London- Day 4 & Day 5

Julie,

Well in previous posts I have been picture lite and so here is the onslaught. Day 4 had two key landmarks for the program. First, was that it was actually Day 1 of classes and two we got to get out the hotel and do something else for a change.

I had stayed up till 1 a.m. getting everything done the night before so when my alarm rang at 6 a.m. I was still very tired. I was able to get up, get ready, and go to breakfast. Wow! What a spread. If there is anything that is to be a constant from these trips, I am sure it is food. There is food at every corner. I took a picture of a couple of the spreads they have put out for us and I will include that in a later post.

Class started at 8am and went well. Nothing great to report. It was pretty much like a syllabus day in undergrad. I did get a little tired as the class continued, but I ended up being ok. The structure is a two hour class followed by a 15 minute break, followed by another 2 hour class. I REALLY wish they would throw a 5 minute break in the middle of each of those and I am seriously considering putting together a petition.

After the second class, we were rushed out into the foyer, grabbed our sack lunches, ran to our rooms to change, and jumped on a double decker bus. That's right a DOUBLE DECKER! Not only that but it was chartered so it had Duke University on the front and back of it. The seats were NOT very comfortable, but it was fun to ride the double decker to the activity.

Here is our bus. Pretty snazzy eh?

Here is a view from the top floor inside.

After about an hour and a half ride to what I can assume was "outer" London we arrived at the place for our outdoor activity. We took our teams of 6 that were have been assigned and were put together with another team of six. So we as team 9 combined with team 10. We were given different color bandanas all with the "Duke Fuqua School of Business" logo all over them. Below is a picture of all the groups. Look closely and you can see the different bandana colors.

Here's us getting ready to go into a man-made cave for one of our activities. The goal was to get our 6 person team through the cave (lots of small crawl spaces with most of the time spent on our hands and knees and bellies) with only one light at the front, while another 6 person team had to make it through the opposite direction. Man it was a lot of fun!

Here are a few pictures of the rock climbing activity. This one didn't have much team aspect to it other than having the climber and belayer, but I was able to show off my skillz. Yeah that right, skillz with a "z". :)

Lastly, here is the raft we built. This is the other team we built it with as they did their race. During our race we got blocked off by a team that didn't know how to steer and we were in last place, but we made a quick turn at the buoy and sped into second place. Had we been able to get a clean start we would have killed! Anyway, we put this raft together with rope, logs, and barrels. Amazingly enough it floated!

This was our last activity so then we jumped on the bus and road back to the hotel. We got back about 8:15pm. We went straight to dinner, still wet from the rafting race, but too lazy to change. After that we had some time to do a little homework and then at 10:30pm we met as a team to finish our case paper for our GMI course. That took much longer than we anticipated and we didn't finish until 12:30am. By the time I got back to my room and finished stuff up, it was a 1:30am bed time. Strike one!

My alarm for Day 5 (Tuesday) went off again at 6 am and if you are doing the math that means only 4 1/2 hours of sleep. My body was made to only take 4 1/2 hours of sleep. Strike two.

I forced myself awake and got ready and headed to class. I had breakfast and the whole time I felt like my body was still not awake. That made a bad combination for the first class. I went through waves of trying to keep myself up and not being seen by the professor (especially since each one of us has name tents in front of us and we wear lanyards with our names on it. You can't hide who you are.

By the end of the first class I was ready to call it a day, but we had just a 15 minute break and then another 2 hour class. Again, I was struggling through the waves of extreme exhaustion and mild awareness. When that class finished, I was actually finally feeling awake for the first time so I went to lunch expecting to be "over the hump." That definitely wasn't the case. We had a third class right after lunch and it was the same story.

When class finally ended, I found myself pleading with the professor to "just end it already" and I hurried pretty fast up to my room. I laid down on my bed and then strike three... I was out! I had about a 30 minute nap, which was wonderful and will help sustain me for the rest of the day. Hopefully tonight I will get to bed early and change this vicious cycle.

At 4pm, Devin and Mare came by since they are in London on vacation. We met and talked and then I showed them around the hotel and all the amenities Duke has to offer while we are here. We had a good chat and they seemed ready to get back to the states after three weeks of touring Europe.

Now we are "free" the rest of the day. We are meeting as a team tonight to do a few more projects and I am trying to get some pre-reading done for Financial Accounting which begins on Saturday. That is the class everyone is currently dreading. We'll have to see how it goes.

Depending on what takes place tonight and what I do for dinner I may or may not have an update on Day 5- part 2 tomorrow. Probably not, since it will probably be just meeting with my team, a quick bit, and more homework.

I will say that I am loving this. It is overwhelming, I am so busy, and I can't believe I got myself into this, but then everyone once in a while (like right now) I take a step back and realize, I am an MBA student at Duke University and I get the excitement chills all over again. It has already been an amazing ride and I know it will continue to be more of the same.

Oh and a small side note. Our third class was going over all these personality tests we did before we started the program and funny enough I found out through the test a lot of the things I have learned about myself since being here (e.g. I am an introvert and I communicate better through writing than words). I'm sure you've seen that too as my letters are much more detail oriented than my face time on skype is. We've got an interesting dynamic of people on our team and we are learning to become a cohesive group as the days progress. We still have a lot of challenges ahead of us and it will be interesting to see how each one of us reacts to those as they come. By the way, my team members are Brett Kahn (L.A.), Kerry White (Fort Worth, TX), Hao Liang (D.C.), Pat Schultz (Raleigh, NC), and Mathew Abraham (Bangledesh, India). They are a great group and will be a key to me getting the experience and know how I expect to get from my MBA.

Love you babe!

Brock