Recalibrating after a month back
September is gone, and with it, its avalanche of social events, new cases to read, new friends to meet and sunny days. Time has been running out for trying to do everything we would like to, and self-pressure is intensifying among the HBS student population: “Am i studying enough?”, “Should i start recruiting (or re-recruiting) already?”, “Can I make it to two different dinner plans and read 3 cases tonight?”. For both RCs and ECs, October represents a new chapter. An opportunity to pursue what we enjoy doing without pressure, meet new interesting people while deepening the bonds with current friends, and giving priority to our goals and objectives for the rest of the year before we start all over again. It’s a difficult task to achieve (even Oprah herself spoke about the difficulty of finding happiness when she visited campus), but nonetheless, a goal worth pursuing.
Our team of editors and contributors had those points in mind while writing this month for The Harbus. Getting to know new people and creating a spirit of community is the goal for the student clubs recruiting new members this past month, and new clubs being formed or reinvented are the subject of our cover story. Oprah’s visit to campus with Professor Arthur Brooks created a frenzy among the student population, starting with the ticket launch in an email at 6am to the long line that formed an hour before the event started outside Klarman Hall. In this edition, we cover the main takeaways from the discussion and the speakers’ concept of “Happierness”.
As we all have experienced, time is a limited resource during our time in HBS. Deciding smartly is a skill that we all aim to develop, and in this issue, we explore the Rule of 37, a strategy for selecting the best option from a series of unknown alternatives. Finally, Karla Berman, MBA ’07, and a successful entrepreneur in Mexico, shares with us her best piece of advice to enjoy life at HBS and beyond. We also aim to look at the status of VC funding to HBS alumi’s startups, considering the special circumstances in the market at the moment.
We hope that the start of the academic year has been fruitful and successful for all of our readers. And if you are feeling the blues or trying to figure out the “right” way to live the HBS experience, we will defer to Oprah: “Anytime you start to feel down on yourself, just look at how far you’ve come. Look at what it took to get here in these seats.”.
Rory Finnegan (MBA ’24) is originally from New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in poetry writing in 2018. Prior to HBS, she worked in consulting and CEO communications in New York.
Edgard Mejico (MBA ’24) is originally from Lima, Peru. He graduated from Universidad del Pacifico, Peru with a degree in Business Engineering in 2016. Prior to the HBS MBA, he worked for six years in Brand Management and Sales in Colgate-Palmolive Latin America.