Admits weekend in London!

So, admits weekend is almost over! I'm sitting in the Lufthansa lounge and have an hour till my flight boards. Taking advantage of the fact that they have t-mobile hotspots at Heathrow airport, I'll give a short account to all those who couldn't make it, since I won't have time to write anything in the coming week (on a side note, a little trick for those of you who own a Blackberry with a flatrate: you can use t-mobile Hotspots for free anywhere if you choose "pay via mobile phone bill" rather than "pay by credit card" and then insert the number of your Blackberry instead of your actual mobile phone number :-) ).

First, the dinner on Friday night. We were greeted with a glass of champagne and slowly got talking to each other. About 100 people turned up, so in the end we were split up into two rooms. I got there quite early so I made sure to sit at a huge table with lots of people. I had a really good time, was seated between a guy from Amsterdam and one from Madrid, with a girl from India, a girl from the Philippines and a guy from Australia opposite me. We had a delicious 3 course meal, had great conversations and then slowly got up and mingled a little bit. I had the pleasure to meet Carlo who has been commenting on this blog and suspected that we work for the same company, and it turned out we do :-). I also met the people I had met at my first encounter with 2008 classmates. I also found out lots of people read my blog, which was very surprising! I have to be more careful about what I write from now on! :-). What amazed me the most was how excited people were about coming to London Business School, people had flown in from places as far as Tokyo and Toronto! There were even quite a few waitlisted candidates who showed up which was great, I do hope they get rewarded in the end, though unfortunately it has been communicated that attendance to the admits weekend wouldn't influence the LBS decision.

Saturday was a long, intense and great day! It started of with a long breakfast and we were greeted by the dean, the associate dean and the student ambassadors. Then we had a long list of lectures and sessions. Surprisingly, I especially enjoyed the Careers Services presentation. I was quite impressed by the quality of the Careers Services team. They told us that the woman in charge of investment banking careers had been the first woman to ever work on Wall Street and had 30 years of investment banking experience. So I guess she knows what she's talking about. "A day in the life of a student" was also quite a good insight into student activites and do's and don'ts. I was glad to be warned not to blurt out what I really thought about my job when I left because we would need to ask former bosses for 360° feedback for the orientation. So, all in all, lots of useful advice and plenty of time in between to chat with people.

At 5pm, lectures and sessions were luckily over, because I did get tired in the end. I woke up though when we all headed to the nearest pub, the Windsor Castle to enjoy a few drinks and talk to even more people! Afterwards, we had a short dinner and then got to the highlight of the evening: a gig in the cellar of the student bar by the student band (do they have a name?)!! They were really good and people were having lots of fun, people started stage diving already 3 minutes into the concert :-). I did wonder if they were from a different generation though with all those Guns n Roses and Jon Bon Jovi songs :-)! I must admit the current students were somewhat more active, while the admits were observing the scene wondering if we too would look like that next year :-). It struck me that soon I will enjoy student life again and became very happy. Bring it on!!! During the concert, I also had the great pleasure to talk a while to KV and the Divine Miss N, as well as Moe (I had met Wheels the evening before but somehow didn't bump into him again on Saturday, there were a lot of people there, I would say about 150 admits, 50 partners and around 30-40 current students from the class of 2007). What impressed me was how close the current students seemed to be, they seemed to be having a lot of fun. I don't know if I should really believe all this talk about how hard they work ;-)! They certainly looked like they were having a good time!

I probably don't need to repeat all those things that have been mentioned as advantages of London Business School. The diversity is impressive, there didn't seem to be any nationality over 10% of the class, I met people from Russia, Taiwan, Spain, Egypt, India, Malaysia, Italy, Canada, US, Pakistan and so on and so on, pretty cool! Also, talking to current students I enjoyed learning so much about potential careers, there were people from the UN, derivatives traders, lawyers, marketing executives, entrepreneurs and so on (though there is admittedly a large chunk of consultants and auditors!). But at least there seem to be plenty of people with unusual backgrounds. This was the reason I chose London Business School and it seems like it was definitely the right choice!

This morning, I attended the women's brunch at the Landmark Hotel, organized by the Women in Business Club. We were a rather small circle of about 30 women from the class of 2008 and 10 from the class of 2007, but this was also nice since the day before was a bit overwhelming and this was the chance to talk to less people in a more relaxed and quiet atmosphere for a longer time.

I didn't go to the afternoon's events. Instead, I went to my favourite restaurant in Chinatown, the Golden Dragon, to eat aromatic crispy duck with egg fried rice and drink jasmine tea. Afterwards, I took the chance to meet up with two of my sisters who happened to be in London this weekend in a pub near Green Park (how many "King's Arms" are there in London??), and then headed to the airport. And now it's back to work for another 5 weeks! This weekend was really helpful for me; on the one hand I'm even more excited about moving to London now, on the other hand I felt so inspired by all the people I met that I think I have the strength to work hard for another 5 weeks now, from now on time is going to pass like crazy!