When the Clock Strikes Twelve

I imagine that most of the other Harvard Business School Round 1 Applicants were glued to their computer screen Jan. 16, 2008, at 12 noon when admissions decisions were released, but my acceptance story took an interesting twist. You see, I was aboard the Disney Magic on a seven-night cruise with no cell-phone or Internet access. Making it even more complicated was the fact that this day's excursion took me 2 hours into mainland Mexico for an exploration of the Tulum Ruins (which were fascinating, by the way) and kept me even farther from modern communication devices until 5 p.m. that evening.

You can imagine my stress, then, when I returned to the ship exhausted from the excursion, sweaty from the heat (and nerves) and knowing that my future lie in an e-mail that would cost me 75 cents a minute to check on the ship (but hey, if you're going to spend $150,000 for two years, what's $15 for internet, right?).

My mom and I made our way to deck 9, grabbed a seat in the Cove Cafe and, with her peering over my shoulder, logged into Yahoo. First e-mail I saw: Congratulations on your HBS acceptance from Gordon Jones (my admissions officer). My heart leapt: I made it.

I'm one of those people that never likes to get their hopes up, so I never truly let myself believe that I would make it. When I visited the campus for my interview in November, all I could think was how impressive Harvard was, and how intelligent and high-profile the other interviewees were. Somehow my job in Public Relations at Walt Disney World just didn't seem to match up against the private equity and hedgefund folks. But, despite the 10% acceptance rate odds, I had made it.

Four days later, finished with my fantastic cruise and surfing the Prematriculation site, it still hasn't quite sunk in that I'm moving to Boston in 7 months to embark on a fantastic and horrifying journey. A million thoughts are running through my head: will I get along with the other students, will I like living in New England, will I be able to handle the workload? Through this blog, we'll find out all those answers together.