Zero to MBA in 1 year

First and foremost, I cannot believe that the Giants have made the World Series without me being home. Giants baseball is truly torture sometimes. I mean, the last several years we could never make it out of regular season play, and now that I am gone, they put together an amazingly lovable team and seem to be going the distance (knock on wood). I bet SF and the Bay Area are going nuts right now. Go Giants!

So it has been just about 2 months since my plane touched down in Italy. I know its cheesey, but it is amazing how fast time can fly when you are having fun/busy. In the past two months I've had tons of classes, homework, group assignments, and events, but I am enjoying myself. And as if I wasn't busy enough, I became the Vice President of the MBA Ski team. Our mission is to organize a multi day ski competition between 5 international MBA programs in St. Moritz. It is a huge task because we have to coordinate the lodging, transport, ski passes, ski rentals, gala dinners, night time festivities, and everything else that goes into such an event. And of course, since we are an Italian MBA and we are doing this in the name of our school, we have to ensure it is the most amazing trip ever! In addition to this, we have to plan several other weekend ski trips and tons of fundraisers to raise money for this awesome st. moritz trip. So far we have thought of maybe having a Thanksgiving dinner for people and charge maybe 30euros to cover the food and raise some funds for the trip.

(St. Moritz)

Now on to some other things. Group projects have been dominating my life. The main one being a consultancy challenge for AT Kearny. The project was completely voluntary, and while I don't really want to be a consultant, it was a great experience. On Wednesday we submitted our project and are now waiting for results. AT Kearny will select three teams (out of eight) to present their ideas to the partners of the office, and the winner of those three will get an all expenses paid trip to London to compete other european business schools. We'll see how that goes.

Finally, last Friday we had a go karting event and conference with Pagani Zonda (http://www.paganiautomobili.it/english.htm). It was amazing to hear him speak. He basically came from Argentina with nothing but a passion to mix high design and science. This passion, of course, brought him to the high performance Italian car industry. He worked for Lamborghini for a few years before deciding to create his own cars, which he now sells for more than $1 Million each. His speech was in Italian, but it was cool. I understood every word! The speech was confirmation that my comprehension is increasing, now I just need more time speaking. Speaking Italian is oddly enough, very difficult to do here at Bocconi because everyone is trying to perfect their english. All well. I am off to do some homework and then enjoy my three day weekend!

Ciao.