Yay!

It's rather hard to believe, but I just finished my second semester here in graduate school at MIT.  Half of the semesters where we will be taking classes (as opposed to traveling and working on our internships) are done.  My last final, Accounting, was on Friday and now all that's left to do before the new year is bid for next semester's classes.

Sloan, unlike the rest of MIT, has a bidding system for course registration.  You're given 1000 points and then told to allocate them among the classes you want to take based on how popular the class is, the professor who's teaching it is, when it meets, etc.  Our bidding round closes Tuesday the 20th at 5PM, so I need to make up my mind soon about which classes are getting what points.  What's hard is that you can have an ideal schedule in mind, but there's no guarantee you'll get those sections or even that class.  It's a strange system and I hope to perfect my technique as time goes on.  Other than that, the past few days have been filled with sleeping in, cleaning up, going to parties and Christmas shopping.  Not a bad deal.

Next semester, my classmates doing off-cycle projects will not be with us in classes at MIT and that will be strange.  A few of them will remain in Boston working on projects with the local hospitals - Mass General and Beth Israel, but others will be scattered throughout the country and others still will be overseas.  10, maybe 11 of the 50 LGOs in the class of 2013 will be doing off-cycle projects.  I say maybe 11 because we had a last minute off-cycle project offering and they're working on assigning it as I write this.

Friday afternoon after my last final felt AMAZING.  Having never taken this many classes at once (six classes, plus I took a seminar as a listener), and having had fewer finals in undergrad, finishing three exams in the four days !right after my birthday! was a big accomplishment.  To celebrate, the LGOs (whom a guy on my Sloan Core team now refers to as LeGOs) had a well-attended house party Friday night and now probably don't know what to do with ourselves.

Well, now that finals are done for us and applications are in from prospective 2014s, let's all take a nice, deserved break and enjoy the rest of 2011.  I might put up another post before 2012 comes around, but if not, look forward to updates about Plant Trek coming in January!