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The forecast. This is following a weekend of snow.
Yeah so they tell you it doesn’t snow that much in Fontainebleau. As the French say, “au contraire.”
Here’s what it looked like here late last week when I was thinking, “Oh wow – snow! I should take a picture before it all goes away!”
Flurries
An innocent enough thought, but then the shit really hit the fan… This is our drive back from the Loire Valley (8 hours for what’s supposed to be 2.5 hours) and a view of the Fontainebleau Forest scenically covered in white stuff.
Drive back from the Loire. Totally relaxing and not stressful at all. Driving in 6 inches of snow is really nice.
The beautiful forest.
More coming on other topics soon……………………
Business Week just put out their new rankings and they wanted me to let you know about this:
CLICK IT! –> “INSEAD Ousts Queens from the No. 1 Spot”
I’ve been delinquent in sharing our break between P1 and P2. I need to show you pictures of this. It was amazing. Morocco. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. Here goes…
Arrival in the Marrakech Airport
Lap of luxury for 49 EUR a night...beat that.
Ah wait...this beats that. The view out the back of our villa.
YUM
Street Meat
This about sums it up.
Truth
I totally forgot to post anything about how finals went after the whole “calm before the storm business”. Well, there WAS a storm. The good news is that as far as I can tell it didn’t spare anyone. And this is the good news about INSEAD. In addition to the whole no grade disclosure business, they also do all their grading on a z-score basis. I’m not going to explain UDJ/stats right now, so if you don’t know the terms just ask me sometime and I’ll tell you in person.
Not what I got.
Basically though, what they do is the following:
1. All tests are scored 1-100.
2. Those scores are presumed to be normally distributed, so each is then assigned a z-score.
3. All the scores are arbitrarily increased by 2.5 (basically, it sounds better that an average student gets a score of 2.5 than 0).
4. Anyone who’s above a z-score of -.5 passes. -.5 is three standard deviations from the mean, which means that only .2% of the class fails (99.8% passes). In a section of 70 students, that means that frequently, literally no one fails. Cool? Cool.
All that being said, they weren’t easy. Of course that works in our favor (lower mean and higher standard deviation are good things, remember). Accounting was a massacre, as far as I’m concerned, UDJ was so-so, P&M was good, and OB was fine. For Accounting, I’m hoping for the gods of the z-curve to save me. We’ll see.
Also, I’d like to take a moment to amend my previous post on “Classes and Professors”. 1) There’s a woman named Michele Hibon who teaches the UDJ tutorial, she is a hilarious French genius who will single handedly cause you to pass UDJ and there is a very high “pro-bah-bee-lee-TAY” that you will even enjoy the tutorials. 2) Harald Hau is the comic genius of INSEAD. The man is incredibly subtle, but just pay attention in FMV. When he does the rocket ship or they “how my family lost their fortune” speech, or best, when he derives beta and ends with (total deadpan) “how convenient”, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I think most of the INSEADers who had him will know just what I’m talking about.
Spoke to a visiting prof from NYU. They do NOT clap after every class at NYU. Evidence suggests this is European. Will report back with further research.
Singapore campus here I come! As of yesterday I officially got off the waitlist and am headed for sunny Singapore early in January, just in time to kiss the French winter goodbye. I’m sure France is lovely in the winter and blah blah blah, but let’s be honest. Singy is warm and beautiful, relaxed, full of beaches, and home to the INSEAD Dash (click if you’re not familiar – skip to 3:30 if you don’t want to watch all the intro stuff) – how do you beat that? (This year’s Dash is coming up on the 10th…the Singaporeans have promised to post a video, which I’ll obviously share.)
Anyway, so yes, I’m off the waitlist. If anyone out there that’s reading is an 11D or some other promotion from the future, listen up: INSEAD has changed their bidding system and it has royally screwed our promotion. In the past it worked like this: everyone bids. There’s a cutoff. People drop out. The cutoff comes down. Now, that’s all the same except THE CUTOFF DOESN’T COME DOWN. So when everyone says, “Oh, I’ll just bid all 200 points to make sure I get in”, you better be damned sure you want to pay close to 200 because once the cutoff is set, it’s not moving (this year it’s fixed at 175 for Singy in P3). Just a word of warning for when you’re doing the process too. Moral of the story is: bid your valuation (aka what you’d actually pay to go to Singy); don’t bid 200 because you’re too lazy to figure out what you’d actually want to pay to go. You and everyone else will benefit from it.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that I’m now getting thrown into high gear as far as getting housing and booking tickets and all that business. I’m not too worried, but it would be nice to have it all magically figured out. Maybe I should hire a secretary. Until next time…
For Business and Pleasure - INSEAD '11J 