Whenever I heard people talking about how tough the MBA experience was going to be, I always discounted them – surely I’ve worked harder in my work than a whiny bunch of MBA students? In retrospect, I should not have believed the people when they say that Wharton hits you like a tonne of bricks – in reality it hits you with a force almost equivalent to a megatonne of bricks. As I sit here at the Abu Dhabi airport (which is quite a dump, btw and looks like an oversized, overstuffed bathroom with green tiles) on my way back to India over the winter break, I ruminate over the last five months and am surprised at how quickly time has flown by and yet how far back in the past everything I’ve left behind seems to be.
But before I get ahead of myself, I must give a quick recap of all that I’ve been upto and been made to do – kicking, screaming and flailing arms followed by death rattles over the last few months.
Pre Preterm
I went through Abu Dhabi on my way to the US and spent a luxuriously relaxed two days in the city with Shikha. Arriving in New York was uneventful and so was the drive to Philadelphia which is about 2 hours from New York. The first few hours in Philly were pretty much disoriented but I quickly reached out to some new admits I’d met over the net or met in Delhi and life slowly limped back to a semblance of normalcy. I am staying in Centre City which is the heart of Philadelphia and the school is a 15 min walk/5 min drive from home. The Centre City looks pretty, friendly for walkers, and has an abundance of old and nice churches around my apartment building.[pics to come in some later post]
It was party time when I arrived 4 days before classes in Preterm started, so I headed out to have a blast with brand new friends. The nights were mostly crazy – you head out to a pub full of people who looked like they could be joining Wharton (clue: people standing in a group introducing themselves with a handshake followed by the question, ‘So, where’re you from’?), stood around for a while with a drink getting chummy with the new faces over loud music and louder conversations, moved to a new group to repeat and answer the same questions till someone screamed in your ear that the group was heading out to the next pub. You head out to the next pub, another drink in your hand, a smile pasted to your face, getting progressively happier with the alcohol coursing its way into the bloodstream and met more new people and answered/asked the same questions again.
Over the next many days, I had come to parrot the following questions and answers to them in an attempt to get to know about 750 classmates:
The answers did not really matter most of the time. I could have as well said I’m Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from Tanzania, having worked in an investment bank and staying on 23rd and Amrood (most of the streets in Philadelphia are named after trees) and would have heard, ‘Ooh nice, so what cluster are you in?’ I think I also introduced myself to the same person about 4 times in 3 different pubs in the same night. Trying to put names to the faces in those blurry nights in loud pubs was impossible and I gave up after the first night and focused on having fun instead – which involved multiple shots, a gazillion beers and some nodding to people you recognized from having been introduced to them multiple times in different pubs. Waking up in the days was painful and mostly involved a sore throat from the incessant screaming out the same questions from the night before.
Coming to the US to live was not a culture shock as much as it was about being exposed to a different way of life. In my past life, if you had to meet people and get to know them, you go out for a quite coffee or dinner. Here, you headed out for a drink in a noisy pub, nodded and smiled at each other in the dark over high decibels of music and noise and hoped fervently that you’d remember their names the next day (and hopefully be friends for life ever after). In my past life, going out was less about getting drunk while sitting/standing at a place but more about getting drunk (or not getting drunk) and dancing. I still believe that if all those nights of drinking were just about getting to know strangers, it’d have been much more useful to actually have conversations with them in a more sober/quieter environment where it was not the alcohol in you speaking, but you. But getting drunk was fun, nevertheless.
At 29, I had never thought I’d make any more good friends. Friendship involves a lot of investment of time which was about to become a precious commodity if everything I’d heard about going through an MBA was true. However, over the daytime shopping trips to Walmart/Target/Ikea/Home Depot, I met some great people that I knew I’d love to be friends with. I had thought it’d take longer to identify a group of people that one would really hang out with, but it happened faster than I’d thought. Within a few days, I was hanging around with the same guys and getting thicker with them with time. But more on that later since these people will probably figure in my future blog posts anyway.
Setting up a new life in a new place was a good experience. I have a cute little studio here that I've really come to love. You know you’re starting from scratch when you’re thinking of hanging that fab painting you bought and realize that you don’t have a hammer or nails and make a mental note to buy that tomorrow. Assembling furniture in the Ikea style of do-it-yourself was fun till you got around to assembling a complex study table with drawers and roll-out hutches. I got back from drinking one night and decided to assemble it, started at 2am and by the time I finished, it was 8am and I was ready to take an axe and cut the damn thing down to pieces. Color-coordinating was never fun till you saw IJC had bought the sexiest looking black comforter and bed-sheets and you wanted those too but knew that Shikha would see red when she saw the black comforter (update: I am a proud owner of a black comforter now and Shikha is still coming to terms with it on her weekend trips to Philly).
I had studiously avoided checking out Wharton before classes started because I knew I was going to have an overdose of it for the next two years. Wharton is a part of the UPenn campus across the Schuylkill river. Housed mainly in the John M Huntsman Hall (JMHH for all calendar entries), Wharton also consists of many other buildings interspersed with other academic departments at Penn. The Penn campus is lovely with amazing architecture (there is a library that looks like the Hogwarths castle) and lovely tree-lined walks. I'll post pics from Wharton in a separate blog post.
In retrospect, I wish I had explored more of Philadelphia which seems to be a lovely and a very historic city (the Declaration of American Independence was made here and Philly is the house to the Liberty Bell – which I haven’t seen as of yet). From rushes, I know there’s a large and beautiful Fairmont Park, an awe-inspiring museum (with the steps that Rocky ran up on in his movie) and a very happening Old City that is the hub of most of the nightlife and fun things in Philly. We did have a ‘moonlight madness’ bike ride through the Fairmont park and a trip to the museum sponsored by the school during preterm, but that was far from being enough.
'Moonlight Madness' and Night at the Museum
Coming up: Preterm@Wharton
