Mark and Jie's Journey to B-School

Originally I was going to title this post with a reference to the song 'The End' by The Doors, one of my all time favorite songs and bands. However, after the events of the day I decided to instead quote my sister, who used to sarcastically repeat that phrase during our lunches while she was in grad school and I a freshman at UT. I arranged my schedule to be off from Thursday afternoon to Monday afternoon and after I reminded her at our Thursday lunch each week of my busy plans for the remainder of the day she would reply that it must be so difficult to be me.

After a wet and wonderful graduation ceremony, with a solid D+ speech from Dean Light (there's grade disclosure for you!), we hung out at the reception for a while before heading back for a pre-dinner nap. We had dinner at Ristorante Fiore, the site of our first North End dinner over admit weekend over two years ago. After a delicious and enjoyable dinner I decided that yes, it is hard to be me.

I've decided to end my blogging career, at least for the time being, with this business school blog. Sadly enough there won't be a BCG (oops, I let it slip!) or Chicago blog forthcoming. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did, the last two+ years have really been something special. I hope to wrap this up with a table of contents, but this could be The End. As Tex would say, Good bye, and good luck!

Here's just a little tip for future graduates of HBS (or HLS for that matter). If more than one of the following are true you should not attend the Harvard University morning graduation ceremony:

• You are claustrophobic
• You might not even attend graduation if it weren't for the fact that your family is in town
• It's cold and sprinkling/raining
• You were up late the night before
• You're hungover

Seeing as all these things are true of me to one degree or another, I ditched the morning ceremony after standing outside for hours and then sitting in a cramped, wet folding chair for about 45 minutes. I don't see how everyone is going to get back in time for the 12:30 HBS ceremony, much less the 11:30 lunch, but we'll see. With all that in mind, I decided to shamelessly bail and come back for pizza with the family.

I just got back from jogging and logged on to find a direct link to my grades for this last semester. Expecting all 2's, or perhaps some mix of 1's, 2's, and 3's, I was amazed to find scores high enough to put me into consideration for 2nd Year Honors. Who knew?

Ironically, the two classes that I thought I struggled through the finals were my best grades, while the two "easier" finals were not as good. It would be kind of a nice end to my HBS experience to wind up with some sort of honors.

This is the third and last time I'll be using this title for a post.

Jie and I drove back into Boston today with A&A from a sectionmate's wedding reception in NYC. The reception was at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and was a fantastic event. The food was great, I got to drink Sam Adams again after having none in Texas, and we got to hang out and dance with several people we haven't seen in a month. As they say, a good time was had by all.

This week should be a busy one. Graduation week activities commence tomorrow, culminating with commencement on Thursday. After that we'll spend the weekend hanging out with Jie's parents (at the cape?) and then the movers come on Monday. Amidst all this other activity I need to get preapproved for a mortgage and tie up other random loose ends in Boston. The tying up of this blog will probably occur after we get back to Texas on June 16th.