Disney's coming to town

More specifically, the bit of Disney that plans to build theme parks in China. For some schoolboy reason I'm getting quite excited about their recruitment presentation - a bit of me thinks it would be quite cool to be involved in getting a theme park going. At least when you're done you can point at it and say: "look. Here's what I've been doing for the past x years".

Identity

A funny thing happened to me on the phone to the bank the other day. I got a mini identity crisis. Having left my home country at the tender age of 12 and lived in the UK practically ever since, it was the closest thing I had to home.

On Monday I rang up my bank in order to order a Switch card as I had lost mine. After being on hold for 40 minutes I was told that this was not possible - I suspect because my account has not had a salary going into it for the past 2 months. In the grand scheme of things this is by no means a big deal - it's just one of the little inconveniences that you just have to live with.

But it was at that point that it really struck me home - I felt like the country which had de facto become my home was turning its back on me. And all because of a silly Switch card. And then I felt a little homeless. I mean France is nice and all, but it's not really home - it's just somewhere I'm stopping by on my big life adventure. Oh how the quirky ways of the little things in life focus your mind on the bigger picture....

Flip Flop

I've never been good with decisions about myself, especially ones which have some impact on my future. I tend to end up in a nasty cycle of analysing all the options to death while distinctly avoiding making a choice and standing by it. This wonderful cycle is also interspersed with period of ostrich impersonations where things appear more sandy than they really are for a while.

And so I have been living the past week. To Singapore or not to Singapore, that has indeed been the question. To those not involved in the mad MBA process making such a decision should be a fairly simple process. To someone who's a bit stressed because of short term questions like what to do about a disintegrating group, and who always has the "CAREER CAREER" red light constantly blinking at the back of their head, it has proven to be anything but.

Is it worth all the extra money? Will I actually have time to travel around whilst I'm there? How will the socialising work? How do I go about finding somewhere to live. In the end I got fed up with it and just went with my heart. Pouring such an enormous sum of money into what will likely end up a couple of weekends in Bali is likely not the best use of my resources. And in terms of getting to know people, the fact that 75% of my year is en-mass decamping to Singapore means that in reality it will be pretty much the same as it has been here. Actually, I think that the 25% which stay here will likely gel a lot more as a group - just because there will be a lot fewer people here.

And so with a stroke I've removed a big part of my recent stress. Gone are the worries about accommodation. Gone are the worries about planning traveling itineraries. All I have to do now is buy an ice scraper for my car in preparation for the depths of winter.....

Ground Zero

My group just blew up. Two minutes ago. Amazing. We were all plodding along and then Kaboom! It all just went mental.

You did this. Well I don't like it when you do that. Oh yeah? Well sometimes you fart too much? Right. Well I hate working with you. And then the group exam result came into it. And then the different working styles. And then I had a headache.

Notionally, I'm group leader for this task. So it means it's kind of my problem to separate the group issues from getting the results done for this project. I went in hard and proposed we just split the group in two for this project and then had a group meeting to air things out once the deadline was over. People went for it but then changed their mind and decided we all loved each other really.

My foresight in predicting this is utterly uncanny. I have no idea what I'm going to do now. Maybe it will mean less time spent working in the group. Overall that would be a good thing - cause you work about 10 times quicker on your own....

The CV is done. Or rather, I've stopped laughing and decided to go with what I have....

Autumn

When it all gets just a little too much, the weather delivers an unexpected bright spark. This morning on my drive into work the sun was shining. The forest is absolutely stunning. The explosion or reds, yellows and oranges is so intense and overwhelming it can make all the other things in life seem a little less relevant.

Not that other things have gone away. We spent a good one and a half hours with my group this morning trying desperately to do the marketing case. I insisted on not letting everyone move on until we'd agreed to a semblance for a plan for the entire project - otherwise we risk being cast adrift in a sea of data with each of us making random unconnected points. I think I managed to do it. But I haven't got many written results to show for it. Hopefully the dividends will come tomorrow when we actually sit down and do the work.

In other news my super organised housemates seem to be sniffing out Singapore accommodation. I feel like I'm somewhat free riding on this one, but I basically decided yesterday that I didn't have enough bandwidth to deal with Singapore accommodation at the moment so my approach would be to hop on a shared flat if one comes along and pull out of Singapore next week if one doesn't. Do I feel guilty for free riding? Sure. But life's too short.

The CV is still laughable. But at least it's starting to resemble a CV.

