For the past two and a half days, I've had a friend visiting. From the time I left to pick her up from the Richmond airport on Thursday afternoon until this morning (Sunday) when I pulled out my laptop to work on the cases for tomorrow, I have not done any work for school. I've had conversations that did not revolve around debits, credits, cannibalization ratios and Crystal Ball*. On top of all these perks, it's been great to catch up with someone that I've known for years and get outside of the MBA bubble a little. I have also appreciated sharing my new town and took Mary to TNDC, Arch's, Bodo's Bagels, the Downtown Mall and Shenandoah National Park.
This morning when I sat down to start work on cases again, I felt refreshed. I didn't come to them with the same drudgery which had been building up over the previous weeks. I was actually kind of excited about tackling the new DA (Decision Analysis) case.
So the moral of the story is that breaks are really necessary for survival. I know there are a lot of people who don't think Christmas is all that far away, so they can just slug it out until then. But I think that when we lose our drive and our focus, we miss out on the whole MBA experience. Sometimes the most beneficial thing we can do, in terms of studying and the job search, is to just not do it and go do something else.
Anyway, all that said, I do still have three cases to prep for tomorrow, a resume to finish and an application to fill out... So I will end it here.
*Crystal Ball is a program that works with Excel to predict an expected result for a formula based on providing a range of assumptions for the values of the inputs to that formula. For an overly simplistic example, assume I assign cell A1 to be equal to A2 + A3. While I may think A2 will equal 1 and A3 will equal 3, A2 could be anything from 0 to 4, and A3 will most likely be 3 with a minimum of 2 and maximum of 8. Crystal Ball will then do a series of trials (I usually have it set a 250,000!) to tell you what the average of all the results will be. It also spits out some pretty graphs and gives you some useful reports.
1 comment:
Taking a break is a form of the sabbath. The sabbath is a fascinating subject. It deals with social justice, with servants or slaves and debts being released every seventh year. It is ultimately a topic of faith. It takes faith to give up personal property such as a servant or capital in a loan. It also takes faith to assume that if you only work six out of seven days that you will have enough to survive. In context, the nations around Israel worked every day, but Israel had faith that it could be competitive even if it worked only six out of seven days.
Dad
Post a Comment