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
  

Putting Faces to Names

Yesterday, I went to a pre-pre-term gathering at at one of the hangouts "Sloanie bars", and was confronted with a huge crowd of unknown faces. I felt like I knew a fair amount of students from the summer gatherings of DC-based Sloanies and the AdMIT weekend I attended, but apparently I was mistaken.

We have a Google board that many2010 Sloanies have been connected into (and generates 100s of emails a day), and I feel like I've gotten to know many of the frequent posters... It was interesting going around the room, meeting people, asking for their last name, and figuring out that they're the ones that wrote the amazing breakdown of the US sub prime mortgage crisis, or the person who had given spot-on restaurant recommendations in Boston, etc. The best was bumping into some of the people who I had corresponded with on the side, based on their posts, and finally putting the face to the name.