The AIA Syndrome

I have Acquired Immunity to Alarms (AIA). To be more specific, I do not hear the alarm on my phone anymore, when it buzzes off at 7 in the morning (maybe it has something to do with the fact that it’s dark outside). Apparently, I am not the only one suffering from AIA. I have decided that I will fight the disease. For what joy, I do not know.

First, I should assess the motivation to get up at that unearthly hour. The fact that I have paid through my nose (and possibly those of my grandchildren) in lieu of tuition fees should be motivation enough. But from Managerial Economics, I have learnt that the tuition fees should be treated as sunk costs and so should not affect my decision (to get up early in the morning).

So motivation goes flying out of the window. Don’t you think Student Services should start a Wake-Up alarm service? But that probably wouldn’t work. If you have AIA, you probably have AIC (Acquired Immunity to Calls) as well.

Am sure each of you finds at least ONE person in class really, really, annoying. What has that got to do with AIA, you ask. I will get to it in a minute. Imagine that the Student Services sends out your annoying person to wake you up. Am sure this person is definitely not the one you want to see first thing in the morning. You can rest assured your day will spiral downhill after that.

The threat of seeing this person so early in the morning would probably tune your biological clock into waking you up right on the dot at 7. And you don’t need alarms anymore!

I will let you know how that plan works out.

The Things We Do

• You talk to someone in the hallway and all you can think of during the conversation is ‘hell, I don’t know his name!’, and the minute you are done, you pull up the photo roster and look for the name.
• You see people sleeping in class/ presentation, you take pictures of them (Suraj has been taking pics, be warned!) or you elbow them awake. Erfan found that I have a pretty strong elbow. Sending mails to the person saying ‘Wake up!’ works too. You would think that a person who is dozing wouldn’t check their mail, but Tuesday did – and it kept her awake!
  
• You find that you are spending so much time in the study rooms that it feels like home – and your housemates don’t recognize you anymore.
  
• After taking the probability quiz, you go around telling people who are studying, “It doesn’t matter, don’t even bother”. Someone was trying to calculate the probability of getting an average score without doing any studying and marking the answers randomly.
  
• MD found people pointing and laughing at him after Neha used his pics in her Communication class discussion on Bad First Impressions.
  
• You like the EIS simulation from Managing Organizations so much that you get addicted to it and treat it like a video game.
  
• Whenever you are hungry, you go check out the free food at the Masters Lounge before you go anywhere else and are disappointed when you don’t find any.
  
• You check Blackboard every five minutes after a quiz to check out the average scores go up or down as more people take it. You may hear cheers if a crowd collects.
  
• You have a stack of the Wall Street Journal in your room.
  
• You feel like you are in a time warp, and it seems like the mini is stretching forever. And you don’t believe its only been 6 weeks.
  
• You are tired of eating the corporate presentation sandwiches.
  
• You are growing very fond of excel. You draw beautiful tables calculating all kinds of distributions to use in the quiz, and you find that they never are.
  
• You are surprised to find that you still haven’t met everyone in your year.
  
• You feel left out that you are the only one who hasn’t spammed the tepper09 mailing group yet.
  
• You go to a party after doing the case competition and you fall asleep on their floor.
  
• You never thought it could be so difficult to coordinate schedules with your group.
  
• You think of writing articles for RB in bullet points coz otherwise no one will read it.

What was I thinking?

When my friend and I started orientation, her uncle, a tepper alum, told us that we will have a ‘What was I thinking?’ moment sometime during the first year of the MBA.
We laughed.

“Yeah, I have experienced that already, when I was washing the dustbin yesterday after we moved into the house”, said moi. As you can tell, I have never done any chore at home. Let us not talk about my cooking skills either.

“Oh no, you will have an academic ‘What was I thinking?’ moment” said uncle.
Into the first week, I looked at the required reading for communication, and wondered if I had reached that moment yet (take your minds out of the gutter, please). We *only* had 8 chapters to read from the text book and seven from the course packet.

And the profs kept saying ‘It will get worse’.

I decided to take part in the case competition (5 Guys). Got back home very late on Thursday, and realized that I had to be there at school by 8 the next morning. The next morning, bleary eyed, I walked to the bus stop, remembering my dad’s question, “Will you be able to give up on your nine-hour sleep time?”

Apparently I can. Am not saying I am pleased to discover that!

Next task on the list was the probability quiz. About half hour into the test, I had given up on about 7 of the 10 questions. I looked around and saw my friend wearing an “I am so screwed” expression on his face. Yeah, he was taking the test as well. No collaboration, mind you (I feel compelled to add that!)

Had I reached my ‘what was I thinking?’ moment yet? Well, I tried all the questions again, and I survived to tell the tale. So maybe not.

Am sure all of you have had ‘What was I thinking?’ moments in your lives (Waking up next to someone you won’t be caught dead with, a huge hangover, bungee jumping, maybe? Disclaimer: Examples are not personal experiences :))

My question to you is, have you had your MBA ‘What was I thinking?’ moment yet?

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Just got this one published in the school magazine :)