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Arianna Huffington came to speak at work a few weeks ago. I wasn’t sure what I’d think of the writer turned politician turned online journalism pioneer. I expected arrogant and out of touch and instead found her funny, down-to-earth and insightful.
The core of her talk revolved around her new book, On Becoming Fearless, which I’ll share more on later. But she also shared one of her keys to success: get enough sleep.
In recent years, I feel like it’s become a requirement of success not to sleep at all. Bill Clinton claimed to sleep four hours a night. Martha Stewart came to work to speak a few months ago and also talked about not needing much sleep. Sleep, it seems, is the a lazy man’s crutch; the successful learn to conquer it, health impacts be damned (and there are a lot of health problems that come with getting too little sleep, including heart attacks). As someone who needs eight hours a night, it’s pretty disheartening to hear I’ll be limited professionally by my need for Zs.
That’s why it was so refreshing to hear Huffington praise sleep. She said she spent years not sleeping enough, only to pass out one day from exhaustion and realize the error of her ways. She now gets at least seven hours a night and wishes everyone else would too.
“I was having dinner with a man, I won’t say who, who bragged about only having five hours of sleep,” she said during her talk. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, this dinner would be a lot more interesting if you’d gotten a few hours more.’”
So on this lazy, post-Thanksgiving day, now I can sleep in and feel smart and successful at the same time. And if I can’t follow Huffington’s advice, I’ll take after Winston Churchill. He believed in the afternoon nap. Mmmmm.
About a week into the fourth quarter of my b-school experience, it dawned on me.
Darden had taken me off the wheel.
Me, for the first three quarters of the year
For the first three quarters of the year, I was running like a lab rat on a wheel. I knew exactly what I needed to do and where I needed to be every minute of the day. I couldn’t always get everything done, but I also didn’t have to do much prioritizing. Do the finance case or finish the strategy reading? Those were the kind of trade-offs I was weighing.
But now, it’s like the lab technicians who run Darden have opened up the cage door and set me free. I’m an emancipated lab rat, running in the wild — and I have no clue what to do.
Suddenly my classes are scattered across the day. I have group projects and, thus, group meetings that I have to find time to attend. And leadership roles that require even more meetings. And a social life. And, dear God, how do I juggle all of this?
The ironic thing is I used to juggle all these things quite well. In my old life as a responsible, wage-earning adult, I figured out how to balance work, meetings, a social life and community leadership.
So why couldn’t I remember how to do it now?
Oh yeah. Seven months of Darden programming. Seven months of “put your head down and do it.”
You could argue that seven months was a waste of time and led to the atrophy of my real-world skills. But I honestly don’t know how else I would learn so much so quickly. Without the focus and structure Darden provided, it would have been humanly impossible. For me, at least, it was a hugely productive time.
But I can’t live in that hyper-structured environment forever, no matter how productive it made me. So it’s a good thing Darden released me from my cage before it released me into the real world (i.e. my summer internship).
Before I came to Darden, a friend of mine who was graduating warned me.
“Don’t expect to meet a boyfriend at Darden,” she said. “All the good ones are taken and the rest of them are reliving their undergrad years.”
She was right. Many of the good ones – guys and gals – are married, engaged or in committed relationships. And many of the rest – guys and gals – are reliving their undergrad years. Which isn’t a bad thing. I was just looking for a guy who could be more than an awesome beer pong partner.
Happy Valentine's Day
So it still surprises me a little that I’ve met a wonderful guy at Darden. And, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I should write about dating at Darden. Not so much about my relationship, but what it’s like to date inside the b-school bubble, a place that’s one part high school, one part workplace and one part pressure cooker.
Here, collected from other Darden daters, are the warnings, and benefits, of dating at b-school:
Hook ups abound: We students are under stress, away from friends and family and looking to relax. We’re surrounded by lots of smart, scintillating people — and drinking a fair bit of alcohol. So, yes, hook ups happen. And they don’t always result in dates, much less relationships.
