The First Few DaysTo put it in one word, chaotic. It's only been 2 days since we started taking the "proper" MBA classes (everything else before this was just a warm-up), and already I am a classic case of having to juggle too many balls at once.
Term I at IESE consists of 6 core subjects - Decision Analysis, Analysis of Business Problems, Marketing Management, Financial Accounting, Managing People in Organisations and Managerial Communications. If you're fortunate enough, I repeat, fortunate enough (because the professors are so damn good!) to need Spanish lessons, that's one more subject to study.
Lets break this down. Typically, there are 3 lectures per day + Spanish, so there's a minimum of 3 cases to study at home each day. Considering Spanish class gets over at 1700h and you're home by 1800h, you're still talking about a minimum of 6 more hours of study per day - and that's excluding Spanish. A typical First-termer goes to bed at 0100 and wakes up at 0630, so that's only 5.5 hours of beauty sleep!
Personally, I guess that Year-1 is purposefully made hectic by the professors to allow us to prioritize needs, like the way I choose to blog instead of reading a Financial Accounting case!
On the plus side though (yes, there is a plus side!), the learning curve is amazingly steep. Already we've seen and spoken about industries and companies that I had no inkling about, and considering class participation plays a solid role (well, depending on the subject) in the grading system, the option of taking it easy doesn't exist.
Bring it on!
