By this time of the semester, we all tend to feel like we are drowning in meetings and deliverables. Yes, you heard me right, drowning. Every class we take has a group project component which is a significant portion of the grades, plus assignments, plus potential midterm / final. And that’s only for the academic side. There are also student club activities ranging from networking to skill-based workshops to case competitions to company treks or information sessions. Then on top of that, don’t forget about one of the biggest missions in business school – finding a job. For each company participating in on-campus recruiting, you start with a corporate presentation, followed by a coffee chat and round 1 on-campus interview, then potentially round 2 or many further rounds of virtual or onsite interviews. Each of these steps takes a few hours. And multiply this process by 10 to 20 employers depending on the industry you are recruiting for. Now we can start thinking about job applications to employers not conducting on-campus interview . . .
Naturally, things start to fall behind schedule. Then one day we wake up to 5 deadlines coming up and piles of to-do items on our list. One of the skills you will definitely come out of business school with is time management and prioritization. You are pulled in so many directions that either you have to let go of something or you risk burning yourself out. At the beginning of the summer when we just started the program, Tiffany from the Office of Student Engagement made it an assignment for us to create a vision statement for this upcoming year. We were supposed to write down what a successful year at Stern meant when we graduate in May 2019, with as much detail as possible – not just academically, but also professionally and personally. The statement was for sure hard and time consuming to create at the time. I am sure not all what I wrote will be achieved by the time I graduate. But I am very thankful that I created this document: though the details might be unrealistic at times, it definitely outlined what I wanted to prioritize this year of my life at Stern. At moments when I felt overwhelmed with action items, I always referred back to this statement for how I would spend my time and energy in different aspects of life. (For more on how to strategize what to spend energy and time on in life, I strongly recommend this episode of the Stern Chat podcast with Professor Sonia Marciano, our strategy professor who made a great metaphor with a ‘sock puppet’.)
Apparently, I am not alone in feeling the lack of infinite time to accomplish all things. When I look around at school, it is easy to think I am the only one falling behind on deliverables – I mean, look at my classmates, everyone is doing 10 million things outside classes, from running student clubs to connecting with the next class of Sternies, from participating in innovation challenges to developing their own businesses, from writing and publishing books to helping early stage ventures as Insite fellows. But here is what makes Stern a great community – we are all in this together, we feel safe to share our struggles with each other, and we are supportive of each other’s endeavors. The support from fellow classmates can come in many different forms: group dinner delivered to whichever random classroom we find available so we can catch up and bond; cheering each other during difficult times; teammates carrying the workload in the week when another teammate had an interview; setting up cloud based Jupyter server such that classmates can accomplish assignments more easily; or doing mock interview and providing resume suggestions for each other. On top of all that, faculties, career coaches as OCD (Office of Career Development) and staff members at OSE (Office of Student Engagement) are all eager to jump in and help, usually just an email away.
At this time, we might all be treading hard to stay afloat, but I cannot ask for a better group to be in this together. I can’t wait to see what we all will achieve in just one short year when we cross the finish line together in May.