Gossip Girl has nothing on us: If you hook up, people will talk. If you hook up a lot, people will talk a lot. And since the Darden bubble is a small one, sooner or later everyone is in everyone else’s business.
Taken people don’t always act taken: Sometimes people with boyfriends, girlfriends, fiancés or spouses act single. Most folks are faithful, but the tasteless joke is that MBA stands for “Married But Available.”
Secrecy is paramount: If you make it over these relationship hurdles and find yourself dating a fellow student, you have a new problem: keeping it a secret. Just like dating at the office, you don’t want to broadcast your new relationship until it’s a sure thing. That means seeing the person you’re dating in class and at social events and playing it cool.
Competing in love: Darden is a collaborative place but that doesn’t mean people don’t feel the pressure to perform. Class contributions, exam grades and especially internship offers are all ways we measure how well we’re doing. And if you’re doing great and your significant other is struggling, that can create some real strain.
Scheduling romance: Darden’s has a reputation for working its students hard. That means finding time for romance often requires Ninja Microsoft Outlook skills and the ability to find romance in reading cases together.
The warnings are harsh, but the benefits are pretty awesome…
Great dating pool: I joke with my boyfriend that Darden screened him for me. His admission meant I already knew he was smart, ambitious, well-educated and a good fit for Darden’s collegial, collaborative culture. Once I found out he had a sense of humor, I was hooked. I don’t think Type-A personalities will find a more robust dating pool than b-school.
Update: A male classmate pointed out to me that the robust dating pool is all a matter of perspective. At Darden, only 29 percent of the first-year class are women. So the guys might find getting a date a little more difficult.
No explanations required: Having your significant other at Darden means you never have to explain why you spent three hours on a spreadsheet, why you’re reading cases on a Friday night or why you’re dressed up in a silly costume for a Darden Cup event. They just get it. And they’re right there with you.
Lots o’ support: In this pressure cooker environment, it’s great to have someone you can let down your defenses with.
For another take on dating in b-school, check out this post by my classmate and friend Julie.
Yep, that’s right, we’re famous. Our section bird made BusinessWeek’s list of wacky b-school traditions. Check out the blurb and the other traditions. For those of you shopping for schools, I think you can tell a lot about a school from its ”wacky” traditions (or lack of them).
If you want to know what happened with the bird and how we got it back, read on here.
The Bird on Halloween night with two of his biggest fans.
I’m back to the grind of classes, which means more free business school lessons for you. Here are the highlights from this week:
Accounting is an art, not a science. Numbers? Ledgers? T-accounts and balance sheets? Accounting sounds like a science to me and at least one of my classmates described it that way this week. And that’s when my new accounting professor – who was an art history major – set him straight.
Making fools of ourselves for a stuffed toy...
“I believe we’re in an art class,” she said. “There’s no science in accounting class.”
As an art-loving poet, that was music to my ears.
She went on to tell us how applying the rules of accounting is an art since there isn’t detailed guidance on how to do every, single, little thing. Good accountants try to paint an accurate, complete picture of a company.
Don’t die rich – die in debt! Macroeconomics class is about GDP, inflation rates and unemployment. But it’s also about fun micro life takeaways like this one. We were graphing income and consumption across a person’s life. You start out with no income (babies can’t earn) and when you grow up, you earn more than you consume (assuming, of course, you’re not the average American with a negative savings rate). Then, in theory, after you retire, you live off the nest egg you squirreled away.
The ultimate, perfect economic goal, according to my professor? Spend it all – and then some – before you croak. In the United States, children aren’t liable for their parents’ debt so there’s no need to worry about harming your own kin. The purely economic view says if you want to maximize your personal enjoyment and minimize your personal down side, die in the red.
