White Spaces

At school, we are repeatedly exhorted to find the "white spaces", "blue oceans", "untapped customers" that are necessary to grow a business. What I wouldn't give for a white space of my own, where I might do some growing too. This period is the most challenging one for me, raising all sorts of questions: to what extent am I happy handing in sub-standard work in order to maintain my social life and catch a couple hours sleep now and then? What have the courses taught me about where my skills and preferences lie? How much of a radical change am I prepared to make in my life, career or otherwise? Rather than achieving any clarity on these issues, I get more confused the more people I speak to. And I just can't seem to find that little space in my schedule, or in my mind, to really sit down and think about it. Resorting to the ostrich method instead, I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping something good happens.

It's not all gloom and doom, though. I am really enjoying the social environment at school these days. It's much more relaxed than in the first couple periods, and everyone is focusing their efforts not on ticking off lists of names of people they've met, but on building real, solid friendships. Integration with our friends from Singapore has also been fantastic, and we've even managed to build some bridges to the new December class as well.

In other news, our team is into the semi-finals round for the L'Oreal business game. That means that we now have to put together a business plan outlining our vision for our little company and its promising portfolio of brands. A fake company, and fake brands, of course, but after almost three months it really feels like our baby. Here's hoping our baby impresses the L'Oreal execs.

I feel like I should close this post with an apology. I know I have not done a very good job this period keeping my readership informed of the goings-on in my life. In fact, I've done a similarly poor job maintaining communication with my friends and family. All I can say is, I promise to do better. And to keep looking for those spaces.

What? Exams again?

So, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

- I handed in the final version of my CV for publication in the INSEAD CV book (apparently this best-seller, complete with mugshots of us beautiful people, will help us land a job to pay back all those loans; not sure how many recruiters still read books, though...)
- Our top-notch L'Oreal team submitted all decisions for the first round of the game, launching what promises to be an innovative, aggressive, blue ocean strategy of our own.
- My group finished the last Finance assignment due tomorrow (moral of the assignment: shareholders are not to be trusted) and has made good headway into the Strategy assignment due Sunday (moral of that assignment: the airline industry sucks).
- After many, many rehearsals, both performances I'm involved with for Cabaret tomorrow just about pass the giggle test, and I have a mask for the ball on Saturday.

But then I remembered we have exams. Again. And they start next week. And in the midst of all that working on group assignments, honing my acting skills, figuring out what to do with my life and attempting to sleep just enough not to get deathly ill, I completely forgot to study!

At this stage, it's best I just forget about all this exam malarkey and focus on the Christmas break...

PS: A quick personal thank you to all the people (from inside and outside the bubble) who made last weekend very special.