I just realized that I haven't blogged for over 3 months! There's a deeper meaning here - the 'just realized' loops back to the fact that time passes by incredibly fast here at Tuck. I recall thinking many times in class each day that I will go back to my room and blog. However, I never got around to it. Most of my time in the fall term was devoted to recruiting. Tuck promises an immersive experience and even in the aspect of recruiting that promise holds.
I was speaking with a friend and he asked me what I did today. My answer was 'nothing' - and that's literally what I did today. It snowed really heavily last night and I think there's about 2 feet of snow on the ground right now. A perfect day to laze around in PJs catching up on movies, sitcoms and what not. However, nostalgia struck me and I took a trip back in time by looking at my calendar in November. There's barely any empty space in my schedule there. Of course now, having gone through the recruiting process, I can quickly recall each of those meetings but as I went through each day and what I did, I never realized how busy I had been.
And as I come back to the present, I realized how quickly fall gave way to winter. The magnificent fall colors on trees gave way to just the white all around. Capital Markets became Corporate Finance. Networking with firms turned to interviewing and finally to offers. The purpose of my blog post is primarily to advise incoming T16s on the value of time. I've been in Hanover for over 6 months now but it seems like I arrived only yesterday. This will be the most cliched and overused sentence you will hear during your time at Tuck. But nothing else will be as true. Why am I stressing on this so much? Mainly because there's so much to do here that you can fall into the trap of non prioritization.
A very rational way of looking at life at Tuck is to segment your time here in three buckets - professional (aka recruiting), social (aka partying), and academic (aka studying). That was the priority set I abided by - the key word being abided. If there was ever a conflict in what I wanted to do, i went back to this priority chart and made my decision. However, this prioritization is dynamic - for example, now that recruiting is over, I'd like to take social to the top of my order set, followed by academic, followed by professional. Once I'm back after my summer internship, it will probably be social, professional (aka helping T16s prep for interviews), and then academic.
I highly recommend that once you've settled in at Tuck, you quickly start prioritizing. Time flies by and you don't want to be in a situation where you do not know what to do. While it may seem obvious that recruiting would be on top of everyone's priority list, it isn't the case. Priorities vary person to person and someone may just wish to recruit properly full time versus investing heavily in the internship search.
So make your decision early as it'll help in making life more streamlined. And of course, if you seek any help, all of us T15s are always ready to help. Until the next post ...