Lost in Orientation

Life starts to be serious now. Seriously. We have just finished our orientation week and I feel... overwhelmed. After two weeks of pre-courses, school has stepped a gear up and we have had our official welcome and introduction - to pretty much everything. School procedures, policies, values, case study work, the career service department, dress codes, IT, punctuality, Opus Dei (IESE has been founded by them), schedules, teams, class leaders, etc. They could have hardly squeezed any more information into two days... Good thing: after some rather directionless weeks (meaning planning generally only extended until the end of each week) we now have a broad overview - and exact timetables until the end of the year. Which reassures me somehow. As much as I usually like to embrace things as they come in this case I'm grateful for some clarity on what our next months will look like.

In the middle of the week, La Mercè made for a day off and gave us an occasion to catch up on lost sleep and prepare for the second part of the week: the career workshop. Two days full of CV tailoring, cover letter writing, managing our careers and discovering ourselves. Sounds esoteric? Well, it was fairly pragmatic actually. We had been asked to take a personality test a while ago for which we now received the results; different personalities are characterized by colors representing four major directions. Turns out my personality is a balance between all four dimensions with a slight tendency towards sunshine yellow and fiery red, which makes me an inspiring/directive motivator. Got that? Then let's move on: according to Jung's preferences I am more extroverted and intuitive but make decisions equally based on feeling and thinking. Who would have thought that??? Anyway, regardless of the seemingly abstract descriptions, I am glad we had the opportunity to take the test. And I have to admit that - in spite of my initial skepticism - I found some test outcomes to be strikingly true. Moreover, I realized a few things about myself that I hadn't been aware of before. Scary.

The test also classified me as a teamworker, which will hopefully come in handy - as one of the week's important discoveries is that we will spend great parts of our first MBA year with our team! That is a group of eight classmates with whom we will meet every morning before class to discuss the case studies and get ready for the day. And who will become our "MBA micro-family". My team consists of Bruna from Brazil, Giovanni from Italy, Naresh and Fish from the US, Neil from India, Akin from Nigeria and Alec from Taiwan. All are very nice and we have had a good team start, so I look forward to getting to know them better throughout this coming year! For now I'll have to go and prepare my case study for Analysis of Business Problems for tomorrow morning - let the games begin!