top 21 experiences from my time on the galapagos

It is my last full day on the Galapagos Islands. I have seen and done so amazing things! A part of me wants to stay here for the rest of the summer, and another part of me wants to stay here forever. But alas, I must move on to my next destination where I am sure I’ll see and do amazing things too.

I have realized that I have only blogged once since getting here, and since there is so much to share I thought I would list the top 21 experiences I have had in my few short weeks of being here. Why 21? As the informal motto of Jatun Sacha would say “por que no”, or why not.

21) On my first day at Jatun Sacha, a group of us went hiking up a river bed to a waterfall with pool, where we went swimming. Then proceeded to get lost on the way back. It was where I learned 2 important lessons: first always brings lots of water with you, and two always carry your flashlight with you as it gets dark early.

20) Being able to eat juicy ripe papaya, mandarin oranges, and passionate fruit fresh from the tree, while on break during our work at Jatun Sacha.

19) Seeing Gaint Tortoises from little babies to ones that were over 100 years old at the Galapaguerra.

18) Snorkelling at Bahia Rosa Blanca, where the White Tipped Sharks were so close and numerous, that one actually bumped into one of the girls from our group.

17) Catching a wild pig, and watching while it was butchered. Then eating it for supper. Mmmmm….

16) Hanging out at the Jatun Sacha bar (aka, the next door farmer’s porch), where we played cards, pool and danced the night away.

15) Hanging out, listening to music while watching the waves roll in at the ever amazing Tortuga Beach on Santa Cruz.

14) Snorkeling at Kicker Rock twice. First time seeing some sharks, rays, sea turtles, and lots of fish that I felt like I was in “Finding Nemo”. The second time, swimming amongst loads of beautiful fish and hoping that the sharks would not start feeding early.

13) Swimming with adolescent sea lions at Isla Lobos, where they would like to swim straight at you, playing chicken with you.

12) Seeing Punta Pitt with all the different types of birds, including the 3 types of Boobies (blue, red, and masked).

11) Macheting mora and guava at Laguna El Junco. It started off covered in so much mist that you could not see more than 5 feet in front of you, then all of a sudden the fog dissipated revealing this beautiful lake to one side and rolling hills down to the ocean on the other.

10) Dancing up a storm at the discotechca, while pub crawling on my last Saturday night on San Cristobal

9) A huge pod of dolphins swimming next to our boat on the first day trip to Kicker Rock. It was amazing; there were probably more than 50 dolphins! What a sight to see!!

6) BBQ Pollo for cena at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Isabella. It was one of the best meals, with the best home-made ahi.

5) Watching the morning feeding while waiting for the ferry on Isabella. There were Pelicans, boobies, sea lions and penguins all feeding together. It was an amazing sight to see.

6) Lobster Ceviche…enough said I think 😉

5) Hiking up Volcano Sierra Negra, and looking out at the 10 km calderas (one of the largest in the world). It was breath-taking to see the huge vast black expanse contrasted with bright green foliage on along the sides.

4) Being able to meet such a vast, diverse and great group of people! It was great to be able to have some great conversations and get to know so many people, and learn about different cultures, and languages, etc.

3)  Celebrating Sankt Hans, a Danish midsummer festival, a little early in honour of Marie’s heritage. Sankt Hans is a festival where you have a huge bonfire and burn a witch (made out of wood). This supposedly sends the witches back to Bloksbjerg (a mountain where witches live). It was very funny when one of the Ecuadorian workers, Hanan, came up to our fire with the witch on it and jut said “Why?”. To which Marie responded with “Por que no”.

2) Cooking and Spanish lessons with Sandra at Jatun Sacha. She was a great cook, and the food was always really great! I cannot wait to come home and to try cooking it myself.

1) Swimming with sea turtles off of Isla Isabella. They were almost as big as me, and so amazing. I was close enough that I could have touched them.

hola from the galapagos!

Hola Amigos!

I have just done my first week on the Galapagos. It has been an amazing experience so far! I have swam in a pool underneath a waterfall, macheted a field that will soon be for coffee production, played soccer with Germans and Ecuadorians (and actually stopped most of the goals!), swam with sea lions, saw sharks and sea turtles while snorkeling, watched as about 40 dolphins swam along the boat, had a whale make a surprise surfacing right next to our boat and just had some great experiences!

