REAL hell week has started!!

The fact that I haven't posted for a week should tell you a lot about my Week 1!
The workload is overwhelming and the course is extremely intense. I spend about 13-14 hours per day at the business school (not even taking into account the time I spend in my college preparing for the next day)...I hardly got 6 hours of sleep per night this week. You could really see the influence the workload has on people over the week. On monday everybody was excited, loud and looked healthy, by the end of the week all of us looked like ghosts.

Here are the highlights of my week:
On monday I had a 1-hour one-to-one session with one of the career counselors. We talked about my career goals and the best strategy to achieve them. It is very helpful to have someone to help you develop a career strategy. I will meet again with her a couple of times over the course of the year to discuss my progress and career search strategy.
My first Managerial Economics class was very exciting. We played a trading game (everyone had a certain number of shares at a certain value and a certain amount of cash; the purpose was to trade the shares without knowing the other's valuation of the share and of course to make money) to explore the pricing mechanisms of the market - believe me, it was a very noisy game.
We also started working on our first study group assignment this week - a strategy case study on Ben&Jerry's ice cream company...due today 12 o'clock sharp. It wasn't easy to fit everybody's ideas in the 1000 word limit. To be honest, it was horrible...we definitely have to become more efficient in solving case studies...we argued way too long. I almost freaked out on several occasions when someone would challenge something that we had already agreed on 10 minutes earlier...argh!!
"Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The unusual suspect in the quest for clean and enduring energy" - that was the name of a talk that I went to on Thursday night. It was about why fossil fuels are the right source of energy for the future instead of renewable resources. It was highly interesting and very controversial. Only a small number of MBAs went to the event, but afterwards we had a very long and very lively argument about the topic...I loved it...that is exactly what I signed up for!
On Friday it was all over...I was totally done! After my last class I fell asleep on the couch in the common room. I woke up just in time for the happy hour (we have our own bar in the business school & a happy hour every friday). After having a couple of drinks I went straight to my college where I fell into my bed at 10PM on a friday night - unbelievable, huh?!

Another interesting thing is that recruiting really started from day 1. From monday onwards we met with possible employers (at the moment primarily the big investment banks like UBS, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, ABN Amro, Barclays Capital, etc.) to learn about their associate programs (entry position for MBAs) and to network. The good thing is that they always have free drinks and food for us ;-)