It's hard to believe that it has been almost 8 months already since we first started the MLOG orientation. Time flies... but as Anne said, I look at the world in a very different way than I did 8 months ago.
This is also my first spring here in the U.S. Being from the country with 3 seasons: summer, raining summer and burning summer, I find the change of seasons to be exciting!
Summer 2005 was the time we arrived in Cambridge and started the orientation. The orientation was 3 weeks long for international students and 2 weeks long for US students... I haven't thanked Chris in person for this great preparation for our life at MIT. We covered everything from stat to regression to optimization... the stuffs that most people learned in their undergrad and threw them away to allow more space in our left brain to think about things at work
Fall was the time when things started to kick in. We had several mandatory classes, and some people including myself were brave enough to take 5-6 classes at the same time. What can I say.. we're only here for a year and there are so many great classes to take! Long study hours, free coffee, and sleepless nights were common for many of us... but the parties and activities kept us alive!
Winter in Boston was so nice to us this year... or maybe we escaped the worst part to enjoy warm weather in Spain. We had ZLOG students taking class with us in January when we had a bunch of companies coming in to give presentations and recruitings. We also had a month-long supply chain simulation game that we competed with the other groups for the highest stock price... Noone went bankrupt, but some teams' stock charts looked like those of dot-bomb companies back in late 90s.
And here comes Spring! We started to seriously work on the thesis this semester at the same time that we seriously started looking for jobs... companies continued to come in and recruit at MIT while many of us were busy flying around the world for the final round interviews. I had to admit that I didn't study much in the first half of spring semester due to frequent interview trips... I promised to myself to study hard again after I accepted the job offer, but it is hard to stay in and do the work when the weather outside is so great! Enjoy Spring everyone! :)

Thanks Tai! Great introduction and pix~ I cannot wait to come, hehe:P
Posted by: philip | 05/06/2006 at 02:27 AM