Rocking and Rolling

One of the weird things about moving around as much as I have, is it means you spend a lot of your time going back. It's only been the past three trips or so to England that I've actually been able to enjoy myself. Part of that is the extreme over-scheduled situation you face trying to fit in seeing all your friends and family into the few short days you have been able to escape from work thanks to the limited American concept of vacation time.  Part of it is the feeling of not belonging -- England's not 'home' anymore, but until recently, America wasn't quite 'home' yet either. Another part of it is seeing friends who stayed behind moving on with their life -- getting married, buying houses and having kids while I'm still single, still renting and still in school at 30. That said, I have no regrets -- I have an awesome life. I've lived in some incredible cities, I've had an amazing career thus far, I have dear friends scattered across the globe, and now I realize that quite frequently, they see me the same way I see them. It's all just a matter of perspective.


I got home at midnight last night -- not a particularly late night and not bad considering four hours previously I was sitting in my mother's living room in the Surrey countryside. I decided to head back to England for a few days as I had five days off from class. I probably should have spent that week working on applications, but with my family so close for once, I'm taking every opportunity I can to see them. Besides, Georgetown's career management team has been awesome, setting up skype calls, running through my resume with me and helping me determine my application strategy. So as long as I'm OK talking though career stuff at 9pm at night, my physical location is pretty unimportant.


Today started my third class at ESADE -- Measuring Business Performance. I took this class because it looked like it would be valuable for people planning to work as a consultant and thus far, my preconceptions have been justified. Unfortunately I picked up a nasty cold in England thanks to the change in weather and with a late night flight and an 8:30 am class I was feeling pretty rough.


At ESADE, things like KPIs and the balanced score card are taught out of the operations department while at Georgetown (and HEC I later discovered) these topics fall under management accounting. This class has been moving pretty swiftly and was another of those bizarre European two-week classes with 7.5 hours of class time a day. However, of the classes I've taken so far, I feel like this is a class I can see applying in my career a year or more from now. If only I can take it all in over the course of two weeks!


So I feel like I'm starting to get into the swing of things here. I fell in love with Barca almost immediately and my feelings haven't diminished over the past month. I can always tell how I feel about a city when I return. If it feels like I'm coming home, then I know it's a good fit for me. And when I was able to give a Spanish tourist from Galicia directions to the youth hostel off Las Ramblas on the way home last night, I knew I felt at home.