Of course you can take the advice
of not getting preoccupied by exams too far; one always needs balance in
approach! As it turns out the MBA type
personality inevitably kicks in and once the exams start looming everyone has
their heads down in preparation.
I hadn’t had the joy of a week of
3 hour exams since uni days so I was interested to be reminded on what it’s like,
and I was pleasantly surprised. In some
sort of macabre way, I liked the incredible focus one develops in this period
where you package together a couple of months of learning and prepare to deliver
it beautifully in those empty answer booklets (some use the expression of
vomiting the stored up information, but I think that the beauty is in the eye
of the beholder). It was actually a
great process to go through, and to recognise how much we had covered in such a
short period.
So the exams came and went
without a hitch and soon enough we were celebrating at our end of term
Christmas party. In a quiet moment over
a drink that night I looked back and realised what an incredible experience it
had been. In a short few weeks, I had
discovered this place called Cranfield, met an amazing international cohort,
fantastic lecturers, learnt an incredible amount of practical theory and an
enormous amount about myself. These
weren’t soppy thoughts in the wee hours of the morning after too many
celebratory drinks, but a sober recognition of how truly fortunate we all are
to be able to undertake this MBA.
But enough of the MBA for a
couple of weeks, we were now on a well-deserved Christmas break where we were
told we could relax and forget about study for a while as long as we got the
pre- work done for the first week back! The faculty obviously kindly want to
make sure we don’t experience withdrawal symptoms.
Xavier (now 8 months old and
going strong) and I shared our first UK Christmas and it was Becky’s first
Christmas back home for several years.
Xavier of course had nothing to compare it to however I assured him that
it rated highly. It was actually the
first opportunity for all of Becky’s family to be together with the four
grandchildren, which was fantastic. I
thought it was strange that we didn’t all go down to the beach for a swim
before Christmas lunch, but I didn’t think it was my place to introduce new
traditions.
Before we knew it Christmas was
over and we were back on Cranfield soil ready for Term 2. It is a nice reflection of the friendship
between the cohort to see the excitement of everyone being reunited after only
a couple of weeks. First week of term
two at Cranfield is dubbed the week long WAC as we complete a whole topic
(project management) within the week. At
the end of the week we got to test our knowledge with a well-developed, day
long, simulated project where a week of resource decision-making was
time-lapsed into about half an hour.
The objective being to complete the project on schedule and on profit
despite any project ‘curve balls’ being thrown our way. It seems MBA’ers are good at handling the
curve balls as the majority of teams were ‘in the black’ at the end – a good
sign. It was a fantastic learning week,
particularly those new to project management.
After the ‘WAC of sorts’ in week
one we were treated to another exam in week two and an exam in week three. We were indeed living the examined
life! Of course in the first weeks we didn’t
just sit around doing exams – we managed to fill it up with six new core
topics, a full assessment centre day, sports competition and Burns night with London
Business School, external speakers and an international week celebrating all 30
odd countries represented in the cohort.
But more on that other fun stuff in the next post!
