Nina Valerio: The Second Half of First Semester

I am not the kind of person who keeps a planner, neither paper nor electronic. So why do I now have a planner? And, why am I using the heck out of the calendar function on Microsoft Outlook? Because, if I didn't I would be truly lost. In just 14 short weeks (and they do feel truly short), B-school has changed me. I find a secret pleasure in seeing my day completely booked with classes, meetings, and recruiting events. If I have an open hour in my day, I would find something to do in that hour. I would pencil in everything from doing laundry, to cooking, to finishing that paper due in 24 hours, because otherwise, I would forget, until I find myself with no clean clothes, no food, and no paper. One of my biggest fears in life is boredom — that in-a-rut, routinized, unexcited feeling. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that in B-school. I'm sure everyone's heard the B-school analogy of drinking from a fire hydrant. How about drinking from a fire hydrant in the pouring rain in the midst of a flood? No? I didn't think so, but it feels like that for me. It's a good thing I like water.

The weather got cooler right around October. Fall in Ann Arbor was the most beautiful and amazing thing I have ever seen from Mother Nature. I will always be partial to the warm, humid summers by the beach in my Southeast Asian islands, but the rich bursts of orange, red, and yellow contrasting with the cool breeze of autumn was just unbelievable to me. I'm sure I sound absolutely green (pardon the pun) talking about this, but Ann Arbor is beautiful in the fall. It was also very cold. Every day I half expected it to snow because, to me, it was freezing!

Fall: My Career in Classes

Core classes continued on to the second quarter. We graduated from basic foundations (statistics, accounting) to applied classes such as marketing, finance, and organization management. For the second quarter, I was able to take an extra class on top of core, and I chose Strategic Brand Marketing under Prof. Rajeev Batra, who is very insightful about brand marketing and is a great teacher. At this point, I've already decided that I'm going to major in marketing, so I was going to be choosing marketing-oriented classes at every opportunity. While it seems that I decided this in a few seconds, in reality, I struggled for quite some time between continuing down the path of investments and consulting, and diversifying into marketing and entrepreneurship. The deciding factor was that my goal in the long-term was to run my own business, and I would be in a better position to do so if my background was multi-disciplinary. I knew it was going to be tough to make the switch, but once I decided on it, everything kind of fell into place. Kind of...

I enjoyed my marketing classes, but it was quite a different way of thinking from what I'm used to. It was very helpful to be taking classes under professors who've had real-world experience, and are very aware of how things are done beyond theory and how marketing continually evolves. In my core marketing class, we were assigned to teams, and were tasked to write our own cases and present it to class. The rest of the class would read the case and be given the opportunity to challenge the team's solution to the case at the end of the presentation. My team chose People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which made for a really interesting discussion in class, as you can imagine. I appreciated it when professors gave us a free hand in choosing subjects that interested us. It helps me apply myself more and get more personally invested in the subject. For Strategic Brand Marketing, Prof. Batra had the class form teams and to choose a brand that we'd like to explore. My team, consisting mostly of members from my Costa Rica M-Trek group, chose Aveda, the lifestyle and wellness brand. Like PETA, this, too, was an unconventional choice, since Aveda was a luxury brand and a niche one at that. I noticed that when my major project in class involves tackling issues close to my heart and I am working with a team that I get along with, I get better results. Not just with my grades, but with the final output, such as a paper or a presentation. I still leaf through that Aveda paper once in a while, to glean some insight on a thought process that my team followed, which helped us come up with a good analysis. Grades are secondary, but I sure do like it when I see that EX (meaning Excellent) on my transcript.

As you can see, team formation is an arbitrary thing. Some professors assign it. Others let the students choose it. Either way, there is no guarantee you'll get a team that gets along 100% of the time. I've been lucky that my average is at about 95% right now. Due credit belongs to the open-minded, industrious and cool people I've had the honor of calling "my team." Also, I should give due credit to the one thing that saved my life in all the many classes I've taken so far, team or no team. To Excel and PowerPoint: You're the two things I could never go without. Those two and copious amounts of coffee and chocolate = my tools for survival.

Rest of My So-Called Life

Classes weren't the only things taking up time. At the start of the second quarter, I volunteered to write a brand marketing case for Prof. Batra on a telecommunications company. Any opportunity to work closely with members of the stellar faculty beyond a classroom setting is definitely worthwhile. Furthermore, on top of the handful of clubs that I joined in the beginning of the year, I had added a few more including the Luxury Goods and Retail Club (for which I am now co-president) and the Healthcare and Life Science Club. Clubs are the best way to learn about an industry and meet people with similar interests. While I had made the big decision of focusing on marketing, I wasn't quite sure which industry suited me most. It was perhaps a good thing that I narrowed my focus early in the term, because had I not done so, the term "spread out too thinly" comes to mind.

Between classes and clubs, there were plenty of social activities to enjoy and each was an opportunity to meet other MBA1s and 2s as wellÑhappy hour at Skeepers, the Halloween Ball, the Winter Ball, tailgates, football games, and all kinds of birthday parties and fundraisers. At some point during the first semester, when I found myself double booking and feeling like I was overextended, I knew I had to sit down and figure out what I can do as opposed to what I want to do. Two very different things, I tell you. After all, I was still only human and could not be in two places at once, nor go a week without sleeping. There is the palpable danger of trying to do too much and finding myself being mediocre in many things, rather than being excellent in a few. I had to make certain sacrifices in order to make the most of my MBA. It was a hard lesson to learn, but quality not quantity made for a good year.

Winter: Ready or Not, Here It Comes

Snow fell right around mid-November and I promptly flew to California for Thanksgiving to spend time with family and my boyfriend, and to get away from the bitter cold. I just counted the days until fall term ended, because I knew that at the end of it, I could go home to Manila for a few days and, perhaps, get a tan. I could see my parents again and my friends, and recount all the crazy and wonderful adventures I've had, including slipping down the front steps of my apartment building because it was covered in a foot of snow, or how the best turkey burger in the world could be found just around the corner from my house at the charming place called The Brown Jug. Going home would be a nice break before coming back to Michigan and facing the onslaught of internship recruiting activities.

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