First year coming to an end...

This extremely hectic semester is coming to an end. We wrapped up our Operations Management take-home (a team-based effort) yesterday at about 2pm, much earlier than we anticipated. It was challenging but with four people working on it we were able to quickly finish the easier problems and then focus on the tough ones.

We also finished up our presentation for Global Marketing, which involved introducing a Whole Foods brand of organic rice into China. Of the three of us presenting, two did very well and the third was quite expectedly a disaster. He is a very smart guy but utterly lacking in social skills (including the ability to speak in public.) He then topped it off by interrupting the last presenter of our group in the middle of her piece to inject an utterly irrelevant piece of information. Several other students in the class expressed their condolences, as it were. Since we get to fill out a peer review form regarding the group, I'm not terribly worried about how it affected our overall grade.

All that remains is our Marketing paper and finals in accounting and corporate finance and the first year is over. I am still looking for my summer internship. I have a few sticks in the fire now and also have a few "fall-back" jobs that would be very interesting, so I'm not terribly worried about it right now. Of course I might be singing a different tune in a few weeks.

All told the first year has been fantastic. I feel like I've vastly improved my quantitative skills, which was one of my main reasons for returning to school. I have made a ton of great new friends from all over the planet. I get to spend next fall in Asia and am planning a trip for the end of the summer that should land me in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam before getting to Japan. And of course there are the planned excursions to Shanghai, Seoul, and Beijing for during the semester.

My new digital camera should be arriving within the week, though I'm still someone skeptical of the company I ordered it from. We shall see.