fair warning

My friend Diana is one of the smartest people I know.

She was my high school's valedictorian. She graduated from Penn with degrees in International Relations and History (and a reasonably good GPA — lest you get the wrong idea, she enjoyed her share of drinking and partying and did a study abroad in the UK). She worked as a consultant at Arthur Andersen before she (and other ethical people like her who worked like dogs) got royally effed over. Later, she started law school in New York and then returned to California when her mom had a catastrophic illness.

She's now at Cal, for their part-time MBA and working full-time in a middle management (read: reasonably stressful/ responsible) job. She's not having fun. But don't take my word for it.

The moral of this story:

1. If you're going to go to b-school, go full-time or don't bother. The teaching is very different (aka 'figure it out yourselves') for the evening classes than it is during the day (aka 'spoon-fed learning'). I'm in my second day class and the difference is, well, night and day.
2. Oh, and it helps to decide that you're there for the piece of paper (and probably, if you go to a top b-school, for the networking), rather than the knowledge. But that could just be the fact that I'm 5 semesters in (and still have 4 to go) talking.