Harvard Business School - Day 2

8 Sep 2009
I didn't sleep that well last night. I had thought that I had fully synced my body clock with Boston time, but perhaps not fully yet.
I got up with 3 of my fellow working group colleagues and went to the gym this morning at 0600.
We had a course overview from the dean at 0900, who talked us through what to expect over the next 8 weeks, then our first session at 0945 through to 1100 on the Nike (A)case study which covers the period 1972 to 1982.
The whole program splits into two lectures each of around 80 people. The HBS case study method involves lots of student participation and discussion. This is a little hard to manage with 80 or so people in a class, and there are a few individuals (as is apparently always the case) that love the sound of their own voice, so hog the bandwidth. Someone droning on in a thick Chinese or Serbic accent can be a bit hard to listen to. Regardless the session was interesting and informative.
At the end of the first session we were handed two more cases which we needed to read and prepare before 1400.
I won't bore you with all the details of what we do each day, but a typical weekday routine is:
0600 Exercise (opinional)
0700 to 0800 Breakfast (any pre-class study)
0830 to 0945 Class
0945 to 1000 Break
1000 to 1100 Individual work/preparation
1100 to 1145 Discussion Groups
1145 to 1245 Lunch
1245 to 1400 Class
1400 to 1500 Individual work/preparation
1500 to 1515 Break
1515 to 1630 Class
1630 to 1715 Individual work/preparation
1515 to 1830 Guest Speaker
1830 to 1930 Dinner
1930 to 2230 Group Preparation
There seems like a lot of individual and group preparation time, but we are expected, once we get fully up to speed, to be reading and preparing (for discussion in class) 4 cases per day, each of varying complexity with up to 20 pages of reading per case as well as the associated exhibits and financials.
Fun fun fun