Which means thankfully focus is shifting onto another question. Which Paris museum to go to this weekend? I've heard Rodin is supposed to be quite something.....

Today was a stress day

Doing the MBA thing you're always juggling one hundred things in the air. Sometimes you blink and before you know it ten of them have hit the ground. Today I had a stress death spiral - I've had a couple before but hadn't really written about them.

What's a stress death spiral? Well, it's when you're stressed you've got too many things to do and then you realise you're stressed so you become less efficient at doing the things you need to do and then it feeds back on itself. You probably want to know where the death bit comes from - but for that you need to have done Accounting this term - it's a term the professor keeps banging on about.

What's causing stress so far? In no particular order:
1. Singapore. I'm having second thoughts. Is at least 3000EUR and more logistical hassle than deploying a UN peacekeeping force worth it for being able to say I "lived" in Singapore for 7 weeks? Somedays I think yes. Other days I think actually, that's a pretty superficial thing. You won't really get to see what it's like to live there. And that the primary reason for going is cause every one else is. I can still pull out. But they sent an e-mail today asking you to apply for visas, student passes and all the rest of it. Deadlines next week, so really have to finally bite that bullet. The deadlines make it all the more urgent to engage arse into gear.

2. Job. I still have no clue at all as to what to do with my life job wise. Deadline for submitting CV to the CV book is next Tuesday. Kinda hard to write a CV if you don't know what it is you're shooting for. But sitting down to write CV for the first time kinda made that one seem a lot more real and urgent.

3. Group. This term we have a lot more groupwork assignments. A lot of these are on the softer skill courses. The Marketing assignment we are doing is going to destroy the group. I know it. Why? Because sticking an engineer, a pilot, an introverted american engineer and a non-English fluent Chinese together and asking them to do something creative that involves English is a pretty high bar.

In other news, I passed my French test. Which means I don't have to worry about having to take French lessons. So at least that's one less thing to worry about. This is the beginning of a spiral reversal. I hope anyway.

Quote of The Day

A GMAT is a GMAT, but they call it Le GMAT.

Hitchiking is off - we would have to average 400km a day for 3 weeks in a row without fail, which seems somewhat over optimistic.

It's French week, or as they call it French Ouik this week. For once the run-up campaigns have actually been quite funny. Late on Friday they sent an e-mail out saying it had been cancelled due to strike action....

Hitchike

An interesting idea popped in my pretty little head at 2am near the end of a wine driven evening by the fire last night. Why not hitchike from here to Singapore in between the P2-P3 break? If I leave as soon as the last exam is finished I have 3 weeks before classes start. I reckon it's about 4000 miles. Is this realistic? Opinions anyone?

Waterlillies

My new found wisdom for P2 is to get out of the MBA bubble as much as possible. This is in a bid to derive some external, non-MBA related, stimuli in a desperate attempt to gain some conversation material that doesn't involve the latest joke told in class.

So far I can declare this operation a reasonable success. Paris is remarkably easy to get to - especially given that I am 3 minutes walk away from the train station. And the number of museums this golden city has that I have not yet visited is vast. The train journey is really pretty and gives oneself an opportunity how amazingly lucky they are to live in the surroundings that they do.

Today it was the Orangerie's turn. For the unitiated it's practically a single exhibit museum - Monet's waterlillies. A series of Impressionist paintings done around the turn of the century, the waterlillies are stunningly beautiful. The Orangerie comprises of two rooms where 10 paintings are exhibited. Their size is breathtaking. And the explosion of color and emotion is amazing. I spent an hour staring at them and was left exhausted.

But enough about art - I think my art writing could be improved somewhat. Back to the MBA. There's another party tonight. And guess what! It's a fancy dress party! Really???? There hasn't been one of those for the past two hours! The INSEAD obsession with fancy dress is simply mind blowing. I think there may have been 2 parties since the start of September that have not been fancy dress (and they were both held in my house). I find this depressing on several grounds. Firstly and foremost I think it's a sad statement that people need to be dressed sillily to have a good time. Secondly, we live in a village with one fancy dress shop. So guess what happens when you e-mail 400 people telling them your theme? They go to the tabac? No. Try again. They actually end up in the fancy dress shop. Which by some amazing coincidence will have a box on the front desk with about 10 items to choose from which will match exactly the party of the week's theme. And then what? Well, you do the maths - 400 people, 10 items, 1 party, once a week, every week..... Am I boring for finding this depressing? Who knows. But I do.