The people that I am volunteering with are great! There is a German couple who are teachers taking a year off traveling. They are very German, and very funny! They are the couple that I would like to be part of one day. They tease each other and there is still that spark when they look at each other that I love. There is a british girl named Kat that is the sterotypical hippy. Before coming here to volunteer she was at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. She is also a vegan. And some how her clothing and hair are always messy but is the best sort of way. I have always wanted to be that girl that makes everything look effortless, but unfortunately I have realized I am a bit more high maintainence. There is also a Danish girl, Maria, who is quiet and super sweet, we actually had an interesting conversation about taxes and social services last night. There of course many others, but these are the ones that I have gotten to know the most in my first week. For the most part they are all young (early 20´s), which makes me feel a bit old but I am coming to terms with that. I haven´t had too many revelations as of yet except for one, which is that I completely in the wrong place.

Now, I don´t mean that I am not enjoying my time, what I mean is that I am starting to understand that I have changed too much. I think before Rotman I would have thought that this is a great way to give back but now all I can think is there has to be a better way. We were macheting a field the other day and all the others were talking about how good it feels to be contributing in some way, and all I could think about was “Is planting coffee a good idea? I mean its a commodity and there is no way that this will be able to help the organization or island in a real way, will it? The commodity market is super fickle, especially coffee prices. The farm is not big enough, to produce enough that would generate a whole lot of income. Although their costs are low as they use volunteers, but still. I cannot see this as being a good decision. Also having us macheting the field cannot be the most efficient way of doing this.” If I were fluent in spanish then maybe I could have a conversation with the organization, but unfortunately I am not. The other thought that came to when we were working, and I am a bit ashamed of this, but it was “I am way over qualified for this”. I mean, maybe 6-8 years I would felt like I was contributing, but now all I can think is that my competitive advantage is not in cutting down bushes but rather in helping the organization with its over strategy.

The other thing that I find funny, not in a haha sort of way, is that it is true: whenever you get exactly what you want you want something else. I have been given a gift in the fact that this trip is exactly what I wanted after my first year at Rotman. It is the furtherest thing from MBA work as you could possibly get and all I can think about is strategy, and operations, and commodity markets. I guess I am now 100% certain that I am MBA, and that I do love business. I do belong walking those halls of Romtan. I want to make a difference but I want to do that through commerce. I am starting to think that is the only way you can really make a big enough difference.

It makes me smile because now that I have gotten what I wanted, I am looking forward to figuring out and getting what I need.

 

 

 

what I learned after the first year of my mba

School is done. It is official that I am currently half way done by MBA. As I reflect over the past year I realized that I am no longer the person I was before the program started. I have learned a lot from my first year of the MBA program, both in and outside the classroom.

Of course there are the givens: the CAPM with the beta and alpha from finance; the five forces from strategy; regressions from statistics; capacity, bottlenecks and utilization from operations; the 3 Cs and 4 Ps of marketing; supply, demand and price elasticity from micro; balance of payments, solow growth model and trade theories from macro.  These are the things that I think are taught at nearly all of the hundreds of MBA programs around the world.

Then there are the Rotman specifics ones: “what the data say versus what the data mean” from integrating data and models; “You will only have a few chances in your life to become Rich with a capital “R”, and that you’ll have to take risks to get it” from Womack’s finance class; “the constant is not like Jesus, it cannot be resurrected.” from Ajaz’s statistics course; if there is a fire alarm during a final, just stay seated and continue to write the exam which we all learned from accounting; leadership has something to do with the ability to build a Lego-man the fastest and write a really great easy (I wonder if there is a correlation-oh wait we have to build a model first and test some hypotheses).

Then there are the lessons that I learned from my first year of MBA. Things like: sleep and food really aren’t necessities they are luxuries; being drunk on a Tuesday night does not mean you’re an alcoholic, it means your social; I love team work especially the kind where everyone is stuck in the small studying rooms until ungodly hours (what can I say? I must be sadistic/masochistic) ; also being blonde has become part of my identity and it sometimes makes me feel like I have a super power. But I think the most interesting part of my experience so far is not from what I learned from any one particular subject or event; it was the overall experience.  Against all of the things listed above, two things stood out to me as being the most valuable lessons.

First, be you. I know this is a weird thing to have learned at 28 years old, but it is true. I came into the MBA program proud of getting in. I was full of passion and energy. I was 100% confident in myself and my abilities. I knew that it would be hard work and I knew that I would not be good at everything. But I just knew that there would be some things that I really excelled at. Some people may think that I was over-confident and maybe they are right. But during my first semester I found out that I was not very good at a whole heck of a lot of things. I tried to compete on grades, and GPA. I tried to get my story to sound like others’; I tried to use the correct wording to make things sound better. I tried networking like everyone else. I tried to compete for the same jobs as everyone else.

