First Term Recap… from Taiwan!

You are currently on the first leg of a plane flight to Taiwan; one of your elementary school friends is getting married in Taiwan. Unlike the overwhelming majority of American elementary school friends, somehow you and your Group of 5 are still a unit even after scattering around the world; you were told this happened because you are a sentimental guy. Who knew?

Anyway, your first leg is a red-eye from Oz to KL; the time is somewhere between 12:00AM to 2AM, depending on how many time zones you have crossed. You are too groggy and disoriented to realize you may have actually gone backward in time; the only reason you are even aware of this is that you were awoken by the nice Malaysian waitress who offered you tea. Maybe she is part English. In England, it is probably tea time. Of course, you are time-traveling over Australia and are very far away from England.

Unfortunately your airline believes that time traveling is a genteel experience that can only be truly appreciated with a cup of tea, and the cabin lights stay on as the tea is being served. You cannot sleep with light, so you time travel, in your mind, back to first term.

The following is a recap, intended as a resource for the new January intake. You remember the anxiety your class felt in September; you hope the following information will relieve some of the January intake’s anxiety that you witnessed firsthand during an interview panel. It is not a how-to guide; it is simply a broad-brush recollection of some of your takeaways after your first term in Oz.

Life in Oz
The most striking recollection you felt about school is your Australian experience… this exposure taught you that you want to stay here post-graduation, at least until you can build your career. Learning about the Australian culture was rewarding and fun, as one of your favourite pastimes is learning new ways of thinking. Oz is different enough to be exciting but close enough to share common ground with the US; this happy medium let you function while concentrating the bulk of your mental energy on excelling at the Melbourne Business School.

Academics
The academic experience was much more consuming than you thought it would be, given the tales you heard from your friends 'studying' at American B-schools. Here at MBS, your grades determine your likelihood of getting interviews from the strategy consulting firms, so your specific target was the grades to guarantee you interviews. You worked long hours to reach that goal. Additionally, you took a 20 hour / week part-time job at a boutique consulting firm to make sure that you want to work in strategy consulting (you do), and this combination of responsibilities left you almost no free time for entire months at a time.

In retrospect, the choices you made were good ones given the information available. You are writing this blog to offer additional information in case a new student has similar decisions to make.

Life as a student
The lifestyle was not as much of an adjustment as you feared, mostly because you really enjoy the flexibility student life affords. Here at MBS, you basically have unlimited work and unlimited time to do it in; you rarely left the B-school mindset because you thrive in these kinds of environments. That being said, you found the breadth of the material daunting, enough to prevent you from truly mastering all the material that was taught during the term. That is not because you are stupid… there is a lot you simply wanted to learn, and your classes, for the most part, emphasized breadth rather than depth.

Internationalism
Melbourne Business School’s student body is extremely international without a clear cultural majority. This leads to many, many different cultural norms while working in groups and interacting with each other; even syndicate ground rules vary exponentially between groups with different racial mixes. During the course of the term, you learned tolerance and acceptance in a way that very few others would even attempt to understand, and you are a better person for it.

Feedback
Melbourne Business School taught you the value of accurate feedback; during the first six to eight weeks of term, before your tests, you had no reliable way of measuring your performance amongst your peers. But this did not stop a noteworthy minority of your classmates from trying. You learned from this; in the end, those who performed the best were generally the ones most concerned with learning, not necessarily the ones who had the most correct answers. However, for those first six to eight weeks, those with the answers generally managed to convince the others that they were smart, mostly because they believed it themselves. In this way, you learned that confidence can be as important as ability.

Living in the small pond
Melbourne Business School is a very small school, and in the Aussie tradition, the hierarchy is relatively soft. The school takes care of its students and listens to what you have to say -- during the course of the semester, several abnormal requests were granted without hesitation. In fact, every abnormal request you have heard of from your classmates has been granted, though you do not know the final outcome of the most abnormal request of them all, which occurred after your last final exam. But even if that outcome did not materialize, it is readily apparent that Melbourne Business School goes out of its way to take care of its student body.

In summary, MBS’ first term was an excellent experience, and nothing worth being anxious about. Certainly it was academically difficult, but that was mostly because you are pursuing strategy consulting. At the same time, you learned a great deal and met some truly exceptional people.

Next term, you will still be pursuing strategy consulting, and while your impending case interviews may threaten to negatively affect your stress and well-being, you are determined to be more confident and less anxious about the experience.

^_^