Amy Bonsall: The End, Too Quickly

Well, that's it. When I first started writing these journal entries, I felt like the beginning of the program would never come (see my second journal entry). Now, my year at IMD has ended. I wasn't ready for the end. I wanted another few weeks, or a few months.

Academically, I pretty much got what I hoped for in the 10 months. But socially, the time went too quickly. I made such deep friendships with people who understood what I wanted out of life because they wanted the same things. And with most of the 87 of us living within a few blocks of each other, there was always a group up for doing something. I miss running into familiar faces on the street, last-minute potluck dinners, and e-mails and text messages announcing yet another get-together at the wine bar Louis or the local pub, The White Horse.

But, I put the cart before the horse. Let me tell the story chronologically.

The school year concluded with electives. We were offered 14 electives from which to choose, each lasting five sessions over one to three weeks. They covered subjects such as Advanced Corporate Finance, Marketing in Emerging Markets, Issues in Venture Capital and Private Equity, and Advanced Group Dynamics. Depending on whether or not we had taken the Personal Development Elective earlier in the year, we could choose from three to five electives.

The Personal Development Elective was a special case, and in fact ran over 20 hours from March through the autumn. Optional, it involved meeting with a psychologist or psychiatrist for individual sessions to discuss whatever we wished. The only rule was that it was not career counseling, not a place to thrash out whether general management or marketing was a better career path.

Many of us chose to try it though, and one of the first things I did after signing up was read an article written by two psychiatrists at IMD, Jack Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri. The article discussed typical types of angst of previous (anonymous) participants in the MBA program: anxiety over career, over personal life, feelings of inadequacy and isolation, among others. MBAs tend to be very outwardly confident, yet often grapple internally with such issues. It was odd yet comforting to find that the struggles I faced were not unique to me. And I welcomed the opportunity every week to reflect on what was going on in my life and the choices I was making. The elective resonated so much that it is one of the things I miss most about my year at IMD.

But again I digress. Back to the end-of-the-year electives…

Since I was planning a career move into marketing, I wanted to learn all IMD had to offer on the subject before leaving. So I chose to attend Brand Strategy and Marketing in Emerging Markets, along with Business History and Meeting Global Challenges in the 21st Century. The courses were short, so necessarily a lot of information was packed into each session. As the EMBA students were on campus as well, they participated in the same electives, affording us the opportunity to work with them.

This being the end of the program for both the MBAs and the EMBAs, the elective weeks were more relaxed than the rest of the year. By that, I mean of course that we partied more. Dinners, drinks, and other social invitations were issued with regularity over those final weeks, as the realization hit that the 86 people we had spent so much (too much?) time with over the past 11 months were about to disperse across the globe.

After electives, we still had one more week to put in before graduating. It was a week for reflection, and it involved brainstorming about ways to improve the MBA program, tying up loose ends, and providing updates on class activities (it was then that we presented checks to Danica Purg of IEDC Bled and the Ambassador of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Switzerland, representatives for the charities to which we were donating).

The penultimate day before graduation was a day of introspection, with Professor George Kohlrieser leading a session on letting go and moving on. At the beginning of the day, I was not in the mood for such rumination, thinking it a bit lame. But, George drew me in with his exercises meant to stir up emotions, where we were asked variously to tell the person next to us where we see ourselves in five years (not in a career sense) and to walk up to people in the class that had touched us in some way to tell them why and how. Some of these exercises were very hard for me, and at one point I had to leave the room. I'm tempted here to explain the final exercise of the day, but will leave it to imagination, as I want next year's class and those that follow to discover it for themselves. But, for those of you from the 2006 class, one bit of advice: bring tissues.

From a sober day of reflection, we turned to formality, then celebration. Graduation day started with an official ceremony in the morning, capped by a rousing speech by our former actor and producer classmate Timm Oberwelland. The event took place in the luxurious Beau Rivage hotel on Lac Leman, also the setting for the evening's graduation ball.

The ball itself was bittersweet for me. Just a few weeks earlier we had enjoyed a party in the café of IMD put on by our German classmates. It was a perfect party, full of laughing (thanks to Mathias Kroll's slideshow on German history), dancing, and beer guzzling (I was the only female participant, and did not make my team proud). In contrast, at the ball we were all formally dressed and sitting at tables. The evening moved slowly, the DJ refused to play enough Abba and other danceable songs to really get the crowd going, and the end (at 3:30 a.m.) was filled with sad good-byes and tears. I felt empty that night, and slept poorly.

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