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Time flies

Wow, it's already end of June and tomorrow I'm gonna have the last exam of my third term.

I feel kind of guilty not to have written anything here during almost two months. There would have been quite a bit to talk about.

However, I was crazy enough to subscribe to 13 credits. Usually the school does not allow students to take on more than 9 credits in order to avoid overload. I got special permission to take an additional course, boosting my credit load to 11. Then I just joined one more course without officially subscribing to it (as I wouldn't have gotten permission anyway ;-).

I have to say - in retrospect - 13 credits is simply too much. There hasn't been much time left for anything else and my social life has been lying fairly low. But somehow I survived. I always do ;-)

On a side note: I'll be in Switzerland from July 1 to July 7, so if anybody wants to see me, that would be the occasion. Then I'll be off to the Philippines for 2 months and after that I'll be staying in London for another 4 months.

Mountain hiking à la chinoise

I've been in for a unique China experience. The past few days were a public holiday and I decided to go hiking to Huang Shan by joining a Chinese tour group.

Huang Shan is one of the most fameous mountains in China. And - as I've learned the hard way - it attracts around 30'000 visitors on peak days (such as these public holidays). I guess I should have consulted my Lonely Planet before booking the damn thing, which hints that "Today the reclusive artists seeking an inspirational retreat from the hustle and bustle of the temporal world have been replaced by crowds of tourists, who bring the hustle and bustle with them". The picture to the left is not staged and is largely representative for the entire 35km of mountain trails.

The mountain was not only full of eager hikers, but also full of uniformed guards which continually opened and closed routes in a desperate attempt to spread congestion evenly across the entire mountain and to keep the crowd under control.

As a side note: The scenery really was breathtaking, although it must look even cooler on a less sunny day, when there's mist between the peaks. What's really particular, though, is that the entire network of mountain trails consists of paved walkways and stairs. Not a single patch of dirt or forest soil. Almost like walking the streets downtown, just with better air ;-)

Friday night we slept in a hospice at the mountain top in order to get up at 4am the next morning to see the sunrise. Friendly Urusla, of course, managed to call me late at night and wake me up. The net result being that I spent the remaining hours of the night listening to the snoring of my 5 room mates. I still can't believe that such loud snoring comes without hostile intentions... And yes, the next morning was cloudy *!&%

But overall it was a great cultural experience. Not to be missed, but not to be repeated either.

Exam success

The first two exams are over!

I studied all weekend to cram the stuff in my head that I had missed during the past few weeks. It would be fair to call it a 28 hour study marathon...

And guess what, it payed off!

Ok, I don't have results yet, but I felt very comfortable at the exams (Managerial Accounting and Operations Management). And even having two exams on the same day turned out to be much less tiring than I had feared.

On a side note: After winning the Littlefield competition, I actually managed to screw up the Littlefield-related question on the Operations Management exam. It doesn't get much more embarrasing than that one might think...

But actually it does. Right after the exam, the school hosted a little celebration party where our Littlefield victory was duly recognized by the dean. Including free beer for everyone. A very smart move, considering that we have another exam tomorrow morning. I bet the school never got away that cheaply beer-wise with any other party they ever hosted!

Strategy Project woes

There it went, my study week.

I still can't believe that I actually spent an entire week on the strategy project!

The story: For Strategic Management, rather than taking an exam, we had to hand in a 20 page strategic assessment paper. Because I didn't want to spend mindless effort on an assignment-only paper on any random company, I decided to have a closer look at my own business, or - more correctly - the business I co-own to 30 percent.

Now one would think that doing a strategic analysis and coming up with some recommendations would be quick and easy fix for a business one knows that well. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. I guess knowing too much detail sometimes only complicates matters...

But the really hard part was the writing. While I had a fairly clear picture early on, it turns out that writing down the stuff in a logical, easy to read fashion for someone who's not an insider (i.e. the professor) can be a really hard thing to do.

So that's how I ended up wasting my entire study week on writing the paper. Granted, I didn't work as hard as I could have and a tiny little bit of procrastination might have played its role as well ;-) But the net result is, the study week is almost over and I haven't spent a single minute on studying the subjects I will be tested on next Monday...

The paper looks quite cool, though!

Exams again...

We have just finished our last lecture of the second term. Gosh, I can't believe that it's already eight months that I've been living in China. Time passes so quickly in this place!

Tomorrow will be the exam in Corporate Governance. Then we'll have a week to study and prepare for the exams, which is what I need exactly, since I still have to write the Strategic Management assignment and I have not much of a clue about what we were supposed to learn during the past few weeks.

Having been visited by various friends over the continuous period of almost three weeks, I haven't gotten around to much studying. And I was rather sleepy in class, too, after taking people to the various hot clubs in town the night before. Add our littlefield simulation and the 24x7 MIT OpSim challange to that and you can guess where about I stand education-wise.

So for a change, I won't go on a scuba diving vacation during the study week, although both the Philippines and the Maldives are currently luring me to their beaches.

#1 world-wide

For the last few days I was part of a team that competed in an Operations Management challange hosted by MIT.

With the damn thing running 24x7, I'm kind of sleep deprived by now, since we had to come up with decisions and implement measures 'round the clock. I probably slept a total 12-16 hours during the past 4 days.

However, the whole thing is finally over, and after catching up on some sleep, I'm happy to report that my team finished first, before teams from UCLA Anderson, MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School, Wharton, INSEAD and many other well-known business schools. In fact, three teams from CEIBS finished among the top ten. So we really are the world-wide elite, it seems ;-)

It was an absolutely fantastic experience. Our team, consisting of one student each from China, Denmark, India, Malaysia and Switzerland, was absolutely fabulous and we worked together as smoothly as you could possibly imagine.

But the best part was yesterday night, when we took our Operations Management professor out to celebrate and got him drunk as hell...