Before coming to Stanford

So after getting admitted to Stanford, you get all these wonderful phone calls and emails from the entire community. In this plethora of communication, there is also a very undesirable letter (or atleast a mood dampening letter), which comes from the academic committee. The basic point of the letter is to remind students that the MBA program is also about academics and not just about partying and networking. It includes rather sobering sentences like “we know what we are talking about, as we have been doing it for a long time” and “your interests are best served by doing your pre-reading”. So to highlight a few of these things

 

1)       DO the EXCEL WARM-UP. It will really help you a lot, especially for those of you who do not do a lot of excel stuff on a regular basis.

2)       DO the SUGGESTED PRE-READING – especially on subjects related to backgrounds that you are un-familiar with. For example, I have no idea about what goes on in Financial Accounting. I have found the initial classes of financial accounting less intimidating because of this pre-work done

3)       STUDY FOR THOSE EXEMPTION EXAMS – this was my biggest blunder and I am paying the price for it now when I have to sit in a statistics class and agonise over Venn diagrams. Trust me, its not worth sitting in a class, where you know 80% of the subject matter. Try exploring other classes and hence study for those exemption exams

 

Those are about the only tips I can offer. Oh, wait…there is one more. Start curbing your spending habits a few months before you quit and actually join college. Its hard to transform those habits overnight, and I am finding it EXCEPTIONALLY HARD to change my spending pattern, as I was not thinking about it.

 

That’s it for this post, the next post is going to be about the Stanford GSB pre-term, the first week, first thoughts and impressions.

 

Cheers

Ash