We have now made it over the hump of the midpoint in the first semester. We have completed a course and started a few more. We are all hitting our strides, and just on time. Now is when the scrambled feeling is really starting to hit home. I spoke to a friend of mine the other day who asked me what I am doing this weekend. My knee-jerk reaction was “What weekend?” There really isn’t much time to breathe around here lately, and in looking around the room, I can see the pressure building up on all of my cohorts as well.
In a HBR article we read for Business and Society recently entitled “What’s Business for?” Handy makes the point that our business practices toward human capital are not sustainable. He says we are burning out our executives in the corporate world, requiring long hours and non-stop work weeks. We are training for that marathon of endless work now in the MBA programme. More than a marathon it feels like a circus: a balancing act between school work, sleep and an excuse for a social life; juggling a critical analysis of the theories of ethical business behaviour and an in-depth look into a case study on whether or not to invest in new technologies; three ring performances in the form of role plays and presentations and MBA room interactions.
When I take a personal inventory of what I have learned in the past couple of months, I am amazed. I did my undergrad in business and worked in diverse and interesting fields before coming here. This has been a wake-up call on just how far I was from knowing it all. It’s only appropriate that I would start to feel like breakfast – served up fried.