Dreaming...

I think among all those four items I had to list responding to the tag, there was one important category missing.

Four things I want to do over the next 5 years

• Learn Karate. Karate has fascinated me for the last 15 years. Somehow I never got to do it because I was doing lots of other sports. I tried Taek Won Do for half a year but had to join an advanced course (it was the only one offered at my university) and it was too tough, I became frustrated. I still really want to learn Karate but I wonder am I too old to start at 27? I know I'll never be a blackbelt or karate star, but as long as I can defend myself I would be very happy

• Get a driver's license. This is pretty embarassing. I just never took one. At the beginning, I just found it too expensive and I didn't really need one. Then I didn't have time. Then I was moving a lot, then I lived in the UK and didn't want to learn to drive "on the wrong side of the road" and now I'm away from home from Monday to Friday for my job and I REALLY don't want to spend my precious spare time on weekends taking driving lessons. But when I move to London I definitely need to get a driver's license

• Start having children. This is something I cannot compromise on. I would reallly love to have children already but I know it will be difficult during the MBA and also straight after that. I don't thing starting an investment banking career just when you're about to have a child is good, neither for the baby nor for your career. So I have to wait a few years but I definitely won't wait more than 5 years so that's the most important thing I'll do, no matter what (FYI: I have already found the perfect future father so that's not going to be a problem ;-) ).

• Play the guitar. Another thing I hope to be picking up at business school. As a child, I played the piano for 9 years. Then I played the guitar for five years. I even had a Fender electrical guitar. Unfortunately I was too lazy to practice and ended up giving the guitar to my cousin when I was 20 or so. This Christmas, my mother gave me an acoustic guitar so I could start playing again on the weekends to relax. A month has passed and I still haven't played the guitar even once. It's embarrassing. I really hope I'll start playing soon. It would be great to have a flatmate who plays the guitar so he/she could teach me some thing and we could play together, maybe I would overcome my lazyness.

Those are my wishes for today, over the next days I have to give more application advice as it seems that R2 applicants have been invited for interviews and R3 deadline is coming up soon. Regarding the R2 applicants I am quite sad today. I have a very good friend and colleague who applied in R2 and I really wished she would be my classmate but she hasn't been invited for an interview and has been asked to reapply. She has the most impressive profile ever but only 1 year of work experience. It's sad the work experience requirements are so strict. I can understand you can be sceptical about someone's leadership skills when they are 20, but in the interest of diversity why not take one person like that into your class, because she is not going to reapply, she'll just end up going to another business school this year. So that's very sad.