How time flys by

For all of you who might have been worried – I am alive.
Some of you have commented that it has been a long time since last I wrote. My only defense is to say that time has lost all meaning where I am, so I haven't really been aware of exactly how much time has gone by.
I guess it's safe to say that my life is pretty crazy. This week I woke up in a panic. It was 6:20 am, which meant that I had over slept by 20 minutes. I know that to some of you are saying to yourselves “I get up before 6, what's her problem?” Well, for one thing – the reason I was oversleeping was that I want to sleep after 1 am. But that aside, the point I'm trying to get at is how worried I was by the fact that I'm starting the day so “late”. There are so many things happening, so many things I have to do, so many things I want to do, that it can get over-whelming. As it turns out (this is an expression professors use a lot – it turns out it's the intellectual “like” or “ya' know”) this is what is hard in business school. The formal teaching is what it is, and everybody here is smart enough to understand and do well, given enough time. The question is: What is enough time for you? If you are average (for the school) you might be able to do your school work and a few of the other basic things that go towards career building. If your above average, you'll be able to do more extra-curricular.
I assume that I need to explain the phrase “things that go towards career building”. Not only because it's vague, but because it is key to understanding the trickiness of time management in business school. The thing is that in today's market – and by this I am not referring to the economic state, but to the fact that there is a high supply of MBA students, it is hard to get a job. So starting from day one, the MBA program teaches you skills and coordinates events that go towards finding a job. This might mean having a course in Leadership, teaching us how to present ourselves in social events and where to put our name-tags or holding “corporate briefings” - an event in which a slew of people who work in a certain company come to campus, tell us about the company and then interact with us during a small cocktail party (=”networking event”). At the last we get to use the skills that we developed at all the “Sage Socials” and basically try to make the best impression we can, so that come interview time, we might have some advantage over our peers. I'm going to continue on the last example, because it is the best one, as it is the most intangible.
So... “Corporate briefing”, how much time does it require? The company will talk for 45 minutes, but you really really really don't want to be late, so it's marked on the calendar as 50. After that, there is the social, and that's really your chance to make any sort of impression, so you can't miss it or leave early – so that's another 45 minutes. All done? NO! There were at least 20 people in the briefing, how will anyone remember you over them? You need to find a way to continue the relationship: Write them a thank you note, write an e-mail asking to continue the conversation. (I'm cynical about this now, but it if it's a company you think you want to work in, these things are also important in order to make sure that the company is a good fit for you). So how much time does e-mailing require? More than you would think. The email you send is your digital footprint. You do not want any mistakes in it, so you spent quite a bit of time writing and proofing it. Because my natural tendency is to be more informal than formal (part of the deal of being Israeli), I also have someone else proof my emails. So there go another 45 minutes – and we're up to more than 2 hours allocated to career building. And that's just one company's briefing - there are multiple companies and there are more types of events. And they all have that deceiving quality that, unexplained, they might seem like fun. It's not that they are not fun, it's that their main purpose, and the reason you participate, is not necessarily the fun. I will however make the disclaimer that there are clubs and events that are purely for fun (As this is the USA, these things usually involve beer drinking).
The bottom line is that each student has to decide how much time he or she wants to spend doing each type of thing. Nobody is meant to do everything, but no one will tell you which is more important.