Big Easy

I'm in New Orleans as part of a winter break school service trip. It's the night before the big college football championship game, featuring the Ohio State Buckeyes and the home-state Louisiana State University Tigers. The streets are a zoo, with thousands of fans and tourists milling about decked out in full team paraphernalia, spontaneously breaking out into team chants. The touts and scalpers are out in full force, and vendors are doing a thriving business selling t-shirts and tchotchkes. New Orleans' liberal alcohol laws mean that open containers of various intoxicating beverages are in the unsteady hands of many. There's currently a trumpet playing a solo from somewhere on the street outside my hotel room, and I can hear it clearly even though we're on the fifteenth floor. Appropriately enough, they just struck up the strains of "When the Saints go Marching In." Once the tourists go home though, New Orleans still has a lot of work to do to get back to where it should be, and that won't be easy.

Debrief

Semester one is officially over. This is the most intense of the four terms, both in the number of classes and in the flurry of extra-curricular activity. Most of this has settled down, and the second term will probably be a bit more relaxed, but not by much - overscheduling is a perennial trait of MBA students.

All quiet

The student center is nearly deserted, with the only sound that of the fireplaces burning softly in the background, on yet another icy Boston evening. For first-year students four out of five final exams are behind us, and the one that remains is the most qualitative of the lot, meaning that most people are taking it easy tonight. Tomorrow will be marked by packing and flights and cabs as we scatter, literally, to the four corners of the earth. At lunch a classmate mentioned how remarkable it is that at HBS we're pulled together from incredibly varied places for an intense period of time, dispersed in an instant, and then pulled back just as quickly, come January, for another term. The new seating charts were released today, and unlike the first time around we have the context gained from a full semester to interpret them. I'm down in front, seated in the evocatively-titled worm deck described in a previous post. My view of the class will be different, but change in perspective is a good thing. As an elementary school student, I played the role of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, one of whose lines comes to mind: "They have made worms' meat of me..."

Home stretch

All first-year students had their last case discussions today. During the next two days we have wrap-up classes for each of the five courses, and then we go into finals, one per day, roughly four hours each, for five days. And like that, the first semester, half of our first-year experience, draws to a close.