I had hoped that with the new semester, I might be able to post more frequently, but it looks like I may have underestimated the demands on my time and energy. Things certainly are more manageable, but we need to start planning Admit Weekend and I have a class that doesn’t start until the second half of the semester, so I have a feeling March is going to be a crazy month.

So far the first two weeks have been really nice. At the tail end of winter break, I attended Tech Trek up in the Bay Area, where we visited a bunch of companies (more on that in another post). Then we kicked off classes last week (has it only been that recent?!! I feel like it’s been a month) and I started taking a bunch of fitness classes at the gym since they’re free for the first two weeks, giving us an opportunity to preview them before committing.

This past weekend we had a trip out to Mammoth, which was timed perfectly with the crazy snow they’ve been getting. They’ve received massive amounts of snowfall and have the most snow anywhere in the country at the moment (somewhere around 15-20 feet). It didn’t snow while we were there, offering my classmates excellent skiing and snowboarding options. Meanwhile, I stayed at the cabin and enjoyed my book the first day and did some homework and had a group meeting the second day. I will try to get a post up about that as well, so you can see the massive mounds of snow and the giant icicle formations.

Tonight I wrapped up my last class of the week and many of my classmates are off to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. I’ll be attempting to get ahead of the mounds of reading that my classes seem to require. In true Core fashion (aka insanely fast and front-loaded), we have a midterm on Monday. Already. It’s for global economics and I’m amazed at how I can read something and then basically forget the entire contents by the time I get to class.

I’m also taking two human capital courses – Designing High Performance Organizations & Human Capital Performance and Motivation. They’re both night classes, but I find them so engaging and interesting that they haven’t felt long. I think I also do better on energy later in the day. My fourth class is Getting the Organization Ready for Big Data, which seemed interesting and useful, but I’m not feeling great about it and I’m considering switching to something else. The professor is brand new (just got his PhD in 2015), the class has never been taught, and he speaks in a rather quiet monotone voice with low energy. He’s nice enough but the class isn’t very exciting.

The class that kicks in in two months is my LEAD class – Leadership Education and Development. We have a cohort of LEAD Fellows from my class who will be taking this and also another class in the fall. LEAD is designed to give us hands-on opportunities to develop our leadership styles, with a community project, off-sites, the class, and a speaker series. I can’t wait to see how the program goes! We’re the first class to have this full-fledged program and I feel very lucky to be part of it.

So that’s a synopsis of how this spring semester is going so far. Sometime next month, global econ gives away to global strategy. Then we start to focus on the countries that we will be traveling to and do projects specific to companies we’ll be visiting. I’m on the Shanghai Taipei trip and I’m so excited!! Also, I’ve scheduled an awesome trip to Israel for spring break, which my classmates planned for us. This is going to be an exciting four months.