I FAILED.

I would not classify myself as a stereotypical MBA. I don’t want to be an investment banker or work in sales or trading. I don’t really want to work for Bain, McKinsey or BCG. I don’t even care that much about maximizing shareholder value (which luckily because of corporate finance we know it is the most important thing). So why then did I come to Rotman?

At the beginning of the school year, everyone seemed to separate into either Finance or Consulting. I followed into the consulting group. It was fun; my friends and I would joke about how we would work at McKinsey after graduation and have fabulous lives travelling, and being rich. Originally getting into consulting was the plan when I came to Rotman, but I never really truly knew the job. I had an idea of what consulting was but it was romanticized. Now, consulting and finance are great fields to get into, but looking back I think I got swept up. All the while, in truth, I was terrified. I was terrified to admit that I wasn’t like everyone else. I thought if I would express interest in something other than finance or consulting, that everyone would realize that I was an impostor: a student that did not belong walking the halls of Rotman. It is true-I am not like everyone else; I am me. I have a set of skills, knowledge, interests and passions that make up who I am and no one else can ever replicate that.  The amazing thing that I finally figured out is this is a great thing! Being in business school, you learn about business leaders. Most of the very successful leaders in business are those people who did not follow traditional paths. This made me realize that if I cannot find a place that I will fit into, then I can make one. Going into a job or career or any decision based on the lack alternatives is not a choice. And it is definitely not an action that will lead to happiness. I want to find my passion and pursue it. If that leads me to saving turtles in south america than that’s where I will go. If that leads me to being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company in 20 years then that’s where I will go.

What most of my classmates probably don’t know about me is that before coming to Rotman, I rarely went out. Honestly I was in bed before 10 nearly every night. It is sad but true. Another fact about pre-Rotman Sarah, is that I planned everything. And when I say everything – I mean everything. This is little bit embarrassing to admit but I actually planned out all of the courses I was going to take for my whole undergrad degree in my first year. I even had multiple versions as contingency plans. Of course, none of the versions are what I ended up taking. I was always concerned with making the wrong choices in life. I always thought that if I made the wrong choice that I would end up stuck with a life that I didn’t love, and that I wouldn’t be able to change it.

After this past year, I learned another important lesson, which is that I need to take risks and listen to my own intuition. I have learned that I need to challenge myself, and not worry so much about the mistakes. Falling done and making mistakes is how you learn; it is how you change as person. Now I am not so worried about making the wrong choice, because I have realized there is no wrong choice. All you can do is follow your intuition and have faith that you’ll find your way.

I took a risk coming to Rotman, and it is something that has changed everything in my life (literally)! Last year I was in Edmonton living in a condo with my boyfriend, working, making decent money with lots of free time, always planning but never doing. Now I am single living in residence with 3 other roommates (who are really wonderful by the way), pretty much living on debt and little sleep, but always doing and quite rarely planning.  I have also fallen in love with taking chances and saying “yes” to new opportunities because they have opened me up to such amazing people, stories and lessons. These opportunities can be anything from deciding to go to Bedford for the RDC mixer, or running for social rep (even though I didn’t win) or doing something completely crazy like going to volunteer on the Galapagos. The old pre-Rotman Sarah would have continued to plan the trip to the Galapagos, and Peru but would never have taken it.

To be honest, the only way that I can really describe the first year of MBA is that it was like military boot camp. I feel like whole Rotman experience is designed specifically to push you, challenge you and in the end maybe even break you. I know that it broke me.   What comes next is to rebuild. This rebuilding and restoration process has started but it is slow process; slow and a bit painful at times. I don’t regret coming here, actually quite the opposite. If I had never taken the risk moving out to Toronto for school then I would not be the path I am now. That decision threw me out of my comfort zone and I have learned so much about myself.  I have learned  that my limits are nowhere near where I had previously thought my limits were. I learned that I need to always challenge my preconceived notions, especially in regards to myself. I have learned not to say “I am not a finance person” or that “I cannot do that” because by saying it you are closing yourself. You are cutting yourself off from exploring different aspects of who you are.

I know that I still want to do something in business but haven’t been able to figure out the specifics. I guess what I am hoping, and what my intuition is telling me, is that by forcing myself even farther out of my comfort zone I’ll be able to figure that out. So here is to the first year being done and to the many possibilities that this summer and next year hold!