Actually, I'm going to start from three weeks ago.

Things have not slowed down one bit. I thought orientation was hectic because I wasn't getting enough sleep. I'm still not... There's just so much work to do; so many people to meet and get to know; and so many workshops, information sessions, speaker panels, networking events, team meetings, etc. to attend. It's fun, don't get me wrong. But business school is definitely not for everyone. If I had to sum up in two words the most important skill any MBA student needs to have, it'd be 'time management.' If you suck at time management, you'll either flunk out or, worse, die. If you're mediocre at it, like I am, you'll have to live with 3-4 hours of sleep until you learn to master it.

But I'm one of the lucky ones. An assignment that takes me approximately 45 minutes to read takes an international student 9 hours. Two weeks into the program and we've already had 3 quizzes. Two more next week, and midterms come up the week after that. UC Irvine was on a 10-week quarter system. I thought midterms in 5 weeks was bad. Here, it's like 3 times the workload in 3/5th the time. It's rough.

I've got five classes this semester. Financial accounting, statistics, management, communications, and team process & performance.

Accounting rocks! It's pretty easy so far, or at least not as hard as I'd imagined.

Statistics is uesless. We're learning this program called SPSS and it's a pretty big waste of time in my view.

Management is pretty fun, except for the 90 pages of reading we have to do every two days.

Communications is OK. Lively discussions (during which I'm usually nodding off...)

Teams only meets once a week. It's easy, but so far, pretty useless as well.

On to the fun stuff now. Last Saturday, I went to my first PSU tailgate and football game. The MBA squad does great tailgates. Since the game started at noon, the tailgate started at 7AM. YES, people DO start DRINKING at 7AM here on gamedays. Pretty nuts. A lot of people show up just for the tailgates. Out of our 100 or so students, I'd say only 30 have tickets. The rest just show up to eat and drink. We played Coastal Carolina (Coastal who? Yeah...) and spanked them 66-10. We're playing Oregon State tomorrow, so it should definitely be a better game. And Beaver Stadium really is pretty amazing. The noise can get deafening, especially in the student sections. The only thing I didn't like about it was the 'standing room only' part. Are you kidding me? Standing room only for Coastal Carolina? Imagine when Michigan comes into town...

We had a Chinese MBA Association bbq this afternoon. I guess with anything, there's always a community within a community. I think just about all of the 1st and 2nd-year Chinese MBA students showed up. Most are from China, and a handful are from Taiwan. They're ALL international students. I managed to sneak my way in there because I can speak Mandarin, and because I kind of act as a liaison between them and the rest of our class. See? I'm all about team processes and communications! Anyway, the majority of them are quite a bit older. Most have families and some have kids. I thought it was really cool of the 2nd-years to put together something like this to get to know us, and to shed some advice on how to get through our first year here.

Finally, some random stuff:

I got a sweet Cannondale bike last week. It cost me an arm and a leg, but I get 15 extra minutes of sleep every morning. From the apartment to the business building takes about 7 minutes.

We have these MBA mugs that you can take around campus and get free coffee where accepted. And where they aren't accepted, you only get charged the price of a small cup.

There are no liquor stores here. To buy beer, you either have to get it from a beer distributor (thankfully, across the street from my apartment), or go into a restaurant and buy it there. Can you imagine walking into Red Lobster and buying a 6-pack and leaving? I've done it...

For Men Only. It's a barbershop downtown, and it's awesome. For $20, you get a cut, a wash, and a BEER! I got my haircut at 9:30AM today. I'm a degenerate...