RudeDude wrote:
devashish_paul wrote:
RudeDude wrote:
I start business school this fall and assume that class, interviews, networking, and drinking will leave little time for training. I love racing and greatly value my health, but IM training is a hobby. Family and career are top priorities. As such, I wanted to ask the ST community for anecdotes from those who balanced triathlon training (70.3 and IM) and business school. Stories about other graduate degrees are less relevant to me but still welcome.
I'm into my third year of triathlon and second IM this summer. Making big gains and loving it, but may have to take a two year hiatus with intermittent training. Or maybe not, who knows. Enlighten me ST! I think you deserve to be banished from ST for using networking, biz school and drinking as an excuse for not racing and training. If you can't race and train while doing biz school you are just plain disorganized or making excuses. Sorry for the tough love. Biz school is really not that tough. It just isn't (for the record, I did 4 IM's while working full time and doing my MBA at nite school)....it's just about being organized. Please don't use family and career as top priorities either. Of course those are for everyone here other than maybe the top 15 pros in Kona and top 50 at ITU. Everyone else is in the same boat...work pays for families to exist (family is really the priority, work is secondary, because work won't come to your funeral, family will) Dev, all due respect, but night and weekend school is a different experience than full time. Staying in the same industry is not as time demanding as spending 10s of hours doing case study prep or busting your ass in a summer internship. You took one route and kept earning $$ while earning your degree. Not better or worse, but different. You were more focused than most doing full time and rightly didn't waste time meeting every employer on campus. I know you have the drill sergeant mentality on ST, but I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I've worked in a demanding industry before and share your skepticism when people working <70 hours per week complain they don't have time to x, y, z. But from what I know, business school is more dynamic with many cool opportunities - I want to take full advantage. That said, I'll follow up in 9 months on this topic. In my time I had some classmates that did some semesters full time and some part time (mine was 2 courses per semester, 3 semesters per year, 3 years, 2 courses advanced standing due to having an engineering degree coming in). It depend on the person you talked to. Some said the full time program was way harder, some said part time while working full time. To some degree it depended on what courses you had at a given time and which profs you had and how organized you could get with your group work.
I aligned myself with enough people who wanted to get the maximum marks with the minimum amount of input workload. We would divide and conquor wherever possible and if I could not get in with some of those people, I just took leadership of the group and said, "OK you guys want to get an A- with X amount or work or an A- with X/5 amount of work". Most people were pretty open to getting the same mark with 1/5th of the work so they fell in line quickly and we had a no time squandering policy. But you really have to manage your groups with the no time squandering approach or group work grows to occupy every living hour of your day, evening and weekends. It's the same in real world companies.....stupid people who have no clue how valuable their time is just give it away like it's sunshine in Dubai in July!
In terms of networking etc, I'd really advise you to treat the entire thing like a sales funnel. Try to make sure you populate your funnel with high quality prospects. Don't ignore low quality prospects, but don't just give your time for free to people who have low influencer qualities in the world outside school.
My 2 cents is that networking is very temporal in nature. The guys who were useful for me in the aerospace industry, are largely useless to me in semiconductors and within that the wireless guys are kinds of useless in high performance computing who in turn are fairly useless in medical imaging....and so it goes. The most useful takeaway is your ability to build new networks fast and in an impactful way....and if you can do that without mortgaging your personal life, then to me, that's the high bar that you're trying to get to anyway.
I was just interviewing a guy and one of my peers asked the candidate who he knew in XYZ key target account companies. I jumped in and said, "I don't care who he know, I want to hear his plan for how he will win over all these guy who we don't know and he doesn't either because that's the holy grail we're trying to get to". Biz school is a low impact place to practice that for sure. Of course some may actually become useful in the near term!
In any case, sorry if I was being hard. Probably a bit over the top, but it really is not that hard to train for half IM's....run 20-40 min every day all the time, do two really hard 40 min swims, bike for commuting if you can, and get a hard 3 hour bike ride in on the weekend one day and a hard 70 min run with 8x6 min hard 2 min easy as your bread and butter run and don't get fat and you're set. I think you can do it with focus.
Here is my plan for you to get the full MBA experience:
- Every morning wake up 40 min earlier than you would and cram in a 30 min run
- 2x per week at lunch time, hard 40 min swim. Don't sit around having lunch with other people at least on those days. Just pick the days and make it non negotiable.
- Networking Events, take whatever time is the max time allocated and invent an excuse to cut in it half and bolt out early or arrive half way in....whatever works. Have a plan that you want to accomplish XYZ objectives in that 50% time. Cut your losses on bad conversations and move one. Free up that 50% of time and get more course work/studying done than peers squandering time doing nothing at the networking
- Group work and described above....take the leadership role on time allocation, objectives and work to be done. If you see the group squandering time on low impact stuff, get them on track. People hate it initially, but they love it afterwards, when they are all in the pub and everyone else is still stuck doing case study stuff they will love you. After a while people will be competing to get into your group. That's really what you want to get to, when all the all stars in your class are striving to get on your team and then they are working with and for you with the same mindset.
- Get 7-8 hours of sleep every nite no matter what. Drop what ever you are doing 8 hours before you have to get up and leave it unfinished. It sounds short sighted at first, but if you set a deadline to get to sleep you will squander less time before that. Then the next day you are more rested and will get more done/asborbed in class on account of being alert. One of my classmates was an engineering physics student with top marks in our undergrad and a multiple time olympian and Commonwealth games champion in shooting. He needed sleep to perform at shooting, but he said only stupid people sacrifice sleep because they think they are getting more work done. I tried it for a semester at age 19 and was sold....carried it forward to grad school.
- No caffeine after 12 noon. This will help the sleep side too.
- Learn to read, synthesize and write really fast. The faster the better. This is your friend in biz school
- Practice your presentation skills. A great presentation can up your marks big time over a bad one for the same input work....this allows you to work less before and get the higher mark because you influenced the markers better by picking the influencing talking points
- Everything you do, ask yourself how you can do it faster for the same outcome
On the tri front, jog everywhere on campus! Free additional training. OK I spent too much time on that, but if it helps just a few people and allows you guys to train or have more time with families or girlfriend/boyfriend all the better