I think one of the most useful skills I've developed over my lifetime is the ability to wake up early--like ridiculously early. This morning, I walked out of my house at 6AM to come to work, and now, at 7:10, I've been pounding away, running reports, spreadsheets, etc. for our veture review. I'm the ultimate last minute guy, and I can't tell you how many times in college that I would wake up at 6 to finish papers for 9:30 classes. I'd much rather do that than stay up late. When I stay up late, with each passing minute, I get slower and slower. Often times in school, I would quit at midnight and then just wake up six hours later to do something, fully refreshed and that much more efficient.
That's why I think this whole Stanford thing will work out with GM. (Should I actually get in for next year.) I really think I can work from 6-9 on GM stuff each day, coordinating with NY time, and get a lot done, and not interrupt my grad work. Maybe I'm smoking dope, but I just can't conceive of a situation where I can't put in 15-20 hours a week doing something else. In fact, I think I'll need to, because I need distraction. I had a great conversation with an analyst from CM Capital the other day about Stanford and grad school in general. She said first term was really time consuming, but that's about the only point where she didn't have a lot of extra time to do other things, and a lot of that was because of classes she should have worked to pass out of like statistics. We'll see, I suppose.