While my fellow MBA students are rejoicing in being done with classes, I am grinding out one last gigantic project. Our adviser sent out a, “congratulations on finishing, now enjoy your holiday!” note that about caused me to jump out my window in exasperation. If you are contemplating being a full time student at an MBA program, especially any MBA program that considers itself somewhat competitive, let me let you in on a little secret: you will have no life until you are done. You see, there’s this thought that some of the value of an MBA program is to test, push and develop your time management skills. One of my professors described this as, “giving you more work than you can possibly do on your own.” Now, this isn’t because it’s hard work, although there is a lot of challenging material, especially if you’ve never taken statistics and haven’t thought about economics since high school (<ahem>). It’s simply that the mass of work thrown at you is intentionally vast. Consider yourself warned.

As such, when you do show up to your first semester all happy and positively oozing with confidence and eagerness, for the love of all things holy do not take an extra class. My girlfriend barely knows who I am anymore. It’s a good thing I have no friends in this city, because I certainly couldn’t meet with them on any regular basis. One of the main reasons for this is that my extra class (yes, the one you really, really shouldn’t take) was a web design class that I enjoyed a lot. More than the vast majority of my MBA classes, frankly. This isn’t a huge surprise, I’m a computer nerd so this is sort of what I do. However, it was also a ton of work. The professor had no difficulty in assigning lots and lots of practice, all of which I think is the best way to learn these skills and none of which I really had time for. Especially the last project, which consists of a website either built from the ground up or re-designed, a paper discussing what choices were made and why, and a presentation. The site is done, and I just finished the first draft of the paper. All 52 pages of it. For a three credit class on top of my “real” classes. Midway through the semester, I heard that 10 credit hours was full time. I later heard that 9 graduate credit hours is considered full time. I’m taking 19. This is why I am a complete moron.

For those of you with free time to do things like read and listen to music, I recommend browsing Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006. I’ve only looked at the top 10, and have already realized some bands I like actually put out new albums recently. I’m going to listen to so much good music. In 2008.