When your calendar makes you sweat

Pictured above is my week as it stands, and it doesn't even include classes, of which I have one on Monday and Wednesday and three on Tuesday and Thursday. Prior to SOM, I was never much of an electronic-planner guy. Life was reasonably simple -- work, social plans, a few volunteer obligations here and there, but basically nothing I couldn't keep in my head. From time to time, I would buy a physical planner and determine to keep it up to date, but that plan always dissolved within a couple weeks. Maybe I should have put my plan to update my planner in my planner.

Here, it's more or less impossible to function without the help of Outlook or some similar calendar. And this week is particularly "brutal," even though you may notice (if you can read the small print) that a couple things are leisure -- wait, actually just one, a Lost viewing party. Everything else is a group project meeting, a required appointment, a seminar, a volunteer obligation, or something at which my body must be present. This is, of course, the point of being here; no sense in moving 1,625 miles and getting almost $150,000 in debt just to go to class and come home!

The clock is ticking on my impending trip to New Zealand and Australia. I've not yet decided whether to bring my laptop, as I am not yet clear on the extent to which I will have Internet access, or time to use it. Part of what's nice about SOM is that they take student feedback seriously, which is why the international trip was moved from January to March; the problem with January was that it was the height of recruiting, especially for finance and consulting jobs. Unfortunately, March is smack in the middle of most other recruiting cycles. Today I was wondering why the international trip isn't a second-year activity ... Wouldn't it be nice to go in March next year, after most people have their full-time gigs lined up. Or do they? Well I'm certainly not complaining. I'm very excited to go and hang out with cheerful beer-drinking Aussies.