The reason why I choose to come to Hanover a day early was to get a feel of living in Hanover. The plan was to hang around with the locals, visit shops, talking with people, etc. It was especially important that I could answer for myself – can I live in Hanover for over 2 years, considering the harsh weather!
18th January 2011: The roads were clear so it was a pleasant drive. I reached Hanover at around 4.30am, checked into a hotel and slept off. Despite the scare from my friends about the New Hampshire snow, it seemed fine. I woke up at around 10am and looked outside the window and voila the roads were clogged with over 3 inches of snow. So New Hampshire did live up to its expectation. I stepped out and my gloves and snowcap, which are generally good for the snow in Saint Louis were useless here. I scrapped off the snow off my car and drove off to the nearest shopping mall – JC Penny at West Lebanon. Unlike Saint Louis, the snow doesn’t get cleared off the road quickly so this was my first true drive in snowy conditions. Yes my car did almost skid into the ditch. The New Hampshire / Vermont localities were kind enough to keep 2-3 car distance away from me. At around 2pm, I got a call from the hotel asking me to move my car because they wanted to plough the parking lot. I came down and again scrapped the snow off the car.
Evening at around 4pm, I decided to visit Dartmouth. It was a good 4+ mile drive and it was still snowing. I had to again scrap the snow off my car. Reaching Hanover, I directly went to the Tuck main building. I closed my eyes and felt the following: 1. Hanover and the area around Hanover was extremely beautiful and bountiful in nature. 2. Hanover was a tiny college town and there was extreme peace in the environment. I could hear myself breathing. Last I felt this while on a biking trip to Lavasa City. The first thought that came to mind was that this would be an ideal place to do research and focus down. There seemed to be no distractions around.
I walked into the Tuck Business School building and looked around. The décor inside was classical wooden and the people were very friendly. After a short walk around, I headed back to my car, scrapped the snow off my car and drove back home. By this time, I was getting the hang of driving in snow.
By 9pm, I realized my clothes were not ironed enough. I tried ironing but without the starch spray, my ironing skills were at best – near useless. So, I googled, found a 24 hour shopping center near by, went down, scrapped my car off “ice” this time and drove to Price Coopers in West Lebanon, bought the starch spray and ironed my clothes.
Planned and unplanned trips all around the day had pretty much given me a hang of what life would be at Hanover.
19th January 2011: Finally, the day had arrived. I woke up early, got ready. I was worried about the roads not being cleared and not being able to make it in time. So I left at 7am. Surprise surprise! The roads were cleared this time and I reached Hanover by 7.15 am, got a shuttle from the Dewy Parking Lot (Lyme Street) to the Tuck Business School. I managed to reach there by 7.30am. The lights were still shut.
8.15am: A second year MBA student took three prospective candidates to the Global Economics for Managers lecture by Professor Slaughter. It was a heavy lecture early in the morning. Having learnt some economics only last year, I could understand a lot of the things he was talking about and it was starting to get interesting. Around this point, I lost track about why I was here and started analyzing Global Economics. Some interesting things we discussed during the lecture were:
Students presented slides on the Federal Reserves Open Market Committee. This committee decides when to print money out of thin air, whom to sell US treasury bonds, etc.
We then started talking about the supply of money and its relation to inflation. An Argentinian student Federico spoke about his father’s experiences in Argentinian during the hyperinflation. His father had a fixed rate mortgage. At one time, the inflation was so high that his mortgage payments were equal to the cost of a bus ticket. A Uruguayan student spoke about how his parents found it cheap to drive to Argentina, and buy groceries because it was so cheap when Uruguayan money was converted to Argentinian. A Zimbabwean lady spoke about how the inflation in Zimbabwe was in something like 3.1 million percent. A ex-world aid employee who was working in Indonesia during the financial crisis spoke about how the crisis helped outset a well entrenched dictator out of power. It was simply an amazing discussion. In another example, the professor shared an example of US state department employee and a Tuck alum. He was posted in Zimbabwe. His wife Kate used to make many calls back to the US. Their telephone bill was 6.2 billion Zimbabwean dollars, which when converted to US dollars was almost a penny.
10.05am: Professor Slaughter overshot and I realized damn, I have an interview in 10 minutes. My mind was still subconsciously crunching the Global Economics. In hindsight it was a bad decision to schedule the interview right after the lecture.
10.15am: The interviewer walks into the room and guides me to her office. The questions she asked were pretty standard of an interview at Tuck:
- When did you get in?
- Did you face any problems getting in?
- Did you have a chance to see around Hanover yesterday?
- Where did you end up staying?
- We will talk for around half an hour and I will answer any questions you have towards the end of the interview.
- I am an associate Director of admissions at Tuck and I…
- Walk me through your resume and talk about the professional experience you have.
- What do you see yourself doing immediately after graduation and in the longer term
- Tell me about the __ and the role you want to play there.
- Why do you feel that you need an MBA?
- Tell me about your team experiences and how they have influenced you
- Tell me more about your team
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- What do you do apart from work?
- What did you learn about yourself after moving to the US?
- What questions do you have for me?
- Anything that you think I should have asked you but I have not.
- Congratulations on finishing the application. Now the hard part begins of waiting until March.
Did I perform well at the interview? I did cover most of the points, but I missed out on the finer points. I would rate myself a 6 out of 10. In an alternate universe, in a different time and space, my alter ego from that universe would have done better. However, what finally matters is how you perform during those 30 minutes irrespective of everything in the past and the future. There is always scope for doing better.
The rest of the day passed off smoothly.
I left Tuck at around 2.45pm, walked back to the Dewy parking lot and started driving back. The road conditions were horrible during my drive back. It was snowing, sometimes raining, the roads were not clear and the visibility was probably at best 10 feet. It was a difficult drive back to Boston.
somehow managed to reach the Boston Airport by 6.10pm, dropped off the car at Avis (now that I mention it – darn I did not refuel the car before dropping it off.), reached Terminal A. I run to Continental Airlines ticketing desk and they tell me that my 7.16pm flight will be handled by United Airlines, you need to rush to Terminal C. I ran from Terminal A to C…. long story cut short, managed to hop into the plane just in time.
Finally when I reached Saint Louis, I was welcomed with 6 inches of snow again. More scrapping off snow – this time off my Corolla.
