September 23, 2002 FIRST DAY OF CLASS
It's only been a few days since the last note but a lot has happened. Today was the first day of class, and they held us from 8 AM until 7 PM. So I'm very tired now. This program I'm on is like the United Nations. Of about 130 of us, we represent 37 different countries. French are the relative majority at 28%, with Chinese, Japanese, Americans, Lebanese and Argentines coming in next in that order. Average age is 29. Unfortunately for the guys here, there are only 24% females, and half of those are married. Besides us there is last year's MBA class which will graduate in December, the PhD students and the exchange MBA students from various other MBA schools around the world. Everybody here is bilingual without exception, the majority are trilingual and many others speak more. I hardly feel like I'm in France and I wonder how much French I will actually learn here because the language of the courses is English, and it's the language everybody speaks to each other when not studying. Being out in the boon-docks here means not much chance of using French otherwise. But the diversity is a lot of fun. They arranged us all into groups of six and we will have to work with this same group for the next three months. My group consists of a British girl, guys from France, Brazil, Argentina, China plus myself. We got assigned a task, and we completed it, but we must have used five times as much energy as necessary to do it because everyone has such different personalities and ways of solving problems. It will be an interesting few months learning to deal with each other.
There is one whole other side of the campus where the undergrads study. They are mostly late-teens or early-twenties and primarily French. There seems to be little inter-mingling between the sides of the campus. While we live in the palace (relatively speaking, now) with modern amenities and Internet connections, they live in crappy prison cells. There's a big age difference and it seems they sort of consider all of us to be elite and snobby.
I explored a little bit this past weekend, and confirmed that there is absolutely nothing around my campus. There's some old towns four and five miles away, but not much of anything is going on in any of them. Someone was telling me that he went into the nearby village Jouy-en-Josas and asked an old lady where he could get an ice cream. He said the lady just laughed at him. Fortunately Saturday night we had a big social cocktail party on campus where everyone drank lots of red wine and mingled. I've never been to a party where people guzzle wine. I wonder if you can rent a keg of wine for a party too? On Sunday I went to Paris with an Italian guy (named Gianluigi) and a Japanese girl who has been in the UK for a few years. Paris can break your wallet. Just a day in the city riding a few trains around, having lunch and a coffee cost about $30 or $40. A guy living off of student loans has no business blowing that kind of cash on a Sunday afternoon. I guess I will have to make the best of Jouy-en-Josas on weekends.
This Thursday is "Japan Night" on campus, but no one knows exactly what it is, including the Japanese people I've asked. The weekend after next the whole class is going to the coast in Brittany to hang out, have fun and I suppose drink more wine. I guess they organized a kayak trip or something. We'll see.
Catch you later.