Crawling Across the Finish Line

I hit the submit button for Harvard this morning, with just a handful of minutes before the deadline.  The Harvard essays were definitely tricky, but given that it was my final application, it really wasn’t that bad.  I had already come up with most of the ideas that I needed from doing all of my other applications.  Therefore the Harvard app was more like putting a puzzle together than building something from scratch.

People usually refer to applying as a race, hence the finish line reference above, but really it’s more like figure skating.  You give your all during a relatively short performance, you’re exhausted afterwards, you’re rated by a group of judges who will be looking closely at your mistakes, and whether or not you win depends on  how well everyone else did.

After I made my final click, I turned around and stared at my apartment.  It looks like a bomb went off.  Laundry is backed up, dishes piled high, and garbage bags waiting to be thrown out.  I’m usually pretty good with keeping my apartment clean, but the past few weeks have obviously been an outlier.

As I started thinking about all the things I could get to, now that the applications were out of the way, I started to feel a surge of energy through my body.  Having sacrificed my health, my time, and to some degree my sanity, I was ready to start taking back my life.  I began composing a to do list.  I started with all the things I said I would do after completing the GMAT and never got to.  Volunteering, tennis, and working on my blog were the major themes.

I’m going to try not to think about business school at all for at least a week and half as I know the upcoming waiting game will be very stressful.