Category: Language

Something I learned traveling around Europe and will never forget is the fact that it is never a good idea to stay up all night to avoid staying in a hotel or catching some early morning event like a train or a race. Well this story is a tale of a group of travelers about to leave Sweden on a 6am train who have decided to stay up all night to avoid the ludicrous exchange rate of the Swedish Krona.

We had just been sent on a secret mission into the archipelago (large grouping of islands) near Stockholm. Our mission was a success and only marked with a few dozen mosquito bites for those in our group with blood that tastes like Malbec. We rendezvous with my cousin for dinner and plan the night’s activities. Our only restrictions were:

• We couldn’t stay at my cousin’s house because houses there are a total of 42 square metres. You do the maths. Not possible to fit five stinking guys in there.
• We had a mandatory train to catch at 6am and we needed to account for the unknown route to the train station itself.
• We didn’t want to pay for a hostel as they were too expensive.

Given this criteria, any self-respecting traveller will decide to find the biggest and best bar and rage it until morning comes. My cousin advises us as to where to go, however there is a problem. In Sweden the best places are 25 and over and I don’t think any of us were 25. Also we looked like scum after sleeping on the ground the night before. The solution was to arrive very early to the bar and establish a presence. This proved to work very well and we all immediately spent as much money as we could at the bar. This meant long island iced teas which cost about $20 at this place. The night continued and ended up being a lot of fun. My cousin left us to our own devices around 10:30 or so. Next door to this bar was another very happening bar so eventually we decide to all give that one a shot since we were spending all our money really fast at this posh place.

It is about this time that everything started to go wrong. (I am going to avoid using real names here to protect the identities of the fallen.) Phillipo found his way onto a very comfortable bench seat and found himself falling asleep at about 2am. The bouncers would keep coming over to him and tell him to get a grip and he would wake up and sit up straight. Then slowly, while holding his beer, he would start to tip over and every time the bottle was about to spill the bouncers would catch him. Then the bouncers were preoccupied (which I will get to in a minute) and missed the leaning tower of Phillipo and he ends up spilling his beer all over the seat and remains asleep. Eventually the bouncers arrive knowing exactly what happened and cursed themselves for not kicking him out earlier. Phillipo is banished from the bar.

So why were the bouncers preoccupied? Turns out that Mikael thought no one would notice if, while walking by the VIP section, he would just take the bottle of champagne out of the cooling container and start pounding it out of the bottle in front of the actual VIPs. Surprisingly this caused quite a commotion and there was a big hullabaloo with Mikael and the VIPs and the bouncers. In the end Mikael loses and is literally dragged out into the street.

The rest of us realise that our numbers are depleting and we are not sure where our fallen have gone, so we end up leaving ourselves. We exit the bar at 2:30 and find Phillipo harassing some locals for a cigarette or something. Still no sign of Mikael. We walk a bit and hear some loud shouts of laughter. We find a group of youths huddled around a homeless guy laying on a bus bench. Turns out this homeless guy is Mikael and he is clutching his red carrying bag which is filled, among other things, with a passport, iPod, speakers, money, and half a brain. The youths were saying funny things to him rather loudly and he would just not move, or didn’t care.

We wake Mikael up and go into the park with the youths to talk politics and compare cultures. Mikael falls asleep again. Eventually it is time to get to the train station. We find our way there miraculously and have to wait for 15 minutes. While waiting, Mikael falls asleep again. We take this opportunity to cover him in everything we could possibly find in our backpacks. Mainly shaving cream, a lot of moisturiser, and the pièce de résistance: we draw a swastika on his forehead, nice and big. The train arrives and we need to find our seats. Mikael gets on and sits down in the first seat he can find. We go to our seats not caring and fall asleep. We arrive in Munich and realise that Mikael is not on the train.

Turns out that Mikael was asked by the conductors for his ticket but he could not respond coherently. The conductors didn’t like this. That, or they didn’t like the fact that this guy was sprawled over two seats covered in creams that were getting all over the seats and was sporting a giant swastika on his forehead as we were about an hour from arriving in Germany. So they kicked him off.