Celebrity Accounting

In a bid to rebalance the somewhat negative bias of the last few entires, I'm going to write a bit about the course content. This term, it's excellent. Most (not all) courses are really engaging and taught really pretty well.

Interestingly, the widely recognised star performer is the Managerial Accounting professor. He's got an uncanny ability of commanding attention through a combination of fast paced humour (he has one of these brains that ticks over 10,000 times a second) and fascinating content. The primary point of the course is that measuring cost in a business is actually quite a difficult thing, and that when it comes to figuring out how much a particular unit costs you to make you can get into all sorts of trouble.

I'm off to Singapore

So it's official. My bid to go to Singapore has been accepted and I shall be departing for sunnier climes come later this year. I am overwhelmed by the amount of logsitics this thing will entail. As far as I can tell, sorting out accomodation in Singapore is more difficult than finding a parking space on Oxford Street. As I'll be decamping with practically every member of my class, campus has become this seething mass of accomodation related questions. "Have you found somewhere to live yet?", "Do you know whether you can get a short term lease?" etc. etc.

The way the numbers work, there's about 150 people from Fontainebleau moving to Singapore for Jan/Feb, and about 50 people doing the reverse. You do the room swapping maths. I've got a headache.

On the plus side, flights to Bali once you get there are meant to be painfully cheap.

French Shopping

Amazing how many differences there are between different cultures. Take for example wine.

When I go to do the house shopping in Champion (that's French for supermarket), I have a functional shopping list in my head. One of the things on this shopping list this afternoon was white wine. You'd think that's an easy thing to get - after all, it's easy to separate from the non wine products in the shop, and it also easy to separate from the non-red products in the shop. In one phrase, I'm looking for white wine.

Alas no. we're in France. Where complexity is cherished, but never openly expressed. I come home with my 2 bottles of (what I thought were) white wine, only to discover that they were actually dessert wine. How did I discover this? Well, I opened them and tasted them. And here's the shocker. It's not like I read the label for the second time and spotted the "this is dessert wine" sign that I had not seen in the shop. It's not like there was a subtle footnote on the back of the label saying "this is dessert wine". Oh no. This is France. Where a combination and subtlety and obtuseness is worshipped for its sake alone.

It seems the answer lay on the 5th line of the back label - according to my French Swiss housemate. 10 point font of course. If a wine is suitable for serving with Foie Gras (as was stated on the 5th line of the back label), then that means it is a desert wine..... I mean for fuck' sake.....

Things are looking up

At least on the academic side. I've now had 5 of the 6 courses for P2, and already I'm getting a warm fuzzy feeling. For a start, the professors are actually quite good. Highlight so far seems to be the Management Accounting guy, who could quite easily do stand up comedy and be quite successful at it. He manages to make the whole experience really quite fun and interesting. And as a bonus, he's taken to playing us music before each lecture. So far the music I've heard has been stuff I've wanted to download immediately.

Corporate Finance II - The Return of the Bond Trader is also looking good. The professor seems to have photographic memory. He remembered (I didn't) that a question I asked in today's lecture was similar to the one I asked in Tuesday's class. Given that he's teaching 300 odd people, that's pretty impressive. We'll be doing options pricing, and I'll finally get to know what Black-Scholes actually is. I'm sure you think this is riveting....

It's the Montmellian Ball this Saturday. That's a party at a chateau. I should probably explain the whole chateau/accommodation/coolness hierarchy to the unitiated. Basically, pretty much as in high school and university, there's various echelons of coolness on the social scene. The peak of this pyramid tends to be occupied by the chaps and chapesses living in Chateaus. They tend to have a cool clickie feel. Of this, Montmellian is the creme-de-la-creme. At least this year. They seem to have gotten all the artsy type MBA students - bar me of course. So they've been busy organising a ball in the style of a 1920's speakeasy. This has involved making a movie with a gangster shootout (one of them drives a Citroen DS - which although not 20s, still looks pretty good in black and white photos), and sending newspaper articles to the whole year with the developing plotline. This seems to involve the mob muscling in on some Don's territory, but to be honest I haven't been following it that well.

Winter's on its way

The car now takes a good 10 minutes to demist completely before allowing a safe driving experience. And we've switched the heating on. Which seems to have a 4 year old's attitude to work - some days it's good, some days it doesn't really feel like it.

On the plus side, you can go for a walk at night and see more stars than you can ever imagine - now here's one thing you can do in a village with a population of 9 rather than a town with a population of 9m.