Housing and Unofficial Start

I've settled nicely into the house I found. I might as well talk about my housing situation here. I was well aware of the intense workload of the MBA program, and figured that I likely won't have much time to prepare food for myself. Since I'm pretty serious about food, my number one priority was to go for a meal plan. I had initially wanted to rent a 1-bedroom apartment or the grad residence, and go for the meal plan that the university offers. But, the university meal plans have assigned time slots for when you go for your meals. If you miss it, you stay hungry until the next meal. With crazy MBA schedule, I didn't want to be confined to these time slots three times a day. Besides, if I were to go for an apartment, I'd have to worry about furniture, since furnished apartments that are within my price range are pretty much nonexistent. And of course, I didn't want to be bothered to think about furniture.

Then I found out about co-op, which offers furnished rooms with meal plans. Great, except the meal plan isn't offered in the summer. The university doesn't have a meal plan in the summer either. Looked like I couldn't escape cooking for the summer in any case, so the next item on my agenda was to find a place for the summer where I can comfortably cook. I could've stayed at co-op for the summer as well, but with ~10 people and one kitchen per house, I doubt it would work out nicely. After searching around on the internet, I found a nice house to share for the summer with a couple of other girl grad students. The AMS Marketplace is where I found this place, I think this is one of the lesser-known sites for some reason. The internal portal provides a list of sites to search for accomodation. In addition, check out craigslist.

A couple of suggestions regarding housing:

• While it might be tempting to try secure housing as early as possible, realistically there's no need. When it gets closer to the date of your intended move-in, more places become available, and at lower prices.
• If you look for a private apartment within a house, be sure to personally pay a visit, or have someone check it out for you. I've heard horror stories of apartments that are not suitable for human habitation.
• You may hear about various rules governing the application process for the grad residence - don't pay much attention to them. In the end, if you apply, you'd probably get in. I know people who applied the very last minute and still got a spot.

In other news:

I finished all prep materials. I'm finding that I'm way ahead of a lot of people in the class in this respect, I guess I have it easy, not having a lot to do for work in the past couple of months.

A whole lot of us met at The Tango last night, it was great fun. I heard that some people also went for poutine afterwards - gotta stay in the loop and join them next time!

Had our first pre-MBA workshop today, on "Basic Math and Spreadsheet Skills for Business Analysis". I was less up for the "basic math" and more for the spreadsheet skills, but the prof spent most of the time doing basic math (starting from 2 + 3 = 5), and went a little fast, in my opinion, with the spreadsheets at the end. I didn't think people needed to relearn math that's THAT basic (since we've all done our GMAT), so would've been nice to spend more time with the spreadsheets, or possibly extend this to beyond one day.

Tomorrow is Finance. I haven't bothered much with looking at my calculator, it's the only "prep" that I haven't done. I figured I'll do it once I have a better grasp of doing the same things on paper first.