CS @ HBS

Yes, I know, I disappeared for a while. By now my internship is almost over (this week is my last one) – I still need to do my final presentation to the SVP but that’s about it. The summer has been great – I became friends with some of the other interns (even though they weren’t all from HBS :)) and we went on trips exploring Seattle and the area, as well as Seattle’s restaurants and bars (with a strong preference to sushi). Work was good, too.

What they say about Seattle is true – in the summer, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived in. The weather is a perfect sunny 25 degrees almost every day, and within less than 100km from downtown there are lakes, waterfalls, glaciers and mountains (and good sushi restaurants). Too bad it’s like that only for the summer… You can skip to the end of the post to see some pictures.

We start second year at HBS after labor day weekend (first week of September). I’m excited about the second year, it’s supposed to be much better – at least easier – than the first one. Here are some of the differences between them:

• Choosing courses: We get to choose our courses this year (or in other words, we get to choose whether we want to get up for the 8:30 classes or focus more on the 11:40 ones). I just received my schedule this week and it looks like I’m going to do an interesting mix of marketing, strategy, technology and entrepreneurship. I’ll write more about the specific courses once they’re final – we can request changes until the end of the first week of classes.
• Studying with new people: As a result of choosing our own courses, we take our classes with different people from the 900-students class and not with the same 90 people who composed our first year section. True, my awesome section will always be dear to me, but I sure am happy to study with other people for a change – by the end of last year I knew what everyone was going to say the second they started making their comment (sometimes even before).
• Field studies: More on the academic side, in addition to courses we can also choose to do a “field study” or an “individual student research” – research that a student or a team does with a professor about a specific topic that interests them, where the end result is a case (yes, we can write HBS cases) or a paper. I have a couple of ideas for these, we’ll see how it goes. We can also cross-register to other schools in Harvard University or to courses at MIT Sloan, and a few other schools I think. I’m considering doing that too, though I’m sure that by November-December (not to mention February), when I need to commute across the river in -10 degrees, I’ll be regretting this dearly.
• Recruiting: Recruiting for full-time positions starts almost the second we get back to school, as opposed to first year when it started mid-November. Which means we already had to update our resumes for HBS resume book, and – damn – start thinking about what we want to do when we grow up (and unfortunately “going to business school” isn’t applicable anymore).

Anyway, there’s still tons of time till all of this begins (last week of work, a week in Maui – yes!, going back to Boston), so in the meanwhile here are a few more photos from my Seattle experience:

See the rest here: http://computersexy.com/gallery/v/SeattleSummer_07-082008/

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2. Choosing Recommenders
3. I Love I
4. FAQ / Answers to e-mail questions (essays, school selection, recommenders…)
5. Countdown