6 months since the last post
Wow - time flies! It has been over 6 months since my last post and it feels like yesterday. I guess everyone has heard about the MIT firehose that I have been drinking from for the past 4.5 months. Its been a lot of work but a tremendous experience. In many ways it is sad that we are at the halfway mark in the program. Regardless it has been an excellent summer and early fall. I have made many new, international friends; we have enjoyed burning the midnight oil on crazy assignments with wicked deadlines. But most importantly we resonate at many levels and in that discovery have created some pretty strong relationships.
MIT has world-renowned researchers and experts who do not always make great educators. It was our privilege to get some of the finest teachers: Andrew Lo for Finance, John Van Maanen for Leadership and Organizations, Duncan Simester for Marketing, Simon Johnson for Macroeconomics, Don Lessard as our program’s faculty director, Richard Locke on Sustainability and Strategy, Andreas Schulz for Quantitative Analysis and others. We had an excellent visiting professor for finance: Kathryn Kaminski, a MIT OR PhD graduate who is on track to become an excellent teacher like Prof. Lo. And a few excellent TAs: Amy Zhou and Brandon Lee, Finance PhD candidates, Juliane Dunkel, an OR PhD candidate and our own classmate Helen Yang.
Learning at MIT is an intense experience - its a rush for anybody because you learn so much in a short time and have to work really hard to keep it strung together so as not lose the forest for the trees. I would recommend it to anybody however old you are. It is a privilege but also a pleasure to learn at institutions like this.
