A day in the life

I am really busy these days. Here's a taste:

6:50 am Alarm goes off, and I slowly wake up from a deep sleep. It is hard to get up when it is so dark and cold outside. As I wait for the coffee machine I check my email and the latest news headlines on Google News.

7:40 am I gather my laptop, papers, and snacks and head out the door.

8:00 am Class begins. Today starts with Leveraging Information Technology. We discuss the Project Manthan case, a huge ERP implementation at Indian Oil Company. Someone jokes to me that these cases always come down to "hire a consultant." Not quite, but that option is always tempting.

9:30 am We switch to Marketing. Professor Niraj Dawar discusses customer buying behaviour by asking us to draw upon our own decision-making process when buying a product. Today he unleashes a sense of humour that we have not seen before. It makes the class quite enjoyable.

11:00 am Our last session with Prof. Dawar focuses on the difficulty of differentiating in the power generation industry. One of his takeaways is "there is no such thing as a commodity"; i.e. there are always ways in which you can differentiate yourself as a brand or business. I'd like to see him debate this with an economist...

12:15 pm Class ends. We are asked to complete a questionaire that is part of a GMAC research study conducted by another Ivey prof. As we are students, we get $20 and a lunch coupon for the effort. Who said there is no such thing as a free lunch?

12:30 pm Grab a quick lunch with classmates down at DK's. Discuss the movie "Slumdog Millionaire," and whether we prefer to read the book before the movie, or never see the movie at all.

1:00 pm Meet with my New Venture Project team. We go through major points of the Market Size-up section of our business plan. For homework we will read some marketing reports to get up to speed.

2:00 pm Go home and start the Ops case for tomorrow. It is only two pages but requires a lot of number crunching.

4:00 pm Head back to Spencer and meet with my learning team to discuss the Ops case. Luckily my group is full of engineers and quant people, so we are able to make a lot of progress. We answer about half of the questions before people have to leave to go to other commitments.

6:00 pm Go home again. As I wait for Julia to cook dinner I set up the registration for an upcoming mock interview session with Bell. This is part of my Business Technology Club duties. The session is this Thursday so I need to set up the registration on the MBAA website.

7:00 pm Eat dinner and talk with Julia. I barely get to spend any time with her these days.

8:00 pm Finish setting up the registration. Send out a few emails about miscellaneous items.

8:30 pm Read the IT case for tomorrow.

10:00 pm Take a break, watch whatever Julia is watching on TV (I think it's The Bachelor).

10:30 pm Read market reports on Location Based Services for my New Venture Project team meeting tomorrow.

12:00 am Turn off the light for some well deserved sleep.