Long Time, No Blog

Sorry, I haven't blogged in a fairly long time. Things have been CRAZY since getting back from Indiana and then this weekend I was at Duke. I had randomly applied to go to this MBA Women's Weekend thing and shockingly got picked to go. Duke paid for everything, the hotel, meals (alcohol), I just had to get myself to Durham. It was about a 6 hour drive, which wasn't bad since I'm used to driving 9 1/2 between Harrisburg and South Bend. The only thing that was annoying was that since my car CD player is still broken, I had to seek radio stations the whole time. Upon entering North Carolina, I lost the radio station signal that I had been listening to, so I hit seek and the first three stations I came to were Jesus stations. Not that there's anything wrong with Jesus stations, that's just a lot of them.

We stayed at the Washington Duke Inn (or Wa-Duke) which was amazing. We had been alphabetically assigned to roommates and mine turned out to be pretty neurotic. She was stressed out the whole weekend and taking the thing WAY to seriously. She took notes on EVERYTHING that was said. Then the night before our interview studied them for about an hour. We had already been told that the interview was more like a conversation with a current student to make sure you were a good fit for the culture of Duke. That turned out to be true. In mine, we ended up talking about Bob Davie...go figure. But my roommate was SOO nervous she told me she thought about running out of the interview room. She was also really concerned that if she had to leave before the optional apartment tours on Sunday that it would be held against her and asked every alumna/staff member/alumna that we met to make sure it was ok. Despite doing research on all other aspects of Duke life (restaurants, traditions, apartments, etc.), she apparently missed one integral part. I had skipped one of the sessions (I had already gone to the marketing part and didn't care to listen to anything on finance, consulting, or general management) and headed to the hotel early. I was watching the Duke/Michigan basketball game when my roommate returned.

Her: Who's playing?
Me: Duke and Michigan. Duke's going to lose though. They're down by 7 and there's only 23 seconds left.
::she looks at the TV::
Her: But that's only in the 2nd
Me: Half
Her: Oh
::They show Coach K walking off the court::
Her: Who's that?
Me: Coach K
Her: Oh, that's the guy they were talking about in the part about personal branding. What's he famous for?
Me: Um...basketball

I should've told her that I heard they were going to be asking about basketball later, so she'd freak out. Then she went on the bus and announced to everyone that Duke lost, like she actually knew anything. The rest of the weekend went pretty much like this. Information, eat, information, eat, information, eat, drink, eat. In fact at one point, we walked out of the classroom where we had just finished box lunches and there was a table of snacks outside. Is that really necessary?

In other random news, also attending this event (which included 120 prospective MBA's from all over the world), was a girl from Notre Dame that lived next door to me sophomore. Literally next door. We had rooms 221 and 223 and she was in 225. CRAZY!

Talking to the people there made me feel a lot better about myself since they have even less of a clue what they're doing with their lives than I do. Like the girl I met who was the same age as me. She attended Notre Dame my freshman year. Transferred to Florida State and graduated with a degree in anthropology a year and a half. Didn't know what she was going to do with that. Went to law school. Passed the bar. Practiced law for three years. Didn't like it and is now going to get her MBA because she really doesn't know what else to do. Oh and she has a four month old and a husband that she's trying to drag to grad school with her.

I also spent an abnormal amount of time discussing: where I am from, why Girl Scout Cookies have different names in different areas, where I'm applying to school, when I'm applying to school, what exactly "smart casual" is, if I was wearing jeans the day it says jeans are appropriate and if our student liaisons were reporting back on us even though they said they weren't (we decided no, but that if we did something inappropriate ie got extremely intoxicated and dance on tables, stole ornaments off the christmas tree, or asked why there were so many at the business school that they may have to report that.)

Duke/Fuqua (that's the name of the business school) has moved its way up on my list, but probably the best thing that came out of the weekend is that they waived the application fee, so that saves me $200 or so.