Midterms
This week officially marks the completion of our first half term at IESE. We only had midterms for two of the classes - Accounting and Capital Markets. It was such an interesting feeling getting back the rush of nervousness facing a midterm, but this time with the knowledge that grades matter a lot less than the process itself. I can’t count the number of T-accounts I ended up balancing, but it felt nice now being able to understand at a high level what to make of a income statement, a balance sheet, and a statement of cashflow. In capital markets class we learned about IPO processes, fiscal and monetary policies, futures and options, financial crisis, and evaluation of companies. During each class our professor would write six full black board full of content, walking us through from the fundamentals to the very bare minimum required to understand a specific topic. As a token of memory, our whole class took a picture with our professor (along with the six blackboard-full of content)
Mano Rota was one of the restaurants Pratik and I tried back in August, but were both impressed by the execution of dishes (and how nice the owner was with me speaking Spanish slowly as I was trying to use the little Spanish I knew). I read somewhere that the daily interactions being an important aspect when learning a new language, and I do appreciate all the restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries who had patient people to slowly wait for me to finish whenever I needed anything :) But back to Mano Rota - Laura and I decided to go back for the tasting menu and opened up the invite to our team where Eliot and Pato also decided to join. The most memorable topics were around who we felt had a shield/front and who we felt like we know well. We each had our own perception, but the reality was usually different.
Instead of spending the entire weekend studying, a couple of us decided to check out a food fair where they feature numerous stalls from local restaurants and shops. I tried some natural wine, some delicious chocolate cake with olive oil and salt after I was stuffed, learned about a town in the Pyrenees mountains that had a restaurant we needed to visit, had a shot of local version of Jägermeister that tasted so much better, and ended up going to Three Schmucks, one of the top 50 bars that was awarded in 2022. None of us liked our drink (everything tasted too strong) :/ But overall the day was a nice reward after some studying.
After being done with the midterms on Tuesday, Marc, one of our teammates hosted us at his house for a traditional Spanish meal. There were Spanish tortilla (the potato omelet), ham, cured meat charcuterie board, lots of wine, a bean and sausage Catalan dish (I believe similar to this), some dessert, and some Gazpacho.
Other than feeling how quickly time has passed, I got to attend a preview workshop around motivation and happiness. We learned about the notion of Logical Levels and how the framework can help us identify why we’re feeling a certain way and what we can do (make changes to the level above) about it. How our brain “perceives” relative to the environment even though in absolute terms two things may be the same. During the workshop, we learned that our brains work with hundreds of filters to accelerate the decision making and how we easily fall into the same patterns if we’re not intentional about them.
Slowly catching up but I already enjoy reliving these moments even though it hasn’t even been that long :)
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