I still have it. I can still go 4 days with 9 hours of sleep and function productively. All those nights spent in the labs/libraries of
USC have not gone to waste! With a finance quiz, a marketing quiz, a couple of projects due, 2 workshops, 2 presentations, the Deloitte case competition, 2 nights of partying and an entire day of admissions work, it doesn't get busier than this....and I'm loving it!
The Deloitte case competition was the highlight of the week (the desi party after Awaz was a close second!). We were given a case on Thursday evening at about 7 PM and were supposed to prepare a presentation by 7:45 AM the next morning! After staying up all night and some far fetched analysis, we were finally reasonably happy with what we had come up with. I decided to go home at 6:45 AM for a quick shower before presenting before the team from Deloitte. I don't even know whether I need to continue with this story....you know what's coming...of course everything that could go wrong had to go wrong (damn you
Murphy!). I couldn't find my keys, had to run back to get them, got to the wretched green lot where I found I had been slapped with $100 parking ticket, got home and realized I hadn't ironed my shirt (which isn't good when time is at a premium), got back to school with 3 minutes remaining to the deadline, parked in the visitors lot without a parking ticket (and got a $40 ticket for that)....and ran to my team room. On the way, I passed my teammate M, and gave him a cheery "How's it going". If looks could kill, I'd be dead right now. He gives me this dirty look and asks me to go talk to the other people and walks off in a huff. The first thing that came to my mind was "F***! Did I mess up in some way". So I get together with the other folks and it turns out that we were supposed to burn copies of our resumes on the CD with our final presentation and of course we hadn't. This in turn meant that we had missed the deadline! As is often the case, it wasn't that big a deal and we did figure it out and fix everything, but that was definitely intense!
The actual presentation went really well. We didn't win but it was a great experience and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. UNC ended up taking the first prize with Duke coming in 2nd, 3rd and 4th. As can be expected, there was no shortage of conspiracy theories and analysis by us about this sinister turn of events :).
[The competition was set up as a Duke vs UNC challenge. 21 teams competed in the internal case competition at Duke out of which 8 were selected. The actual competition (mentioned above) consisted of 8 teams from Duke and 8 from UNC out of which 4 (irrespective of the school) made it to the final round in front of an open audience.]
After the long week I'd had and with the serious sleep deprivation, you would think that I'd want to take it easy over the weekend but for some reason I got it into my head that my life would be useless and totally not worth living if I didn't go out and party till the wee hours of the morning on Friday and Saturday. The fact that I had to work in the admissions office all of Saturday wasn't quite enough to stop me and keep me in. That was followed by a night of desi revelry. I must say that the Indian cultural festival (
Awaz) was absolutely amazing. I was stunned by the level of talent that some of the participants had.
Figured I'd take it easy after the show but at about 11:45, I felt the need to go and dance to some desi music with all the cute desi women I'd seen at the show. A phone call to a friend and a short walk later, I found myself at one of the craziest parties I've been to recently. Ended up staying till 3:30 AM.
The last 8 hours have been spent cooped up in a study room with my ILE team working on the marketing case due tomorrow and studying for accounting. So all in all it's been a good week/weekend and it's not over yet...
