first year at IMD

So I can't believe I have only been in school for a week and a half. We all agree that it really seems a lot longer... maybe just in hours spent together. This week we have had so many readings, case studies.... My classes this past week started at 8 am, and sometimes lasted until 8pm, or assigned group work until 11:30... It has been good fun, but I am exhausted.
IMD has a different approach to business school. We take leadership classes, which is similar to organisational behaviour. This really translates as our teacher is a psychologist. So it has made for an interesting week.
First I will introduce my group though. I am in a study group of 8, including myself. We are 5 guys and 3 women. Tom(Germany), Tomo(Japan), Pablo(Pablo), Alex (England) and Ivica (Croatia). The 2 other women are from Kate (China) and Carol(Brazil). IMD assigns a study group, and we work together for all of our assignments for all of our classes. So we review our case studies together, our reading and participate in all events together... It makes for interesting conversation, and even more interesting disagreements. But really, I think I am very lucky with our group. We are disfunctional, like the rest of the groups, but we do really get along well, and even after homework hang out with eachother voluntarily at dinner or at the bar. So we are together a lot. We will have another group for our start-up project (we help a start up business fix their problems or launch into the market) and in March we will be assigned into a different study group.
So this week we had a lot of leadership courses. We were assigned a 'group therapist/consultatnt', she isn't quite a psychologist, but she is something similar. She would talk to us about how we interact with eachother, and how we interact with ourselves. It was really interesting to get an outside view on this though.
On Thursday we had an outdoor activity in which she was the facilitator. We went to a retreat type place and spent all day outside doing group challenges. An example... they created a square, with some plastic tape, maybe 10 ft by 10ft. they placed a large jug... with maybe 20 litres of water in it. They gave us 2 planks, 2 metal poles, 2 long sticks of bamboo, and some rope. We had to figure out how to get the water out of the center of the area, without walking in the square, dragging the water. So we had to work together to figure out how to do this. We were video taped throughout all the exercises and then we had to evaluate later on how we interacted together.
So really all this week we have been learning about the psychological aspect of group dynamics.
Lunches at IMD... ARE AMAZING!!! The food is really good. Everyday we have a regular main dish with meat and vegetarian, tons of salads and sides, cheeses, bread... and the desert table is amazing. I think everyday we have 10 different deserts. I will have to take a picture...
Well I best get going... I guess I will be updating on Sundays. I will try to take my camera with me to take pictures this week and load them up.