Last night, the toddler slept through and the baby only woke once. In the morning I woke up with that slightly horrible feeling of having slept so deeply that your…
Meri, Meri, quite contreri
Category: Personal & Family Life
Most things fell into place today. The baby wasn’t ill anymore, I got stuff done both from the ‘Work’ list and the ‘Home’ list, and… well, it’s mainly the getting…
I recently passed my driving theory test – woo! The required reading includes The Highway Code, which can be found here, and I found it so useful I now think everyone should read it, whether they are a motorist or not.
Knowing The Highway Code is obviously helpful for understanding the rules of the road, but if you look closely you can also spot bigger lessons… These are the ones that endeared me to this seminal manifesto of British public behaviour.
It has been six months and a bit, and I’m halfway through my MBA. What have I learned?
Someone in my MBA class told me that I ask good questions at lectures. Emboldened by this lovely compliment I started thinking about what makes a good question, and how to ask better ones. (This is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and I’m not at all implying that I avoid all the pitfalls all of the time.)
It’s the end of my third week at Imperial College Business School, where I’m doing an MBA. I can tell it’s going to be a lot of work – in some ways more work than my job at Little, Brown was, because the student timetable eats into my Me-Time quite a lot. So it’s important to know why I’m doing it. I’ve already self-diagnosed as a Questioner (see this post about Gretchen Rubin’s expectations framework), which means that when it comes to expectations I set for myself or others set for me, I can do it all as long as it’s clear to me why I should. Let this post be a reminder to myself…
I’m a brand-new MBA student at Imperial College Business School. To get in, most MBA schools require a good score in a gruelling test called the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test). I too had to take this test, which measures all kinds of critical reasoning as well as verbal and quantitative information processing skills.
My problem was that I was a late applicant in an admissions process which normally takes a year. I had only ten days in which to prepare for the GMAT, and I managed a score of 620. The difference between my first practice test and the final test was pretty stark:
| Total score | Quant score | Verbal score | Quant % | Verbal % | |
| Practice test (estimated ranges) | 370–470 | 6–18 | 37–39 | 0–6 | 83–89 |
| Final test | 620 | 32 | 44 | 24 | 98 |
Contrary to most of the advice I read online, it turns out you don’t need a minimum of three months, a private tutor or to be a maths savant. Here’s what I would say about preparing for the GMAT at short notice.
At the start of this month I was in Finland, discovering new sides to my home country. I’ve lived abroad for nearly six years now, and I’ve found that different things about Finland have been more conspicuously absent than others, at different times. For example, to begin with, I missed foods I couldn’t get in the UK. Then I really felt the loss of ‘feeling native’. At various times I’ve lamented not having this or that in the UK, and there was even a phase where I started noticing all the things I can have in the UK, that I couldn’t have in Finland (a job?).
This trip was a little different.
The inspiration behind this post comes from observing my fiancé. I say this with love: he is someone with a natural sense of entitlement – and I don’t mean in the millennial sense. I mean that he seems to feel entitled to exist and occupy a space in the world, and not ask for permission nor forgiveness for it. You can see this in his body language – for example, the way he stamps his feet coming up the stairs, or the way he belly-laughs at funny things on the internet. When he’s around, you hear it first.
Contrast this with me. My natural instinct is to deflect attention. I’m inclined to walk lightly, close doors gently, speak at the lowest volume that will still allow people to hear me, automatically walk on the edge of the pavement in case somebody wants to pass by, and generally behave as if I’m trying to minimise the signs of my presence.
Lately I’ve become really aware of the ‘minimising’ behaviours and tried a number of experiments to ‘maximise’ my presence, instead, and let me tell you – it’s fun. These are some of my experiments:
As my nearest and dearest can attest, I’ve become obsessed with Gretchen Rubin’s model of dealing with expectation. I like personality tests in general, and this one made such intuitive sense to me when I came across it that I just can’t stop talking about it.