Since my first blog was a bit serious, I wanted to keep my second blog a lighter read. Again, I promise to make this short but entertaining. Growing up as a 90's kid, I loved watching sitcoms. And until today, I remember a lot of the famous catchphrases. Some memorable ones include: how you doing?, suit-up!, have you met Ted? or Bazinga! Hearing them automatically triggers happy thoughts. Even across different cultures, as I found out on campus. For us INSEADers, even students and professors have our own most-used catchphrases.

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I am a minority at INSEAD. Coming in, I had never taken a business or quantitative degree – ever! Even though I had already braced myself for a challenge when I decided to apply, I still found myself initially overwhelmed in the first couple of weeks of classes. I was sitting in finance class with CFA-certified colleagues and computing regression models with engineers!

• Read more about P1 with a Poet: Five Ways to Survive (and Thrive!)

Prior to joining the MBA programme, I have always been amazed by the pride that INSEADers have and the strong bond that they share with one another. Five months into the programme, I got to discover what sets INSEADERs apart and to belong to this unique community and culture. With more than 200 students across two campuses and more than 50,000 alumni, my journey at INSEAD has been rich with friendships and impactful encounters that have significantly shaped me.

• Read more about What sets INSEADERs apart?

The 19Js are going into recruitment season, the 19Ds are preparing for their internships, and the very air on campus is tense but buzzing. I feel this is the right time to write about asking for and offering help – a critical part of the essence of INSEAD. “How do you randomly reach out to people and ask them for advice? It isn’t that easy after all, right?” a prospective candidate rhetorically asked me at a recent INSEAD admissions event. The thing is though, it is that easy; and INSEAD makes it easier still.

• Read more about Ask.

For most of us at INSEAD, the MBA experience is also about moving to a completely different geography, and adjusting to a new culture. It was no different for me when I first arrived in Singapore a month and a half ago. Cultural shocks, misunderstandings, some confusion… Though little by little I started to observe – and in some cases, even mimic – some of the Singaporean ways of living. Let’s say that you are an authentic Singaporean when…

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As Linkin Park used to say, time is indeed a valuable thing, and its opportunity cost is incredibly high it at INSEAD: for each activity that you are choosing, there are three or four valid alternatives that you are implicitly turning down. I believe that every student in the MBA class will agree with me when I say that I have this constant feeling of not having enough time to carry out all the things that I would like to do.

• Read more about Time, ROI and Serendipity

I had the privilege of visiting some of Indonesia’s most exciting tech firms over the weekend of 1-2 Feb during the Jakarta Trek organised by the INSEAD Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Club. While I had often heard about Southeast Asia as a rapidly emerging market, this visit was eye-opening for me as I witnessed it in a very concrete way.

• Read more about A Glimpse into Indonesia’s Digital Revolution

When I came to INSEAD, I had a notion that given the short time span of 10 months and the pace of things here, it would be almost impossible to establish any kind of bonds or friendships here. Four months and two periods later, I am so happy with the fact that how terribly wrong I was.

• Read more about The beauty of INSEAD Friendships!

It's been one month since INSEAD started and I am finally beginning to feel the heat. The first month was pretty chilled out - welcome week, welcome party, Dean's party, buddy dinner, section dinner, nationality dinner, broke dinner, fancy dinner, fancy clubbing, cheap clubbing, skipping dinner and straight to the drinks - time was just going by and people were going out for trips every weekend (not yours truly though - thanks finance recruitment).

• Read more about Time Management in the life of an INSEADer

Today is Sunday, February 3rd. It's the first work day in February in Abu Dhabi. The official first work day of our second half of the INSEAD MBA programme. The 40+ of us in Abu Dhabi just spent an entire eight hours in a Crack the Case session with David Ohrvall, and about 1/5 of the class was filled with GEMBA students. Because we are a much smaller class than on the other two campuses, David said he could give us one more session hence bring us to a next level of cracking case interviews.

• Read more about Halfway Through the World - P3 in Abu Dhabi