I know that I'm a few days late on putting up my recap of the Stanford Admit Weekend, but the jet lag took a little longer than I thought to get over. Now, I'm well-rested and have some time to put my thoughts down, so I might as well get to it...
Friday afternoon and evening:
Let me start by sending a huge shout out to my boys Detavio and Shawn who ended up being my roll-dogs for the entire weekend from Friday through Monday night and to my host for the weekend, Charles (GSB '05).
Although the Admit weekend didn't officially start until Saturday night, I arrived on Friday afternoon so I could attend the BBSA conference and all of the activities that preceded it. My arrival on campus that day was the first time I'd ever seen the Stanford campus and all I could say when I saw it was "WOW!!!!". While I still think Princeton's capus is the most beautiful I've ever seen, Stanford's a VERY close second. There are palm trees everywhere, wide open spaces, and all of the buildings looked more like houses in a community than university buildings on a campus. One of the nicest places on the GSB campus is the new Schwab Residential Center (opened in '99) where the majority of the first year students live. Schwab was more of an apartment complex full of small suites than a univeristy dorm. One of the downsides to Schwab is the price to live there (~$1200/month), but it serves as the center of social life for MBA1's and I decided that it would be the best place for me to live next year.
On Friday evening, Detavio, Shawn, and I were able to take part in one of the GSB's weekly rituals, the Liquidity Preference Function (LPF). The LPF is basically a gathering of many of the GSB students after classes on Fridays where they socialize, drink, and listen to a variety of performances. I was able to meet quite a few of the current students at the LPF and I started getting a sense of the culture at the school. After the LPF, we attended a reception sponsored by the BBSA for current members and alumni. Since all three of us had just arrived from the East Coast earlier that day, we were starving, went straight for the food, and huddled up in a corner so we could get our grub on. I was fully expecting for everyone there to shy away from us because we'd pretty much secluded ourselves in that corner, but a bunch of the current students started taking turns coming over to talk to us and welcome us into the GSB family. These students answered a lot of our questions, shared their experiences, and let us know why the GSB was such a special place. At that point, I really started feeling the love.
Later that night, the three of us rolled out to San Francisco with three first year students to hit a club. It took a while to find a place, but we ended up going to a place called "One Eighty One" that was completely wack. The DJ in that joint was spinning HOT GARBAGE and I'd never seen such poor dancers in a club as the ones I saw that night. Let me provide an example...when we first entered the floor with the DJ, he was spinning Beyonce's "Crazy in love", so I thought the club had a chance to be OK even though I saw that there was a contagious case of "no-rhythm-itis" floating around the dance floor. My opinion changed when the DJ put on the next song and it was a techno remix of "Sweet Home Alabama"...I was like "WTF!?!?!?! but the other patrons of the club were getting crunk off of it. That's when I knew that it was time to start drinking and I was about that work when it came to that. Despite the wack music, I had a good time kickin' it with the first years who'd brought us to the club, which surprised me because a wack DJ is usually enough to kill my high when I go out. We ended up getting back to campus at about 3:00am and I crashed on my host's floor like a drunk driver when I got in.
OK, that's all I can put down for now because I've got to hit the gym. I'll write up my experiences from Saturday when I get back.