Yesterday, was one of the best days of my MBA

Yesterday was one of those days where everything just seemed to click into place. If only Butler had beat frickin' Duke, the day would have been perfect. Yesterday's highlights:

• Managed to pull together a financial negotiation with another team in hours after we found out that our results were due a day earlier than what we had scheduled for, stuck to our guns based off of our financial evaluations, and walked away from a pretty good deal (that probably did go down in real life) when the other team wouldn't budge and we thought they were taking advantage of us
• Really started to understand venture capital term sheets after having written our own as an assignment this past weekend, and negotiated with a team representing the entrepreneurs based on a real life deal. On presenting our results to the class, the VC who actually made the deal cut all of us to shreds when we'd done something stupid... I started to get it, and realized how little I had actually understood this entire process - learned more from one assignment and the subsequent class than I had the entire preceding semester
  
• Started to grasp the underlying methodology for alternative investing (PE, Hedge Funds) in a mindset that had never occurred to me in the slightest before in a seminar taught by the guy that started Goldman Sachs' PE practice. As a bonus, he told us how he'd gotten to that position in what ended up being a pretty fascinating life story... Also provided a mantra for a mindset on life:

  "you never know where life will take you, so don't be afraid to go there"

• Went to a meeting with Sloan's IT division to find out that a lot of stuff I'd been pushing for for a year will get done soon, and even more cool things that I couldn't have foreseen
  
• Post-MBA plans got a lot more solid, and in a very good way