CS @ HBS

Procrastination is a lovely word which doesn’t have an equivalent in Hebrew (and not because we Israelis don’t procrastinate, I can tell you that). So there’s no better word than Procrastination to describe me writing this instead of studying for my Accounting and Marketing finals this week.

Wednesday next week we’ll be done with finals and I’ll be going back to Israel for the winter break (not planning on celebrating Christmas though). I have mixed emotions about it, ranging from “can’t wait to go home!” to “the last two weeks here have been awesome!”.

Samples from last two weeks’ awesomeness:

• Wine & Cheese night with the girls in my section
• Free guided tour at the Fogg Museum, a Harvard Muesum of classic European art (and other types of art). Their collection was surprisingly impressive (to me) with famous works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Miro and more, in a beautiful building. The tour was followed by a wine and cheese (yes, more wine and cheese) reception in one of the museum’s private rooms, which looked like what you would have imagined as a “classic Harvard room” (complete with a wall-to-wall library, statues and oak desks)
• Sankofa – a show of dance, music, songs and acting put together by the HBS African-American Student Union (AASU). I couldn’t believe how talented these students were! I kept dancing in my seat :)
• Fabulous 3-course French-Cuban dinner at Chez Henry with the HBS Wine and Cuisine Society
• At least 4 Hanuka parties, including one with my Learning Team, to celebrate us surviving as a learning team till the end of the term (not a trivial achievement!)
• Salsa class with HBS Dance club. We danced Salsa and Rueda, and it was a great study break (I know, seems like I have more breaks than study)
• Holidazzle! HBS End-of-Term ball, a “black tie” event at a fancy hotel in downtown Boston (Westin). Yeah, so I had to pay $135 for a ticket and a buy a “cocktail dress” (coming from Israel, not really a thing I had in my wardrobe), but it was so much fun!

This photo is dedicated to the blog readers in Scotland :)

Being ridiculous @ HBS, OR: The truth behind HBS myths, #2

Sometimes people think HBS is all about studying hard, getting good grades and getting a really profitable job at the end. Well, that’s true ;) BUT, we’re also pretty good at having fun and making fun of ourselves. My section (as well as the other nine sections) has gone quite crazy towards the end of the term. Among the ridiculous things we’ve done lately:

• Dares or “Secret Santa”: each section member had to give a mission or a “dare” to another section member. Dares included, but were not limited to: wearing a complete ski outfit in class (including goggles), shoe shining outside class, wearing a boxing glove through class (and of course raising your hand to talk while wearing it), Michael Jackson-style dancing on one of the desks in class, standing up and spinning 360 degrees while the professor had her back to the class, and so on. My dare was wearing my pajamas to class and having a stuffed animal on my desk.
• Last accounting case: we were lucky to have the best professor ever for FRC (Accounting) – Prof. Warren McFarlan. His unique teaching style made this potentially-dreary subject my favorite (as well as many of my sectionmates’). Like many great professors, he has several funny “sketches” that he frequently repeats; one of them is his fondness for stories about senior managers indulging in various accounting shenanigans and being sent to prison, termed by Prof. McFarlan as “receiving the Leavenworth special” (Leavenworth – an all-male high-security US prison) or “having the zebra-view of the world” (zebra – black and white = prison garb or the view behind bars). Our last FRC class was probably Prof. McFarlan’s favorite case – the unbelievable fraud story at Worldcom. As a tribute to the “zebra-view of the world”, our entire section dressed in black and white according to our rows: first row in black, second row in white and so on. It was tons of fun, and Prof. McFarlan was definitely touched: