Last final tomorrow afternoon - time for a breakdown.
Great things about Gradschool
The people. It sounds cliche, but gradschool is a further tightening of the social spectrum one relates to, and it's always fun to hang out with people who are like minded. When you think about it's probably the pinnacle of optimal social settings till the retirement home.
Think about it this way; you start life in grade school. The school is filled with people from all sorts of different persuasions; as put in Ferris Bueller's Day Off you have "The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, [and] dickheads". Plus while you are co-mingling with the masses you also are constrained by your history. If you did something memorable in grade 9 (either good or bad), that has bearing on your identity for the next three years. I'm not saying I had a bad high school experience, but there are benefits of going to university. When you go to your undergrad, you are amongst the masses - able to reinvent yourself - and as you focus in on your major your circle of friends become even more like minded. By the time I finished my undergrad, I probably had 15 close like minded friends; when you go to a grad school which you were on the edge to get into, you find nearly everyone in the program is "your people". As we move into careers the age spectrum will jump out at us, and depending on the business it might be hard to find 100 friends with a passing glance around a room.
The pace. Everything pre-gradschool moves so slowly. Actually most other grad school experiences (engineering, math, history, etc) are equally slow, b-school really is an exception. I'd rather be busy than bored, and balancing 4 quarters of classes, a job search, professional designation exams, and a social life, makes time fly by.
The facility. Coming from a middle class upbringing, and a public university that fed heavily on in-city students, I'm still a bit star struck by the grandeur involved in private universities in America. As an international student, I was going to be paying upwards of ~50,000 no matter where I went , and so it made sense to go to a school where every student ponied up the same amount (instead of state schools which are subsidized for domestics). The result is me spending my days in rooms that resemble Hogwarts. It also has an impact on the undergraduate student body. Graduate students are all driven individuals but undergrads can be... less so. Although there is a lot more 'valley girl' presence in the halls here, generally the students conduct themselves with a bit more class then I am used to, and it's oddly motivating. If all the undergrads are quietly holed up in the library, then I surely am meant to be working.
The material. I'm not taking a Ph.D. developing masters. If I were I'd be eye deep in math and worrying about "quals". Instead I'm learning the why's and how's of industry practiced finance. My undergrad brought me halfway there, but there still was an emphasis on the academic delivery and testing of the material. Now I'm not doing my work by hand, I'm doing it on excel. When I'm doing stats exams I have a laptop in front of me, all of the work involves real world data and situations, and the solution is delivered as a memo, not a proof.
The Gripes
THE DOORS. Oh my goodness, it gets to me every day. For some reason this school loves closed doors. Doors, in its' halls, tunnels, some vestibule doors, doors just there to be doors. On my walk to from my locker to the library I open 8 doors. It's a 2 minute journey! Locker to squash court is 16 doors. The student body has adapted by constantly slapping the handicap buttons to force the doors open for 10 seconds at a time, but I have a much simpler solution. Every interior hall/tunnel door is affixed open by an electromagnet. If a fire alarm is pulled the power is cut to the magnets and all the doors shut. Problem solved. (Ahh real motivation for post appeased)
America. I really like the people I interact with on a day to day basis, but this country can bring a man down a bit. Money in and out is a hassle. Air travel is a hassle. AT&T is a hassle. F1 visa is a hassle. Having to think about 'saftey' is a hassle. Being separated from my CAD licensed car is a hassle. Domestic politics and it's influence on the world is depressing. H1B sponsorship is nearly impossible. And seeing the wealth and race divide is sad.
At my previous university the student body was composed of students from a middle to lower class background. Although this added to the 'riff-raff', it also meant that the people working the cafeteria, washing the floors, and staffing Tim Horton's, were all peers who were just doing some part time work. Here the only establishments that seems to employ students are Starbucks and the libraries, everything else is employed by primarily Black or Hispanic middle aged men and women who show the cultural characteristics of being on the wrong side of the wealth divide. This said I am acutely aware "great" paragraph 4 is in part a direct pairing with this gripe, and I can't have my cake and eat it too.
And those are the big ones. Next post from Canada, where health care is free, strangers high-five, nobody thinks my dance moves are "elaborate", airport security is just a slip and slide, and roads are paved with candy frogs and internet memes.
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