The Beginning of the End, Cases Purging and a Cowardly Commentor

So here I am, blogging on my very last first day of classes ever (or at least for the foreseeable future!). It is SO hard to believe that my HBS experience is almost over. It feels like just yesterday I was on my second Disney cruise with my mom reading my acceptance e-mail and now there's just five months and 11 weeks of class in between me and graduation. Weird. The good news is that I have an AMAZING last semester of courses that I can't wait to really dig into. I think I might have mentioned them before, but for good measure here they are again (drumroll, please):

• 1) Managing Innovation
• 2) Strategic Marketing in Creative Industries (basically the course that made me want to come to HBS)
• 3) Half Course in Digital Marketing Strategy
• 4) Half Course in Retailing
• 5) Competing With Social Networks (another class I've been looking forward to taking since I started here)
• 6) Field Study on Jordan's Furniture / Norwalk Furniture

Basically, I have class daily from 10am to 1pm, which may very well be the easiest school schedule I've had to date. I temper this statement with the realization that much of my free time will likely be devoted to what will most definitely be a challenging job search (and the rest of it I plan to fill with lots of fun activities like the upcoming Entertainment & Media Club conference, my trip to Sundance Film Festival this weekend [can't wait!] and maybe even a spot on the spring break IXP to Costa Rica [to make up for missing Peru]). I'll be sure to keep you updated as we go along!

In other news, when I got back to Boston this past weekend and started organizing myself for the semester, I started to move all of my case binders from last fall to their final resting place under my bed (where they would join the rest of my cases from RC year) and I almost gave myself a heart attack. I never realized how much space 15, 6" binders can really take up under one's bed. Immediately, I felt the need to purge because the clutter (despite it being under my bed where no one ever sees it) was driving me crazy (not to mention the fact that I never once referred to one of my Finance cases last semester).

Thus, I spent about 3 hours on Sunday evening sifting through every single class binder and consolidating. If I couldn't remember ever having done a particular case? Recycled! If I had negative memories of a particularly difficult cold call? Recycled! If I just plain hated the subject (i.e. Finance)? Recycled! I did keep any cases that I remembered enjoying and nearly every "Course Note" that had teaching materials in it that could be of use in the future. I also kept my ENTIRE Consumer Marketing binder and notebook because, well, Youngme Moon is a marketing goddess and her class will forever remain at the top of my HBS experience. In the end, it felt so good to throw out the old, make room for the new and have a little extra storage space. :)

Now, before I depart for the moment, I have one more item to address. If you are a regular blog reader, you may have noticed that my "Comments" section has recently changed to a Moderated format that no longer accepts comments from Anonymous readers. Although when I started this blog, the intention was to allow anyone to post, even if they felt uncomfortable signing their name, I've recently had to deal with one particularly virulent reader who feels the need to make personal attacks on me featuring multiple expletives and slanderous insults...all while hiding behind the veil of the "Anonymous" feature. Personally, I think that anyone who takes time out of their day to repeatedly post insulting, negative comments on the blog of someone that don't know is only proving that they have no life of their own; however, I also don't want these horrible remarks hanging around the pages of my blog. So for now, comments will remain moderated and you'll have to log in to your gmail or blogger account in order to post. I apologize to those readers that will be inconvenienced by this!

Anywho, that's all for now. Have a great week everyone!