The story of a French guy and his lovely Belgian wife gone to Barcelona to get the IESE MBA.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The eye of the storm

After an endless silence period due to very heavy activity on my side, I take advantage of a somehow less crazy period to write a few lines.

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote. First, holidays in Belgium. Excellent, end of course too short to see everybody, go back to France, see my family more than a few hours and even less my French friends. That's very frustrating but it's the issue with living abroad and having your base in another country. I sometimes have the feeling that I am abroad everywhere... Or at home everywhere, depending on the mood.

Emilie's pregnancy is going well. Here is how she looks now (as you can see, the baby is growing, and he is moving a lot also!) :



And here is another one of the full model ;-)



We got the grades from the 1st term and I am quite happy with mine. Not a stellar performance but a very steady one. I even managed to understand accounting and get a pretty decent grade, thanks to our amazing teacher. I've always had an issue with soft skills classes, like "Leading people in organization" during last term and Human Resources Management this term. It sounds like BS to me. But I guess that's mostly me as some people really like these subjects.

This term is much more numbers oriented. I have the feeling we're getting into the real MBA core courses, while the 1st term was the -necessary- introduction. How would you study finance without knowing how accounting works?

We are still working a lot. From what we know from exchange students, they are surprised by how intense the pace is. Frankly, it is quite intense but it's not boring at all. The subjects are very interesting and at least you get what you've paid for. The case method is a double-edged sword: what you get out of it is proportionnal to your personal investment. No pain, no gain...

I have applied for a few consulting firms for my summer internship. Mostly in Brussels. For the moment I have good returns but it's not over yet so I can't say more.

The last week has been quite hectic. First, I have participated in the VCIC competition, which is an international venture capital competition where B-schools compete. My team won the IESE internal competition among 5 other teams. Next step is at London Business School against the other European schools. Very exciting, but very demanding because it is over 48 hours and you don't sleep much.

[one week later]
I think I have not really understood the concept of a blog. Instead of writing kilometric articles, I should write smaller ones. That would spare me the issue of the same article being outdated before being published.

This week, I have secured a summer intership at the Boston Consulting Group in Brussels and my mid-term exams are over. I am very excited about going back to Brussels, especially for the BCG! The unfortunate consequence is the lack of preparation for my mid-terms: "una carneceria", in Spanish!

Finally, we're going to a new appartment tomorrow. More quiet, and much better in any way, but less expensive...

All right. Enough for this one. I think I've caught up with most of the stuff!