The idea of having a blog is so my friends and family can keep up with what I'm doing over in the UK when I go to school. Since this is post #1, I suppose some background is in order.
At the age of 36, I decided to go back to school to get an MBA, somewhat because I think that will help me move forward in my career, and somewhat because I'm ready to try something new. When I told Reba (wife) about this idea, she said "sure, but there is one requirement: you are NOT allowed to work and go to school at the same time, you are not capable of focusing on that many things at once." She was probably right. From there, I thought, "well if I'm not going to keep my job during this, I should go somewhere cool for school." Since I've always wanted to live in Europe, I figured this was as good a chance as any. Initially I was thinking about a 2year English language program at the IESE in Barcelona, where they even teach you Spanish at the same time as the MBA stuff and have really good food AND weather, but Reba was not down with this: she wanted to keep working, and therefore wanted to be somewhere where people speak English at work. Ok, so I started looking at the UK. To make a long story short: the university of Oxford sounded like a damn cool place to spend one year overseas, and after a lot of GMAT studying, test taking, essay writing, and to-the-UK-flying, I got accepted to the Saïd Business School at Oxford. Here's the business school's website: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ Also, some funny background info on Mr. Saïd and the arms dealing controversy can be found here: http://www.oxfordstudent.com/tt2002wk1/news/what_was_saïd
Campus liberals up in arms aside, I'm going. The timeline works out like this:
- (may '06) sell house, move into sub let in seattle, visit Oxford briefly to pick an apartment
- (aug '06) move to Oxford
- (sep '06) screw around in the UK, France, whatever
- (oct '06) start school, get ass kicked by reading assignments, etc.
- (jul, aug '07) consulting project somewhere cool in the UK or Europe
- (oct '07) work for at least 1 year in the UK... the UK govt gives a 1 year work visa to Oxford grads
- (oct '08) stay? return? unknown!
Since I got the OK from SBS in October, there hasn't been a ton to do in terms of prepping for school. That all changed last week, when I got the official offer package and a demand for an ~£4000 downpayment and proof of having the cash to cover the whole £29,000 tuition within 15 days. This appears to be pretty typical of Oxford... £29,000 is about $50,000, so most people would take out a loan. BUT, you can't get a loan unless you have an offer of a place in the program. SBS doesn't care, they want their down payment and proof NOW. So, I'm scrambling a bit, but should be OK.
The other imminent step toward business schooliness is the Financial Accounting class I'm going to take two nights a week starting tomorrow. The idea is that if I have some inkling of how that works before I get to SBS, I won't have to learn all the basic basics while I'm getting slammed with a ton of other material in Oxford's somewhat legendarily intensive terms. While business school in general interests me, I don't seem to be super drawn to accounting, so I suppose it will be an exercise in "can you handle doing something you don't like doing", which is pretty much what I do for a living currently, so it shouldn't be too difficult.
Ok, that's about it for now, I plan to update this as stuff develops, but mostly not until I move, which is the point at which things will probably get interesting.
L8tr
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