Section advance

One of the annual rituals for incoming HBS classes is the fall section retreat. This generally involves an excursion to a semi-rural part of New England in the company of almost all of your 90 section mates, plus a few spouses (very few are unable to make it, and those that do usually have quite reasonable excuses, such as week-old twins). It's less than 48 hours in total, but in that time many people consume copious amounts of alcohol and generally take actions that place the security deposit at continual risk. I'm not a drinker, and even if I was I wouldn't enjoy drunkenness, so to the extent that our social activities revolve around rapid ingestion of alcohol I'm not a central figure. Nonetheless there's something about being out of your normal surroundings that leads to a refreshing openness to connecting with each other. In random corners of the different houses we rented, at various hours of the day or night, you could find people you don't normally get to speak with and strike up an insightful conversation on some topic or another, if that's what you were looking for.