What’s up, y’all. I’ve reached the end of my first week of classes and, surprisingly, I’m completely relaxed instead of freaked out by the volume of work I’ve got ahead of me in the next nine weeks. Being able to see that light at the end of the tunnel goes a long way towards allowing one to take it easy in his final term in school.

If I haven’t said it on here before, I absolutely love Stanford GSB’s grade non-disclosure policy. It allows us to focus on learning without being too worried about how well we do in our classes. Unfortunately, I haven’t exactly made the best use of this benefit in my 5 quarters here and have been overly concerned with doing well academically. Last quarter was a prime example of that. I went into Winter quarter knowing that I had no worries because I’d already accepted my McKinsey offer and had my graduating-level GPA secured, but I wanted to push myself a little harder for some strange reason. I guess realizing how much of the Core curriculum I’d internalized had something to do with that. Anyways, I was grinding hard last quarter in hopes of pulling all HP’s and maybe an H or two and damn near ran myself into the ground doing it because I was also trying to maximize the rapidly decreasing time that I’ve got left with my classmates. Taking classes like Touchy Feely and Competitive Strategy that require a lot of time had something to do with me having to grind so hard, as well. At the end of the quarter, I was confident that I’d knocked some of these classes out of the park and went into Spring break with a huge smile on my face. Once I checked my grades over Spring Break, I was surprised to see that my professors had a totally different idea of how The Kid had gotten down. I didn’t do badly, but it isn’t a great feeling to have been twice as focused on academics as usual and to still get the same grades as usual. I’m telling this story to advise any first year MBA students or MBA applicants reading this to take it easy whenever you can during second year. If you go to a schoolwith grade non-disclosure, you should just focus on learning and not necessarily grades because doing the latter is a great way to stress yourself out. If you get your full-time job offer early, you’ve got even more reason to chill regardless of your school’s grading policy because I highly doubt your soon-to-be employer will check with your registrar to see how well you closed out your Bschool career academically. All in all, I made the past 3 months much harder than I needed to, but at least I learned a lot in that time.

The previous paragraph feeds very well into the next piece of advice that I’d like to give to folks going into their second year of Bschool…try to put together as easy a schedule as possible during your last academic term. A few entries ago, I wrote about the dilemma I had because of getting into a class that I really wanted off of the waitlist and wondering whether I should drop another class I was enrolled in. Well, I decided to drop that other class and stayed in the Managing Growing Enterprises joint, which is turning out to be a really good course. That left me with 20 units for my final quarter and class every day of the week, including Wednesdays, which is usually our day off. Wednesday is the only day that I have class before 1pm and I only have more than 4 hours of class once per week, so I thought I was getting off with a pretty easy quarter. That is, until I talked to my roomies and realized tht each of them had set up their schedules so that they’d only have class two days per week. Even funnier/wilder, each of them is taking only 12-14 units because that’s all they need to graduate. Now, i know that I didn’t need to take 20 units, but I wanted to maximize my learning in the time that I’ve got left. After this first week of classes, I wish i’d gone the same route as my roomies and taken a lighter schedule because they’re kickin’ it in a major way while I’m trying to get all of my readings done for all of those classes. When graduation comes, I will have probably learned a ton, but it sure would have been nice to have had one or two days per week where I could just lay around in these last weeks at the GSB.

I’m closing this entry out, but, before I do, I’d like to give a shout out to the folks at Clear Admit who’ve nominated me as a finalist in the student blogger category in their 2005 Best of Blogging Awards. When I started this joint back in October 2003, I never thought many people would read it and i certainly didn’t think I’d ne nominated for anything because of it…I just wanted to share the Bschool experience with people like myself who didn’t know any MBAs prior to applying. It’s cool to know that people have actually been reading this and getting something out of it. It’s going to be so weird when I graduate and don’t have anything else B-school related to add to this blog.

Oh yeah, I also have to send a long overdue shout out to the student at the Olin School of Business who passed my case interview preparation slides along to their Career Services Office. It makes me feel good to know that more people will have an additional tool to help them prepare for their Consulting interviews and will hopefully avoid the feeling of getting kicked around by the firms if their case game isn’t tight enough. Now, I only wish i had packed more information into those slides to make them even more useful.

That’s about it. I’ve got to jump off of here and start working on some of this homework for all the classes I’ve got. You know, for the past 5 quarters, it always seemed normal to spend a good portion of my weekends studying and doing homework, but now I wish i could just drop the ball on all of this work and just freestyle it in class. Oh well, I’ve come way to far to end my academic career at Stanford GSB with some bootleg classroom performances.