Few things are funnier than a grown man in a Big Bird costume. My section has a mascot, a very old, much beloved Big Bird plush toy. Because the other sections are jealous of our obvious superiority, they try to steal the bird and this year they succeeded. On Friday we got the bird back by performing the Sesame Street song in front of the school with our section rep (formerly a well-respected member of the work force) dressed as Big Bird. It was juvenile, ridiculous,
Don't I look relaxed?
embarrassing – and a whole lot of fun. And when you’re working 16 hours a day, you need to blow off a little steam.
It’s OK to take a vacation. I can’t really take a vacation until Thanksgiving, but I desperately felt I needed one this week. After rolling straight from exams into classes, I could feel burnout setting in. Luckily another Darden student was kind enough to invite me up to her family’s mountain cabin for the weekend and even though I should have been doing case work/networking/housework/errands, I went. It worked miracles. One day and night in the wood, far from cell phone signals and high-speed Internet, felt like a week’s vacation. Just looking at the gorgeous leaves was therapy. Eating homemade apple pie and roasted chicken didn’t hurt either.
Here’s what they don’t tell you about the first week of business school:
You need to decide right then what you want to do for the rest of your life, forever and ever, amen.
At least, that’s what it feels like.
The career service’s office puts the pressure on to narrow your focus, figure it out, do the research and start hunting for that internship. They bring in high-powered speakers from each type of job (i-banking, private wealth, general management — the list goes on) to tell you what it’s like to live their lives. They dole out more personality quizzes than Cosmo (Myers-Briggs, anyone?) and force a ton of introspection (What makes you really happy? What are you really good at?).
It suddenly dawns on you that you are not just here for two years of education, enlightenment and world-broadening. You are here to get a job. As someone once told me, b-school is a two-year job search.
To be fair to b-schools around the world, they’re under a lot of pressure. Those fancy b-school rankings in Business Week and others rely heavily on statistics on how many graduates have a job and how much that job pays. Also, it’s a bad economy and competitive market, so we need to be prepared. And there is so much to do at my MBA program that if the career office didn’t force us to pay attention, narrow it down and focus on our job search, it would be very, very easy to shove it on the back burner.
But that pressure cooker of the first week is intense. And it was as I listened to all these experts telling me about their jobs and the reason that being an i-banker/consultant/marketer/trader that I started to think I should be a consultant.
I started salsa dancing two years ago when I was living in South Florida. Many of my friends already did it and I was tired of watching from the sidelines as they spun across the dance floor. Plus my then-boyfriend had moved and I suddenly had a lot more free time. Enter salsa lessons Monday and Wednesday nights.
Doesn't that look fun?
I loved it and it quickly became my haven. Stress at work? Not to worry. I could dance it out at salsa. Even if I was grumpy or miserable or exhausted, I left feeling renewed. A good night dancing was better than just about anything else – better than wine, better than chocolate, better even than new shoes.
When I moved to Virginia, I said goodbye to salsa. The Appalachian foothills aren’t exactly known for their sizzling Latin music scene. But after a little digging, I found a salsa night that happens every Sunday at a hole in the wall not too far from where I live. Last week a group of us went to check it out.
It was amazing.
OK, maybe it wasn’t as amazing as the clubs I went to in Florida — it was never going to be. But the music was good, most of the guys knew how to dance and I stayed out on the floor all night. I left sweaty and smiling and feeling so high I didn’t feel my blistered, pinched feet. It was the perfect way to start my insane school week.
During orientation everyone from the dean on down told us to find an hour a day for ourselves. One of our professors said we should do something creative every day. And while that sounds fantastic in the abstract, it’s hard to do when you’re up to your eyeballs in case work, internship hunting and study groups.
It’s easy to blow off a chance to blow off steam. Spending a few hours dancing (or writing a blog entry) is a horrible waste of time. I feel that acutely now as I sit here writing this with spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations breathing down my neck.
But, as we learned from Footloose, a place without joy is no place worth living. And so, to keep my sanity, I’ll spend every Sunday night on the dance floor.