In one of those Ferris Bueller-type moments, we rendezvous with Mikael on a train going to Prague when coincidentally he has the same train, the same car, and the same cabin as we did. Weird. Was it right to send someone into Germany pissed drunk with a swastika on his forehead and enough moisturiser to lubricate the Swiss army? Probably not, but it makes for a good story.

Damn I wish I had pictures of this.

I would date the feeling to about June of ’07. A feeling I always described to people as being antsy. To solve this I chose to take a GMAT prep course with my roommate Justin. Nine classes at three hours each requiring roughly 7–15 hours extra homework and study per week during that time, with the intention of taking the proper test several weeks after the course ended. Ahhh those college days with books and libraries and coffees and all that. Banged a 680 on the test and then wandered off to Argentina, England, and Paris for some self-exploration and shenanigans.

I walked through a grad fair on the UCI campus during the waning days of senior year. I walked to a table that had Barcelona on the front of it and figured I had some leverage due to my recent travels through Europe. Thirty months later I decided that school was what I needed. Get to take advantage of one of the best cities in the world to grow as a multi-cultural human being. I could finally develop my Spanish skills so I can say jokes in Spanish. Go to what turns out to be one of the best international schools in the world and ranked very well according to supposedly legit sites. (Found that out after I made the decision for that school, funny enough.)

My plan was to first make contact with the school. Through email I was able to get in touch with a very pleasant Dutch admissions associate who said he would be in San Francisco and could I meet him there. I think I bought the airplane ticket before I responded to him. So to make this meeting a formal interview, I had to submit my application.

The application took close to 16 hours I would say, including “pondering time.” The trick to a good essay is one that can be read and leave a lasting impression on the reader’s mind. Stay on prompt but all the time dropping little knowledge bombs like your cycling habits or current work success or new internet idea. The questions they give you do not allow you to say enough, so you have to put a spin on the questions to get everything in that you want.

I flew to San Francisco for the interview. All I knew was I had a 1:30 appointment in this huge posh hotel in downtown. So I wandered the lobby just hoping I would see someone that looked Dutch. Fortunately I Googled the man I was meeting and had found a picture of him, so I could spot him in the crowd and walked straight up to him — I thought a good first meeting. We talked for roughly 70 minutes even though he said he had an hour, which I was pleased with. I felt I had nailed the interview except for one question where he asked me what I knew about the school. Now, I had spent several hours the night before researching the school and how to interview, so I thought I came into this locked and loaded. But I stumbled. My move was to ask a question back at him so he could inform me and I was happy to listen. It ended with smiles and laughter but I had furious thoughts in my head about why the school needed me to verify they were so good. Why was it not enough for me to simply just “want” to go? Oh well, it was out of my hands. A heli-boarding trip to Canada cleared my self-perceived frustrations with my interview performance and/or essay quality.

Since then I have been told that I am on the waiting list and can expect to hear from them in the middle of May. I didn’t even know there was a wait list option — I thought it was No or Yes only. So I did a lot of reading on Google and decided that I had to be proactive during this waitlist process, otherwise fall into the pile of wait list names. First contact was an email I sent trying to cover up the bad interview question mentioned earlier and make it very clear that I would jump at the opportunity to attend the school. The idea being to step on those other applicants who have applied to many schools at the same time and may have already accepted elsewhere. Second was to research the classes I would like to start with and who I could contact to help with that. Next is to prove to them that I am continuing to challenge myself in as many ways as possible from both a personal and professional point of view.

When you apply for business school the one thing you will get out of it regardless of the outcome is a life plan for at least the next five or more years. Currently I have applied to one school and plan on applying to one more, which is due in 11 days. And I have already disregarded my own advice from earlier and haven’t given my referees the paperwork yet. Note to self: do that tomorrow. But I feel good because I know what I want to do with myself, and worst case it doesn’t happen this year and I do it next year. Give me one more year to save money and develop a better application. What’s funny is that putting this off one more year still doesn’t get me close to the absurd average MBA age of 28 or more.