Going home, again

Every good UNC grad knows that Thomas Wolfe (UNC 1920) said that you can’t go home again. Lucky for me, he was wrong in this case.

This weekend I returned to my adopted home for the first time since coming to Darden. I grew up in North Carolina but spent the last five years of my life living and working in West Palm Beach, Fla. In some many ways, these were some of my most formative years. I was out on my own for the first time, navigating a journalism career, relationships, friendships and a new city. It was Mary Tyler Moore with palm trees.

Perhaps that’s why West Palm Beach feels more like home now than North Carolina. True home will always be where my family resides, but West Palm Beach is the place I know best, the city I can rightfully claim as mine.

All that said, I was ready to leave when I departed for Darden this past summer. I left at a low point, a period of professional stagnation and personal difficulty. I simply felt I’d outgrown the opportunities South Florida could provide me and was itching for a new challenge. Saying goodbye to my friends was hard, but I felt many of them were moving on with new and different lives too. And abandoning Florida in the stifling heat of July was very easy.

So it shocked me a little when I touched down in West Palm Beach on Thursday night and felt a rush of excitement. I could pick out my old neighborhood from the plane window. When the clerk at the car rental office asked if I needed directions, it felt good to say, “No way.” And driving down the sunny, palm-lined Intracoastal plastered a goofy smile on my face. I missed this place!

And my friends … Let’s just say returning to a place where people know me to my core was refreshing. These are the people I grew up with, the ones who helped me develop into a grown up.

But first, you have to understand about Saturday night. I was in town for my dear friend Leslie’s wedding (read the NYT wedding announcement here) and Saturday night was the bridal shower. I watched Leslie surrounded by 15 women and 1 man who she’d known in all stages of her life. There was her twin sister, her childhood friend, a college roommate, friends from her first “real” job and then those of us who knew her in West Palm Beach.

We all donned pink plastic tiaras, raised glasses of champagne and spent two hours telling stories about our friendships with Leslie and each other, the memories we carry with us when we’re apart. Looking around that room I was amazed by all the good friends Leslie had collected and kept close during her 38 years.

And it reminded me of something.

I can’t completely give in to the busyness and excitement of Darden and my new life. While I love the challenges and the new people I’m meeting, it’s so important to nurture my wonderful existing friendships, the women and men I hope to still be calling up 20 years from now, the ones who know me completely, the ones who will don a pink plastic tiara if I ask them nicely.

Cannon ball!

It’s sad that my new idea of a vacation is exam week.

But that’s a little what last week felt like. Just five hours a day of exam-taking followed by studying stuff I’d already learned.

Compare that to a typical b-school week that includes five hours of classes, six hours of trying to teach yourself new concepts, three hours of study groups and shoe-horning in networking calls, emails and briefings.

So, yeah, last week felt like a break. I even had time to go to Target. Twice.

Which meant that yesterday felt like the first day back at work after vacation. And it was a roooough re-entry.

I woke up late. I took too long to get dressed. I didn’t eat breakfast. Finance class made my head spin. I nearly fell asleep in a company briefing. I slogged through the evening’s cases. I collapsed in bed at 10:30 p.m., ridiculously exhausted.

It could have been easier. I could have prepped more in advance. I could have picked out my outfit the night before. I could have woken up earlier.

But I didn’t do any of that. Why? Because I’m in denial.

When the first quarter ended, I felt this enormous sense of accomplishment. I was smarter after my first two months at school. I had tackled concepts I’d never heard of before (NPV, anyone?) and did things with Excel I never knew were possible. It was challenging and exciting and fantastic.

And I never want to do it again.

I knew that first quarter would be hard. But I didn’t know how hard it would be. But this time, this time I know. I’m like a kid standing on the edge of a freezing swimming pool with my water wings on. I have to jump in but that’s hard to do when I know exactly how cold the water is.

Good thing I have no choice but to hold my nose, close my eyes and do a cannon ball.

Scare yourself silly

I’ve done a lot of scary things in my life.

I’ve jumped out of a plane. I’ve roamed some of the most dangerous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I’ve spent two months traveling alone in Australia. I’ve been inside a pen with two cheetahs. I’ve given speeches in front of hundreds of people. I’ve hiked in the Rocky Mountains in a snowstorm.

I even came to business school with no Excel skills.

Stephanie skydiving

So it’s a testament to how much my life has changed that the scariest thing I’ve done in the last two months was sit in front of 62 friendly people and give a five-slide Power Point presentation.

It was in Decision Analysis, a class that is, to put it mildly, a bit difficult for me. For you non-MBAs, let me lay it out for you. For each class, we’re given a complex problem. (Should a developer buy that piece of land that may or may not be a swamp? Should a car company risk going into a potentially lucrative (and volatile) Asian market?) Using Excel and some scary risk analysis software, we build complicated economic models — full of distributions, assumptions, future cash flows, decision cells — to predict all the possible outcomes of all the possible decisions. And then we have to make a decision and defend it.

It’s really, really, really hard. And I’m not naturally good at it. Often I make these models and they’re very, very wrong. Usually I look at other people’s elegant solutions and think, I could never do that.

Last night our assignment was a former exam case. Long. Complicated. Multi-faceted. And we had to make a Power Point presentation because one of us was going to be asked to share it with the class.

Yep, that was me.

When my professor emailed me before class to ask if I’d be willing to share, my stomach dropped and my hands started shaking. I was terrified and felt ridiculously … exposed.

Stephanie hiking in the Rockies.

In my head, I knew the reaction was overblown. My classmates are nothing if not supportive. I like talking in front of people, even big crowds of hostile people. I’ve jumped out of a plane, for goodness sake! This should be nothing.

And yet, getting up in front of my Decision Analysis class felt like a huge risk. The experience had the potential to expose my intellectual weaknesses, to lay out all my faults where everyone could see them clearly.

I hate not being good at things. I hate it even more when people see me being not good at things.

But I did it anyway. And it went … OK. Probably better than OK. And since I didn’t leave the room in tears, I considered it a success. Most of that’s due to the fact that I spend five hours a day with an extremely kind and generous group of people who did not grill me about every cell in my spreadsheet. And part of it is due to the fact that I know more about decision analysis than I thought. Not enough, but more than I had given myself credit for.

It was such a small thing and, yet, such a big success for me.

I always liked that Eleanor Roosevelt quote about doing one thing every day that scares you. Doing risky things can force you to stretch, to grow, to realize you are capable of far more than you imagined.

Sometimes those things that scare you involve parachutes and cheetahs and huge crowds of people.

And sometimes, they just involve Power Point slides.