A Week in the Life of P2

Sorry it's been a while. If you knew what a typical INSEAD week looks like these days, though, you'd understand. In fact, let me give you a guided tour of a fairly standard week in my life:

Saturday: (we start here because all good things start on a Saturday, in my book)
No class today. This is very exciting. Lots of reading to do, though... slightly less exciting. Plus there's rugby practice (and trust me, it's cold). Then there's the frantic last minute shopping for essential accessories for whatever themed party is going on. Tonight, it's the Montmelian Ball 7 Sins extravaganza. My sin of choice for the evening: greed. Goes very nicely with all the champagne. Mmmmm...

Sunday: The day of rest. Well sort of. Very little time to actually recover from last night's party before I realize I better finish the reading in case Jake Cohen (accounting superstar and my worst nightmare) decides to call on me. And you know he will.

Monday: We kick off the day with Accounting at 8.30 am before running off to Finance and an all-afternoon-long CV workshop. By this point I'm already exhausted but I have rugby practice again. (Yes, dear friends, you weren't misreading earlier, I have actually joined the women's rugby team. Laugh all you want). It's even colder now than it was on Saturday.

Tuesday: Long day of class today largely spent discussing power tools, until it's time for our section's long-awaited champagne party. As co-organiser, I naturally feel obligated to get there early and drink as much champagne as possible. According to all those surveyed, as well as the tell-tale glazed expressions the next morning, the party was a huge success.

Wednesday: L'Oreal comes to school today to present it's e-strat business game. My team is now all set and ready to shine in the glitzy world of cosmetics. We quickly come back down to earth in POM and Accounting. In the evening, my study group spends a couple hours playing with single-server queue theory before devouring a delicious meal at a local Michelin 1* restaurant (La Table Saint Juste, I recommend it).

Thursday: Heavy class schedule today, and I'm determined to go to bed early tonight. But first we have to learn about Black-Scholes and apply it stock options for our group assignment in finance. And then there's people having drinks at Aussie Bar and, well, life is short, I'll sleep next year.

Friday: Today is big scary exam results day. If you want to know how I did, well, I can't tell you. INSEAD non-disclosure policy, you understand. Things have been happily coordinated, and we end up having our exam results distributed in a 1-hr window from a single, small office during class time. Needless to say there were suddenly quite a few empty seats in what is usually a packed amphi for Taylor Randall's one-man-POM-comedy routine. And then we still have to sit through 3 hours of LO until 7pm before finally being able to run screaming through the halls on our way to the closest bar (seeking either celebration or comfort...)

And then it starts all over again...

Highlights for the upcoming week include: the INSEAD Dash on Wednesday morning (8am), two group assignments to prepare, auditions for Cabaret, more rugby practice, and a weekend trip to Barcelona with the team to play against LBS and IESE...

Prices, Markets and Group Bonding

Prices and Markets is the name of our Micro-Economics course in P1, taught by the INSEAD Greek legend that is Nikos Vettas. And this week is definitely Prices and Markets week.

On Monday, we had our second quiz, designed to help us assess whether we've understood what's been going on so far, and more generally give us a first taste of exam panic (yup, those babies start in less than three weeks...) Despite counting for only 10% of our grade, the quiz kept my entire house up late Sunday night, frantically trying to understand why profit-maximizing output should be set at P=MC.

Also on this week are the "P&M Games." No, this does not involve our class stretching its collective athletic muscle to compete for laurel wreaths before our great Athenian leader. Instead, each of our study groups is matched against another group from Fonty, Singapore, or the Wharton MBA class (an example of the INSEAD/Wharton Alliance at work) as we set prices and quantities for products in an attempt to make more profit than the other guy. Every day this week, we input our decisions into the network and wait to see what the other teams come up with before moving on to the next round. While rather time-consuming (but hey, who needs sleep...) it's a fun way to apply all these nifty equations we've been learning, and also allows us to work more closely with our groups.

In a similar vein, the P&M Class Exercises also start this week. This is based on the same principle as the P&M Games, but carried out on a smaller, less high-tech level. First up, pricing pharmaceuticals when a patent is about to expire and a new generic brand wants to enter the market.

As you can see, slight Econ overload, but I actually really enjoy the subject so no complaints from me (all I can say is thank god I don't have to spend that much time doing accounting...)

Another feature of the week is frantic, generalized study group bonding. Our LPG (Leading Peoples and Groups) essay is due next week, subject: your study group, its mechanics and your role within it. This essay counts for 50% of our grade, and while it may seem "warm and fuzzy" compared to the heavy finance and stats stuff we have to do, it's slowly dawning on most of us that writing an essay like this will not actually be simple. So, groups that have until now been spending as little time as possible with each other are planning dinners, study sessions, drunken brawls, anything that will allow them to "observe" each other while surreptitiously scribbling notes in a little black book and gathering fodder for the essay. Spies are everywhere.

And with that I leave you to go meet my group for the next round of P&M Games. Shhhhh....