The long road to INSEAD

I know.  It’s over 2 months before I move into my villa (read: French for college dorm), start my classes, drunkenly stumble into a fountain at a chateau party, hit a boar while driving home, but I’m already joining the throngs of bloggers who write about their experiences.

Already bored in my pre-tirement, I’m looking to put off the delightful pre-reading (“Essentials of Accounting” and some such) and blogging provides a cheap, self-flattering means of expression.  And, I already have a lot to say about the process of getting to INSEAD.  I need a place to vent my frustrations with the visa process, the scholarship allocation, the useless INSEAD intranet, and the state of women’s fashion. 

But first, things that you should know about me:  I’m a girl.  I still call myself that despite the recent troubling trend of store clerks and bank tellers calling me M’am.  Just because I occasionally wear clogs and put my hair in a bun…

Depending on how the election goes, next month I either [will/will not] be proud to call myself an American.  

I’ve never been to France.  In fact, I’m pretty intimidated by the idea of living in France.  I’m already having dreams about mis-pronouncing something on a menu.  I am, however, pleased that I’ll be living in a country where it’s not sexist to call someone mademoiselle instead of madam.  I’m also super excited about all the charcuterie and offal and bread and cheese and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.    

I’m getting my MBA because I got bored at my job, of living in the same city for way too long, and wanted to live abroad.  The MBA seemed like the intellectually lazy way of doing the next thing while ensuring a doubling of my salary on the back end.  That’s the cynical view anyways.  The less cynical one is that eventually I hope to start my own company and will actually learn the things that are useful to that end while at INSEAD, while also partying a great deal.  

While I wrote very convincing essays about “why INSEAD” and not some other business school, the real reason has more to do with the timing and the costs of the damn applications – somewhere upwards of 200 EUR a pop.  I applied first round to INSEAD, whereas at the time, other schools like IESE, LBS, etc., were already on their third round of applicants.  While some schools tell you that your chances are equal in all three rounds, I don’t actually believe that.  So, INSEAD it was.   

I might not be giving enough credit to how hard INSEAD is going to be.  You’ll have to ask me in two months.  Based on this assumption, I’ve opted out of attending the Business Foundations Course (1500 EUR).  Someone described it on the message boards as “an expensive way to start socializing early,” which sealed the deal for me.  I also consider myself pretty math-capable, though I’m told my Mac does not have the capability of doing regression calculations in Excel.  Yes, but it looks really cool.  

But, I’m rambling.