Today was move-out day and boy did I get beat up! My poor legs and feet are throbbing and I’ve developed a couple of bruises from getting banged up.

Squirt the frog with the water gun!

My wisdom teeth started to bother me today and now the back of my mouth is sore.  I think it was because I decided I wasn’t brushing well enough back there so I gave them a good scrub.  They definitely weren’t used to all that action and I think my gums got inflamed.  I’ve been holding off getting them pulled because it’ll cost a pretty penny, but I’m really getting tired of the crowded feeling I have in my mouth.

Back in China, I was going to have them removed, but then I changed my mind when I realized I might not get to enjoy the food there if I went through with it.  I thought it’d take a week or so to recover, but as I later found out from my parents, it could have been fine after a day or two.  Oh well, it’s too late for that now!  Unfortunately they’re bothering me these days, so I really want to get them out.  I’ll have to review my coverage and see if it’s worth it right now.

I’m very tempted to find something to prop my jaw to help ease the tension, but what is there?  I tried using gum for awhile and also putting food on that side of my mouth to chew so I couldn’t accidentally bite my cheek.  Those solutions proved too temporary for my needs.  Maybe a night’s sleep will reduce the swelling and make me forgetting about those annoying buggers.  Why didn’t I have them removed long ago??  I’m regretting that now.  :(

Yesterday was the deadline to apply to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the second round (there are three rounds and year and you can apply in any single one you choose).  This entire week, I had been working to perfect everything for my application, particularly my essays.  I had found the Harvard Business School essays to be easier to tackle, with only a few rewrites.  When it came to Stanford’s though, I was a mess.  Let’s take a look at both schools’ prompts:

HBS

1. Tell us about three of your accomplishments.
2. Tell us three setbacks you have faced.
3. Why do you want an MBA?
4. Answer a question you wish we had asked.

Stanford GSB

1. What matters most to you, and why?
2. What do you want to do – REALLY – and why Stanford?
3. Tell us about a time when you made a lasting impact on your organization.
4. Tell us about a time when you generated support from others for an idea or initiative.

I felt like Harvard’s were more practical and Stanford’s were more emotional, if that makes sense.  What made Stanford’s challenging for me was how personal those first two are.  It was really getting to the core of what is meaningful to me and it’s hard to express something you believe in so deeply.  I had to work backwards, first sharing stories of my workplace successes, then tackling what I want to do and what matters to me.

The first versions of my responses to questions 1 and 2 came out extremely idealistic.  I realized that I sounded like my mind was in the clouds and my feet weren’t on the ground.  I knew I had to present things in a more concrete manner so the selection committee could see the logic behind how what mattered to me drove what I wanted to do and why that all tied into going to business school.  Unfortunately, I cared so much about properly expressing something so close to my heart that nothing sounded right.  I would write a paragraph and start the next only to decide that I wanted to add a paragraph to the beginning instead.  I labored over those two for so long!

Finally, I was satisfied with how the second essay came out, but I was still pretty stumped by the first.  How do you share your greatest dreams without sounding unrealistic?  Again and again, I would rewrite my response to that question until I started to create a structure that made sense.  I then made the very smart move of sending my writing to Maven for a proofread.  One of my greatest challenges in writing essays is making everything flow.  I tend to let my ideas out stream-of-consciousness style, which usually results in random connections and scattered ideas.  He was able to help me reorder some of my sentences to make my structure infinitely better!  At that point, I was finally ready to turn everything in.  I had put forth a great effort and now it was time to officially apply to one of the most prestigious programs in the world.

I feel so relieved now that it’s in and strangely, I’m not really nervous about decision day.  That’s probably just because it’s still over two months away!  As the time nears, I’m sure I will nervously anticipate the news and hope for the best.  I can really see myself going to a top business school and excelling.

It was late at night and I thought I’d be free and clear to drive down the 405, but of course they were doing construction and we got routed off the freeway onto Sepulveda.  I was pretty tired and the little caravan of cars all following the detour was amusing to me at that point.

It’s down to the wire for my HBS application and I don’t think I’m going to make it.  I have been unable to get in touch with two of my recommenders and the third says he did it, but the system didn’t register anything.  By the time we start work tomorrow, second round applications will be due (and all too soon overdue).  It was disturbing to come to this reality, since I really want to get into b-school this fall, but at least there is still one more round.  While that round is extremely tough since most of the class will already have been formed, I hold out hope that I will be able to stand out.

I’ve still got another day and a half to get my Stanford GSB application submitted in time for round two, so I’m going to put all my effort towards that and this time I will not fail. I will spend all day tomorrow making sure my recommenders get those recommendations in before we leave work.  I won’t accept another missed deadline!

Happy holidays!  I’m busy traveling around so I won’t be posting much.  Took a 25-hour trip from LA to Portland to Tokyo to Beijing and then the next day, a 5-hour train ride brought me to Shenyang.  My poor feet have been sitting around too much and I’ve napped so much I don’t know when to be tired.  It’s all good though, I get to see quite a bit of family in the next couple of days and hopefully get some relaxation too. 

Today at the office we had a white elephant exchange, which was quite fun! I’m quite pleased with what I got and what I gave. Here you can see that this fun piggy bank I ended up getting allows me to free up the water cooler for its original purpose.

A cute piggy bank that I can now use to save up a fund.

I'd been using this toy water cooler to save up change, but now I can actually use it for water!

Oh what a marvelous thing has happened!  It has been years since I started developing and talking about my business philosophy, one of the key components of which is a business partner.  Finally, I have stumbled across the first viable lead and I am thrilled!  I’ll call him Maven, since that’s what he is as per Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point.  Maven and I both have a strong interest in business and our conversation recently led us to budding partnership.  He has a fantastic idea for a business and I have all the eagerness and complementary skills that he could ask for.

I feel like it’s been a long time coming, so it’s really rewarding to find someone who has a vast number of skills that I don’t, and who needs the very skills that I do have.  At the same time, we share many values and both believe in the synergy that can be created to make a partnership more than just 1 +1.  It’s just enough overlap to agree on the important things, and plenty of complementary abilities to pack a powerful punch.  I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect scenario!  If nothing else, 2011 will go down in history as the year I met Maven.  A very fortunate experience indeed!

Whether or not we are able to get this idea off the ground (and I am confident that we can and will), I have a great feeling about just knowing Maven.  There’s a lot to learn from him and he is a fantastic conversationalist!  I’d been craving the kinds of discussions we’ve been having – about business, personal philosophies, psychology, and so many other topics.  We’re both very curious, inquisitive folks who think a lot, ask a lot, wonder a lot.  I’ve never had someone ask me so many “whys” about my beliefs and it really helps me understand myself better.

In addition, I got a kick out of the fascination we both seem to have with personality tests and what can be gleaned from them.  I love reading personality profiles!  I feel like I learned a lot about him when I read the description of his “type,” whether or not all of it was accurate.  At least it gave me a good basis for understanding the type of person he is.  The more I get to know, the better it all seems.  With our work ethics, determination, and combined efforts, I wouldn’t put anything past us.  You just wait!

Traffic was at a virtual stop when the rain came! They had shut down the Sepulveda tunnel due to flooding, which made what should have been a 10-minute drive back took over an hour extra. Yikes.