Costs of Academic Distress

Well, Term 5 is mid-way through already. Your friendly WEMBA blogger is heads down trying to stay afloat this term while my startup is rapidly growing right now. I'm taking Advanced Corporate Finance, Investment Management, and Negotiations this term. The great thing is that they are all 1 cu courses, so there's a lot less context switching. I hear that the Strategic Control and Entrepreneurship Seminar elective courses are pretty good through the grapevine.

The reason for this post is to talk about the costs of academic distress. In finance, there's the costs of financial distress, and in the WEMBA world, there's the costs of academic distress. Bottom line: this program takes it's toll on your health, and I don't think anyone takes it into consideration.

Here's some of the costs:

* My eyes are getting worse. My eye doctor just quantified it for me when both of my eyes had checked out as significantly different (more than 1 diopter of difference) from about a year ago. My astigmatism has gotten quite a bit worse. I was wondering why I couldn't read the greek subscripts in IM this term!

* Grey hairs, oh my! I've been blessed with a full head of hair with relatively few grey hairs. The past few terms this has started to change, however. I now have 7-8 instead of 1.

* Bags under the eyes and crow's feet. Tiger Woods 2k7 has a feature where you can build your own golfer. There's a ton of detail around facial feature customization in the game. I booted up the Wii the other day, and started to create a character and needed to know what settings to use for eye bags and crow's feet. When I looked into the mirror, I noticed there were some crows feet and slightly larger bags under the eyes. Again, I'm blessed with Asian youthfulness but WEMBA has started to take it's toll here.

* Stress! This one is hard to quantify, but the stress of constantly feeling like you are behind and don't have enough time takes it toll over time. I think that you get used to it after a while. Also, 2nd year WEMBAs are not nearly as concerned anymore about grades and classes.

* Lack of sleep. You definitely have a lot less sleep in this program. It's somewhat amazing how little one can function on.

* Second year career paranoia angst. In the 2nd year, there's a definitely increase in angst for many of the WEMBA students that haven't made a career switch. I'd characterize it it as a focus shift from academics to the real world. The big question is "what am I going to do after my MBA?", and a lot of time is consumed chasing career management opportunities (on the website, in Philly at interviews, and in other networking opportunities). The angst originates from the stress that occurs from realizing "I don't want to still be stuck at company X" after going through all that we have gone through. It still remains to be seen if the new career management office on the West Coast that is due to start next year will reduce the angst; I suspect that it will greatly reduce it. They just announced the creation of a new career management resource: Wharton Resume Book for Experienced Hires. Good idea, I'm glad they read my blog! :)

* Idiosyncratic costs. Not everyone has a family, some live far away and have to travel twice a month, and others have really demanding jobs. These costs are particular to individuals, but nonetheless should also be incorporated into the overall costs of academic distress.

In summary, this is my 0.02 on the costs of academic distress. So when the Financial Times data on the mean salary increase for the #1 exec MBA program comes out again, keep in mind that we should subtract the costs of academic distress.