Happy New Year of the Pig

One of the things I love about London is how international it is. I don't know how it feels for the indigenous minority here, but I love walking around the City or Trafalgar Square and hearing dozens of different languages. This weekend was Chinese New Year of the Pig and the Chinese Association of London hosted celebrations and fireworks in the centre. It was VERY crowded but a nice experience.

Other than that, tomorrow London Business School holds a new session of the Breakfast Series. These are free breakfasts hosted by the school where they invite interesting senior speakers (sometimes alumni, sometimes others) to share their personal experience. Tomorrow the CEO of a Nigerian investment holding company and alumni of our school is coming for breakfast and as you might have guessed I am going there to find out more about investment in Africa.

After a class in Decision & Risk Analysis, I will head to the City with some classmates to a lunch hosted by our summer employer, or specifically an Argentinian director of the bank who is also an alumnus of our school. After that I will meet one of my first round interviewers for coffee as it seems I have now found a team to work with over the summer. They do very interesting projects in infrastructure investment and all the people I've met from the team are extremely friendly and sociable, which I like a lot.

I have also just booked a flight to Barcelona where I will carry out an "organizational audit" of a company. We have to do this for our Managing Organizational Behaviour class, and since one of my study group mate's family has a large chemicals business in Barcelona, we decided to carry out our project with his company and enjoy some shopping, good food and the sun "on the side" (of course, the project will come first ;-) ).

So things are good except for most of the classes this term. I'm not getting much out of them. The only great class we had this term was Finance but this is over now and there are only some fluffy classes left - and though I have nothing against fluffy classes in general, specifically now I'm not getting anything out of Marketing or Organisational Behaviour. This term is great for lots of other extracurricular reasons, but in terms of academics it is quite disappointing. The good part is that there is hardly any serious work and I can enjoy my spare time for now. So taking everything that is happening into account, it seems to be true what the Chinese are saying - the Year of the Pig seems to be a lucky year.