HEC - First Impressions

I had been waiting for 4th September for an unbelievably long time, and time had almost crawled to a standstill. I left Grenoble at 4:30 am and took the train to Paris. After a hurried walk to Gare d'Austerlitz, an automatic ticket machine that wouldn't accept my debit card, a turnstile that wouldn't let my suitcase through, and a 1-hour train ride, i finally made it to Jouy-en-Josas !

Allow me to go off on a tangent here for a moment. I once abused Shashwat for living in Angouleme. It wasn't his fault. He was just there. Angouleme just happened to be so "in the middle of nowhere" that i took it upon myself to poke fun at him. Dude, honestly, you can now go ahead and insult me. Jouy is 10 times smaller, has 7000 people, 3 main streets, 1 supermarket and really is "le trou du cul du monde" !

More importantly, HEC is located there, and i took a short bus ride (thank god for that, HEC is on a hill) to campus and went about my paperwork and check-in etc...

The more interesting aspect was meeting my new classmates, many of whom i had exchanged emails/messages with since the admissions. Meeting them and all the others was very very interesting (you will see why a litte later)...

The first party was the same evening, and what followed were 3 others in as many days, all weekend ! However, things did get a bit more serious today. We had a solid first day of orientation, along with a conference in the evening. Tomorrow starts with a French evaluation test, followed by French oral interviews.

Coming back to my classmates... To mention some of the backgrounds :

A French "gendarme"
A Canadian who was working in Panama
An Indian merchant navy captain
A "Quebecoise" who isnt really a Quebecoise
A Georgian woman entrepreneur
A Russian software engineer (who sat across the Georgian at lunch one day, but no gunfire was heard...)
A Portugeuse guy who wants to go to Goa !
A Greek electrical engineer with whom i discussed MV cables !
A Japanese automobile engineer (there's a cliche) who knew that Toyota has a plant in Bangalore
A German lawyer with a great sense of humour (he even said "ich bin ein Hamburger")
A Chinese guy who never worked in China !

I have a session on "Cultural Stereotypes" on wednesday. I'll keep you posted...