “tourist walk”. It was a very interesting experience and I recommend it to anybody because you get to see everything from a completely new perspective. You might also discover something new about your hometown.

It's Time for Updates: 2. Sports Weekend

This was the first treat after finals. Every year, Challenge for Charity chapters from nine business schools (Stanford, University of Washington, USF, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, and Pepperdine) reunite at Stanford for Sports Weekend. It is a weekend of fun, competition, and business. The Board Meeting is the place and time for each chapter to show their accomplishments over the year as well as discuss strategies for the year to come. Then the competition begins: teams from each school compete in every sport known to mankind to win the Golden Briefcase. The weekend ends with a big party where the winning team gets to take home the briefcase. Until next year!

To see highlights from this year's competition, watch this video. Incoming students, get ready for Sports Weekend 2010!

It's Time for Updates: 1. Finals

I’ve been MIA for weeks so it’s time to update you on what’s been going on: finals, Sports Weekend, trip back home, and finally internships. I’ll post the entries separately though to be easier to find.

Finals

Yes, those tests, papers, and presentations that take over your life. Literally and completely! During finals week I’ve averaged 4 hours of sleep a night. By the end of the week, I was looking like I was auditioning for a scary movie role. Good thing girls have make up!

But let’s go back to finals. Monday I had my 4-hour final in finance followed by a treat: a final in QBA (quantitative business analysis)! I did it, but I really do not recommend taking two finals – especially these two – on the same day. Unless you’re a genius, which does not apply to me. The finance final was alright I thought, not too difficult, not too easy, but definitely long. Professor Harjoto is the best finance professor and one of my favorites. He goes above and beyond and wants to make sure you understand everything. He holds full-day (i.e. 8-hour) reviews before tests, something that’s really unheard of in b-school. He makes himself available in person and via e-mail for questions… he really is amazing! He and I disagree on one issue though and that is me changing my concentration from marketing to finance. He thinks I have it in my blood, I think I just have finance in my brain and marketing in my blood. Time will tell, I guess.

Professor Hahn, my QBA professor, is great too. He starts each lecture with a review of the previous lecture to make sure you understand the material. The review really helps and you almost don’t have to read anything for his class (if you repeat this to anybody, I’ll deny it.) :) Plus – and this is my personal favorite thing about his class - everything is applied and he uses examples you can relate to and will definitely use in the future. And in his final he just wants to see that you understand the output and can interpret the information. He is also C4C’s liaison with the school and supports our efforts to promote our activities.

The other and the most important class for me this session was Marketing. I think I got lucky and had truly amazing professors this session. Professor Rapier has over 20 years of experience both on the client and agency side and brings to class tons of examples from his work. Kotler’s book was a valuable resource and Professor Rapier encouraged us to question parts of it with real life exercises. One thing that everybody loved about Professor Rapier is that he was very hands off, which gave us the freedom to explore in our reports and projects, as long as we could back it up with evidence. If you take his class you’ll very quickly become familiar with three (well, four) words: relevance, authenticity and market research. ;-) And then there was our famous E2B (Education to Business) project, which provided plenty of real-life experience. I will write a separate entry about it because there is plenty to talk about, but I will just say that our marketing plan presentation in front of the company and our professors concluded the finals week for me.

I am officially done with my first year! I’m excited, nervous, and anxious that the second year is going to fly by as quickly as the first one.