Say hello and goodbye to the second year(s)

The hardest class I have taken at Kenan-Flagler to date ended five hours ago when I handed in my final exam for managerial accounting. Judging from the number of students who left the room early, either the final was not as hard as the midterm was or they were really sick of looking at income variance and activity based costing.

This marks the unofficial end of my first year in the MBA program. I have an integrative exercise, something which hopefully I will get to blog about later this week, on Thursday and Friday. The first year will official end sometime in June when I hand in my response paper to my trip to India. After that I can start calling myself a second year, regardless of whether I have a summer internship or not.

Speaking of second years, they will start trickling out of Chapel Hill sometime after the last exam on Wednesday for “beach week.” I commented last year that whenever I transition from one phase to the next (ie graduating from college, leaving a workplace) the group that I always miss the most are the people that I knew well enough to do a quick “stop and chat” with, yet I did not know them well enough to go out of my way to make plans with. There are a couple of second years who are in this category. I very much would like to say goodbye to them in person before they leave but realistically I may have to settle for sending them a “best of luck, keep in touch” email since they will have permanently left by the time I return from India and during this past year I did not have the chance to get to know them well enough to feel comfortable about calling to say goodbye.