I'm like the cat

I love my MBA program. I've learned so much. Countless exciting opportunities have come before me. I have grown as a person, a thinker and a leader, and wouldn't trade the experience for anything in the world.

And, yet, it's amazing how quickly happiness and psychological peace are restored once the semester ends. The ability to wake up at my leisure with little worries, cook, sort through things and take it easy -- to live like Ophelia, my roommate's cat -- has incredible restorative, healing powers! Not that I'd want every day to be like this. That would become depressing. But it's nice to be in break mode.

Or in 80% break mode, at least. I still do need to wrap up Data-Driven Marketing, which I plan to do tonight before heading out to meet some friends for a beer. But if 80% done feels like this, 100% done is perhaps going to be too much bliss to handle.

Meanwhile, in the land of first-years, I received e-mails from several excited students who just today found out they've been invited to interview for a summer internship at Deloitte, in human-capital consulting, which is what I'll be doing full-time after school. I'm happily offering support and advice, and to practice interviewing and casing with them so that they're at their best in the interview. It's interesting how quickly one ascends from feeling like a downtrodden reject to an accomplished and revered sage. OK, both of those characterizations are radical extremes, but there's some truth captured in them.

In pre-first-year land, this is also a time of year when I am particularly flooded with requests for information from prospective students. I'm having lunch with just such a person tomorrow, and then Skyping with someone else in the evening. (I'm contacted by these people because I'm listed on SOM's Web site as an "ambassador" for the Q+ Gay/Straight Alliance. So LGBT students naturally want to know what life is like here and so on.) Always happy to be on this side of these interactions; I much prefer being "nagged" to feeling like I'm nagging others for their time. Maybe that's why I wasn't a very good reporter.