Stanford and UCLA

So much has been going on the past couple of weeks. I feel like I have been saying that for months? Anyway, work really is crazy. I’ve been working 6 days a week about 10-12 hours a day. I seriously have never worked this hard for so little $$ before in my life. And although it irks me at times when I wander through Neiman Marcus (which I try to avoid like the plague these days) it really doesn’t bother me much at all. I feel good about it. It’s really amazing and it’s hard to explain that to my family and my best friend where money is so much more of a priority. Oh well. It’s my life and my happiness so they need to get over it.

Anyway, I sat in on a class at Stanford a little while ago. It was awesome. The class was mostly second year students. It was the standard b-school U shaped classroom. Pretty full class, I’d guess about 50 or 60 students maybe? The class was on Power and apparently it’s a very popular elective. The professor was great. The entire class was very conversational and almost every student had something pretty insightful to add to the conversation. I had warm fuzzies the entire time I sat there thinking how I desperately want to be one of those students. It was awesome. There was one other prospective sitting in on the class too. We had been picked up by a second year host to take us to the class. The host seemed a bit frazzled and wasn’t the most friendly host in the world but I won’t hold it against him/her. I imagine since classes just started he/she was a bit overwhelmed. But regardless there was something very intimate feeling about the visit and I am seriously in love with Stanford. I am trying so hard to put together an amazing application so they can’t refuse me!

I also went down to Los Angeles for a day to visit Anderson, sit in on a class, an info session and an interview. I hadn’t been on UCLA’s campus since I graduated and it was great to be there. I had completely forgotten how stunning that campus is. It really is such a beautiful campus. I don’t think I really appreciated it when I did my undergrad there. The weather was typical LA weather, sunny and perfect. The traffic was typical LA traffic, unbelievably obnoxious and irritating. It took me over an hour to get to campus from LAX and I had to take a cab because the morons at Super Shuttle were too late to pick me up and couldn’t promise me that they could get me there in an hour and a half after I waited 20 minutes for the damn shuttle!

Anyway, the visit was alright. I was exhausted from the get go so I don’t think I got as much from the visit as I could have. I had an interview with an associate director of admissions. I have no idea how it went. They really are intent on not giving you any feedback or maybe it was just that the interview didn’t go well? Who knows? After the interview I sat in the café that I used to study at to escape South campus (the engineering side of campus) and had a coffee and read the Daily Bruin. Then I sat in on a marketing management class. The class was interesting enough. It held my attention the entire hour and a half. The students, I won’t hold it against them since it was their first week of classes, weren’t as insightful or as articulate as the students at Stanford. But again this was a first year class with students just starting out on their mba journey so it’s hard to make a comparison. The class was a lot less conversational as well. But I did enjoy the class, minus my splitting headache. (I had a bit of a mountain biking accident about 2 days before my visit and was covered in bruises and scrapes and had two big bumps on my head, it wasn’t pretty). Then I hung around wandered a bit and sat in on an hour and a half long info session that was more of what I already knew so that wasn’t all that helpful but the person I interviewed with was leading the presentation so it was good that I attended the session.

So that is my long winded update. I’m still hoping to get UCLA, Yale, and Stanford apps done in first round then I’ll decide what 2 schools I’ll be applying to in the second round.