Spring Break
The End of the Affair
Alex Godden (OJ), Ex-Viewpoints Editor
Issue date: 5/5/08 Section: Viewpoints & Humor
About eighteen months ago I fell in love. It wasn't love at first sight: on the contrary it followed a long and tumultuous courtship, and I entered into it with a healthy dose of British cynicism. I wasn't expecting to fall for HBS. I hadn't even really intended to do an MBA. I had been very happy with my life in London and really wasn't sure about having to deal with two years of American happy-clappy over-enthusiasm and meaningless business jargon. I had quite enough of that at Bain, thank you very much.
It's often the strangest little things that make you fall in love: the first truly spontaneous applause in class after a tough cold call; my learning team feeding me chocolate at seven thirty in the morning when they knew I was having a rough time; my section giving our TOM Professor a box of giant chalk because his handwriting was too tiny to see on the chalk board. It was hard to keep the sarcastic, cynical facade completely solid in the face of a classmate telling me how their parents cried when they got in, and once I started to crack the combination of hope and history, HBS got to me and I began to appreciate what an amazing opportunity I had.
I must also admit to owing some of my emotional about-face to that perennial love potion: alcohol. There were some really good parties that first semester.
My rose-tinted spectacles began to slip pretty quickly, however, and I wasn't blind to the negative side of HBS, but when you're in love you learn to look past the faults, or at least learn to live with them.
I saw my classmates huffing and puffing their way indignantly through LCA, and at the same time marvelled at how blithely everyone talked about emailing around case write-ups in blatant violation of the HBS Community Standards. Is it really OK just because everybody else is doing it? OK, it may be a grey area in terms of what is expressly forbidden, but hadn't we all just spent the Enron case discussing how much more important it was to adhere to the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law?
It's often the strangest little things that make you fall in love: the first truly spontaneous applause in class after a tough cold call; my learning team feeding me chocolate at seven thirty in the morning when they knew I was having a rough time; my section giving our TOM Professor a box of giant chalk because his handwriting was too tiny to see on the chalk board. It was hard to keep the sarcastic, cynical facade completely solid in the face of a classmate telling me how their parents cried when they got in, and once I started to crack the combination of hope and history, HBS got to me and I began to appreciate what an amazing opportunity I had.
I must also admit to owing some of my emotional about-face to that perennial love potion: alcohol. There were some really good parties that first semester.
My rose-tinted spectacles began to slip pretty quickly, however, and I wasn't blind to the negative side of HBS, but when you're in love you learn to look past the faults, or at least learn to live with them.
I saw my classmates huffing and puffing their way indignantly through LCA, and at the same time marvelled at how blithely everyone talked about emailing around case write-ups in blatant violation of the HBS Community Standards. Is it really OK just because everybody else is doing it? OK, it may be a grey area in terms of what is expressly forbidden, but hadn't we all just spent the Enron case discussing how much more important it was to adhere to the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law?
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