​What do you mean by busy?

We’re at that stage in the IMD MBA where there’s no escaping the lack of time and sleep. Friends and family start to miss us and wonder if we lost our phones or were taken to another planet 🙂

I remember asking some alumni about what it meant to be busy here because I could not really grasp the concept of not having time even on weekends. I went to all of those time management courses (I guess we all did) and wasn’t it just about choice and planning? At that point I was working 14 hours every day and doubted it could ever be as busy.

Talking to some classmates we thought it might be a good idea to make prospective students (and why not friends and family?) understand how and why is it that we get so busy.

Here it is:

• The IMD MBA is not a one-year MBA. It is a two-year MBA done in 11 months. (perhaps this is enough)
• It is also frontloaded, meaning we get a lot more study load in the first semester so that we can use it in the second semester with our ICP, Discovery trips, etc.

• We have classes Monday to Friday from 8am to 5:30pm. All classes have required prior readings of book chapters, cases, exercises, etc that can take from 1 (oh, those happy days) to 5 hours to prepare every day. If you don’t prepare, you will not be able to follow at least 80% of the session.
• Every Friday one of the groups present a mandatory repetitorium of the past week until 8pm.
• We often have extra sessions on weekends or after class. I’d say about once every 2 weeks.
• Our groups have 2 simultaneous large projects that take at least 12-16 hours of group work a week.

Do the math, but don’t be scared. Everybody survives it and even say they miss it!

Bottom line is that the life of a C-level executive or entrepreneur will never be easy to manage. This way we also get a crash course on how to function on limited resources (like sleep) and allocate our time and energy.

This week will be especially busy. Wish us luck and stay tuned! 🙂

Sílvia Simões

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