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Midterms Are Over at Kellogg

At long last. Midterm week in our first quarter at Kellogg is finally over. Although most students here did not spend the entire time immersed in their books and outlines, there was certainly a difference in the energy here on campus.  In large part, students spent less time hanging out on campus, spent more time reading and doing problem sets in study rooms, and walked around campus with more purpose and less time to chat. But this doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, some people are recruiting for banking and consulting, where sometimes grades can factor in.

Over the last two weeks, all the first years here at Kellogg partook in their first exams here at business school. Surprising was the number of students that stayed here and studied here on campus in the in the study rooms. I suspect that the number of people studying on campus will change over the course of the year, as space is a bit limited and as people start to have other priorities as the school year goes on

For the most part, I’ve did a good job of staying out of the studying frenzy. I think many of the JD-MBAs do that well, in part because we’re used to taking exams now given our experience last year in law school. But that doesn’t mean the week was easier for everyone in the program. After all, not all the JD-MBAs have quantitative backgrounds, nor do all of them have the same levels of business experience.

On the other hand, a number of my MBA peers have pretty significant finance and quantitative experience, and some of them put in much less time studying than I did. My hypothesis is that the number of hours people spend here at Kellogg is very different for everyone individually and that it largely depends on the specific subject.

It’s been a pretty interesting past few weeks, but the journey isn’t over yet. Since Kellogg is on the quarter system, rather than semester semester, the pace of the quarter is fast and final exams are looming – my first final exam is only four weeks away.  In fact, we’re already starting to bid on classes for next quarter.

But the good news is that we’ll be able to start new classes soon and that after final exams, we’ll all be headed to Aspen for the school wide ski trip.

Stay tuned to hear how the rest of the quarter plays out.

Tags: Exams, MBA, test