In real life

As a Silver Scholar, I take a year off between 2 years of business school to work. My first summer internship was at The Boston Consulting Group, where I used many of the problem-solving skills gained from my first year at Yale. Now that I am one month into my second internship at Fab.com, this is probably a good time to take a step back and reflect upon the experience. Life has been very eventful. On top of working 40 hours weekly at Fab, I take 5-hour-long evening classes at The French Culinary Institute (which run till 11pm every Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and serve as the Co-President of the New York Singapore Association, a 550+ member organization with monthly activities attended by over 100 people. Did I mention I also run this blog? Despite the hectic pace, I feel very at peace with it. This reminds me of the Careers course all first-years take, where we explore our lives' trajectories. I remember interviewing 3 women with enviable careers and work-life balance which I wanted to emulate, then reading Sheryl Sandberg's speech at Barnard College, which was followed by Anne-Marie Slaugter's retort in The Atlantic Magazine. At that point, I must admit I found the debate theoretical and not entirely pertinent to my life stage. How wrong I was! One year on, I find myself flipping back to the Careers essays I wrote as I contemplate my next steps. Careers is just one of the many Yale SOM classes that have crept into my year-off life. During work, I channel Customer and Employee when looking at survey designs and hiring processes. When a recent online shopping order was twice-delayed, I called customer service and would never have gotten a good deal had I not taken Negotiations. As President of a growing organization, I have learned vital leadership lessons from Integrated Leadership Perspectives. And lastly, in cooking school, I optimize mise en place preparations through Operations fundamentals (note to self, bottleneck!) Now that I see the influence school has had in my life, I am interested to see what second year will be like and explore then, what influence working will have on my school life!