gapyear

Time goes by fast and life always moves on. After 4 years in Tokyo, life brought me – or more precisely, I asked life to bring me – to a new destination. Not Bangkok, but the beautiful lake side city, Lausanne.

Life has its own way of staging. In the process of it, I guess it is hard to see through, but you would have a sense of the flow, and you would feel it when it is time.

In my case, after 2 years of struggling-slash-meditation, and another 2 years of different attempting-slash-experimenting, I decided to leave Tokyo temporarily and took a leap of faith in pursuing an MBA with IMD. It is not an easy decision; it never is. But after a while, you know you will only have two options: to give up, or to take a jump. I jumped, and so far, so good.

The first month in Lausanne flew by quickly. After a brief vacation in Thailand, I landed at Zurich in a pale morning on the new year’s day. 2 hours sleepy train ride later, I found myself in this lonely city with two huge luggages and unresolved tiredness from serious jet-lag and vacation excitement. To make things worse, almost no shops were open in the holiday season, and I was just lucky enough to have grabbed some survival stuff at the only opening stores near the train station, and hoped I can get by the first week with minimal supplies. Lessons learned #1: never expect Japan supermarket hours in Europe!!

Anyhow, I figured I could use this food shortage situation to lose some newly gained weight from the Thailand trip, which actually worked. lol. So picture this: I was basically alone in the first couple of days in the new year, survived on croissant and cheap hams, while figuring out the extremely old apartment building that I had to live in. It was purely adventurous.

Well, nothing is more adventurous than the ride with IMD I just started to take. It just started; but I have already confirmed I do not regret my decision at all. It felt so good to know at every moment that, the things I am doing now, is 100% for myself and will pay off both physically and spiritually, not to mention the surprises I just discovered about myself that came along with those. It has been a blast already.

Nonetheless, it is very hard to study so much new things within a year. I felt different level/kind of challenge all day everyday. For example, finance is very challenging to almost everyone, including myself, however I enjoyed the challenge so much that I felt so fulfilled when I crack the problems and understood some phenomena better in the financial perspective. While some subjects such as marketing and operations, are so very distant from my past experiences or my background, they are so challenging that I had to focus all my energy to imagine myself in the situations and try to think of something meaningful or insightful. In general, it is fun.

Last Thursday, we met our Start-up partners for the first time. Although I cannot tell the contents of the project, what I can tell is that I am so looking forward to the future 10 weeks working with them and I have already gone through many ideas in my head.

February just started. I know life is going to be hard for a while, but hard and enjoyable at the same time. I no longer feel the stress and concern I constantly had when I was in Tokyo. I am very calm right now, and I know I am discovering myself for sure.

Talk to you again soon.

Junyi