It was so nice being home for a month, and I must say that flying the red-eye from LA to NYC and starting class right after getting only 2 hours of sleep was a little hard... I was bummed about being back in NYC and wishing I was back home with all my friends and family and Baja Buds nachos. For about 12 hours.
And then the familiar faces and brick architecture (who doesn't love that?!), the enthusiasm of my fellow classmates, the events, opportunities, EXCITEMENT of being back, and rush of NYC, took over again and I was gladly moving to the Manhattan groove once more :]
I'm pretty amp-ed up about most of my classes this semester! I'm taking 5.5 classes, one more class than last semester... perhaps suicidal. This may sound like water-boarding to some of you, but I'm psyched for this schedule:
Enterprise Strategy for Leaders
International Capital Markets
Emerging Financial Markets
Women in Global Leadership (Short course)
Economic Analysis
Accounting
I'm most excited about the Global Leadership course, which is a half course that ends in the middle of the semester and is discussion-oriented with a bunch of prominent female speakers. Like a seminar. Emerging Markets and Enterprise Strategy are also looking pretty cool. The best thing about courses at SIPA is that the courses can all be completely practical and applicable to the real world, and are topics and situations that are being discussed globally by top researchers and practitioners. Not like in undergrad when you wondered why you were forced to take Astro 3 or Anthropology. Not to say those classes weren't fascinating...
The difference is that in undergrad, I LOATHED classes like management and accounting. I think it was this weird association I had with it to frigid business suits and dry, boring spreadsheets, and greedy, corporate financial institutions. But after working at a non-profit global venture fund and knowing how powerful the ability to read and understand financial statements and balance a budget is, I see how useful these skills can be beyond the threshold of Wall Street. My accounting course is actually really interesting! Still not the MOST interesting... but MORE interesting!
In undergrad, I was all about IMpracticality. I relished my literature courses, the discussions we had about ideas captured by 19th century British novels, the analysis of forms, symbols, metaphors, and meters of Romantic poetry, and every tortuous moment of composing a paper on arbitrary things like Rosa Dartle's displacement in David Copperfield. Beyond teaching me to be able to think in a particular way, the knowledge, theories, and ideas in my literature courses were probably useless in any other setting beyond an English classroom. I LOVED it.
Don't get me wrong, I still love it. I don't think I will ever stop loving it. And perhaps one day I'll go back to school for it and study it for 5-7 more years. But right now, I love something else. I love ideas that spark and inspire, discussions that leave visible impact, movements that influence a city, region, country, or even the entire world!
We're looking at the dynamics of democracies and other forms of government, globalization, human rights and poverty, international organizations, causes and consequences of the financial crisis in the US and EU, economic growth rates across the world, fiscal and monetary policies, alternative energy and sustainable environment issues, development in third world countries, the Arab Spring uprisings, the rise of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), neo-colonization in Africa, political development, peace-building, social enterprises, and on and on and on... and most importantly, how all these movements and ideas are interrelated.
Maybe someday I'll get back to trying to figure out why Milton used blank verse in Paradise Lost, or if Jane Austen's portrayal of female protagonists (which were practically the same in almost all of her novels) actually contributed to progressive gender perceptions in Britain, or if I will ever remotely understand what James Joyce's "Ulysses" is actually about...
But right now, this is what we're talking about at SIPA. This world that we are living in, and the people we are living with. This is real life.
I love it :)
