Time Machine part 2 1/2 - Spring Break B-school style

Ok - so MBA spring break alone is enough to justify the cost of going full time to an MBA program. My friends did all sorts of cool stuff. Treks to Japan, Egypt, Turkey...but I went to Thailand! No - i didn't just go to Thailand. I sailed around the islands of Thailand! How cool is that? We started off in Bangkok for 2 nights, then flew to Phuket, where we picked up our sailboats. 20 of us, 3 boats, 10 days. SOOOO awesome. Here is the link to all of my photos from the whole trip

Spring Break Thai Style

Of course, there are a TON, so here are some my faves to give you a snapshot of my trip (sorry for the layout crapiness...having problems getting this one to do what I want!!):

Bangkok...

Temples

and bars...namely the Hillary Bar! I know...they spelled it with 2 Ls, but we decided to forgive the Thai of this massive oversight, and we still took home the koozies as party favours.

And then there was the awesome food and restaurants

Then on to Phuket to pick up our boats...

And enjoy the amazing scenery and beaches by dayIncluding the Thai version of Super Troopers!
And private beach parties and barbeques by night!
And of course...the GORGEOUS sunsets when I woke every morning. I took this from my bed inside the boat!

It was amazing. I can't wait for more sailing trips. And I am so blessed to have had this opportunity!!

Time Machine Part I

Ok - so Mom thought it would be fun to just throw up a bunch of pictures and show everyone what I've been up to over the past few months of blog-land silence. So here is part I...the rest of Fall Term!

So it all started with a profile pic! This is my picture that went in the school directory, and on my ID card (and now it's on the school website - since I'm now on the Student Association). Not bad huh?

I think i mentioned earlier in the year that the Windsor pub is basically attached to school and that we spend LOTS of time there. This is the back entrance that is from our school. Check out the welcome sign! :)

Another common hang out for us is the Hobgoblin. It's a great pub that serves Thai food - here I am with one of my faves! :)

A big party in the fall I haven't blogged about - Halloween rugby style. I was Hermione from Harry Potter! So much fun! Halvor from my class (in the purple hat) hosted a pre-party at his flat. These are his brother and friend that were in town! This is Dan the Mummy Man! Stream C Social Reps!!

And then the best thing ever...Santa Claus Pub Crawl! Amazing...400 Santas take to the streets of London. And the pubs, and the bars, and the clubs. Sooooo much fun!!

Santa Girls!!!

Santa girls and Firemen! And our sleigh ride through London!

Time Machine Part 2

So here's part 2...Spring Term! The term was lots of fun but was very consumed by Winter Ball, which you all know all about. I managed to post about Austria, mainly so that I could make Jonny jealous that I got to ski in Europe before he did. But so much else went on that I haven't updated on...

First for school stuff - we had our Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities class (DEO) where we had to identify an unmet need and consider potential solutions. We did ours relating to foot pains in high heels - and I was the model for our story line

And of course, there was plenty of rugby! We hosted the London Business School Tournament. The men hosted Harvard, Smurfit and INSEAD, we hosted Wharton and Columbia. Here's our awesome team!! We won our tourney :)

There was also Cranfield - a tournament at a school north of London. They hosted us for the tournament (which we won!) and for a scottish celebration, the name of which escapes me. But it was lots of fun. here we are all gussied up for the night...

And finally, the Alumni Tournament. The Alumni/08s played against the 09s - they beat us. :( But the party was awesome and we had a great time celebrating! And the ladies in red - we're co-captains for next year!

Workin 9 to 5!

What a way to make a livin! :) I love Dolly.

Ok, so I know it's been a really really ridiculous long time since I've updated. And I've been feeling guilty and kept promising to do a long update. But then i realized that planning that is incredibly daunting, and it's better to just dive back in and give the latest. So here goes.

School is out. crazy huh? my time in B-school is already half over! it makes me really sad. not to mention that i've made some amazing friends in the 2008 class, and as of this week they're gone! :( sniff. We have the Summer Ball this weekend to close the year, and it'll be the last time I see some of them for who knows how long! Others, for just a few months, until they return to start work at the end of the summer.

As for me, I've started my internship and it's going very well. I've met some great people and am definitely challenged by my work. But I've also worked amazingly great hours (see title of the post) and have not missed a single social thing I wanted to attend. I got to go to Amsterdam with my team over the past 2 days. We did a bike tour of the city, had dinner and drinks all together. Then around midnight we walked through the city to get home and the folks from Amsterdam gave us an unofficial tour. It's kind of an interesting experience to wander through the Red Light District with 20 of your newest friends who happen to include your boss and his boss. hmmm. Even without them it would have been an interesting experience. As one of my school friends put it, it's hard to imagine hookers lined up in windows. But there they were. One after another. And such normal looking girls. pretty weird, and i find it sad, that they choose to do that to make a living. They literally hang out of the windows and open the doors and are standing half in the street. I almost ran into one of the girls at one point as I was talking to my friend trying not to make eye contact, and i just blurted "oh! she's right there isn't she!" Anyway, I forgot my camera so I don't have any pics - although some others took some so I'm sure i'll eventually get those at work. Overall, it was a nice couple of days of getting to know the team, and i think it's going to be a successful summer! It's already the end of my 3rd week (out of 10)!!
I've also been busy leading my summer league co-ed touch rugby team to victory! We won our league! Very cool. I'll be co-captain of the women's team next year, so it was a good way to start to practice and figure out how to be a coach/captain. I'm playing softball too in the London Banker's League, and that is coming to an end. We have an all day tourney on Saturday , so that should be a good time.
Finally - Happy Fourth of July to all! I'm wearing red white & blue to the office tomorrow. I wonder how many people will notice?
Hugs to all!!! xoxox Hil

Bust open the bubbly!

Time to celebrate!! First, Winter Ball was a huge success! Everyone had a great time and I've had loads of compliments! So cool. Here are the initial pics...I'll post more once our 'professional' photographer gets hers posted online! http://picasaweb.google.com/hilary.steinway/2008WinterBall

Second - I got a job with American Express! I'm still waiting for all the details, and will have a couple weeks to continue to explore opportunities and make a decision, but it's a huge relief to know that I have something to do over the summer! It's based in London, at a very cool new location, and it's a job that I'd be happy to do at a company that I'm thrilled to get to work at! So cool.

Thanks to all of you for all the good thoughts for both things! Clearly it worked!
More later...Hil

Prayers please!

So Winter Ball is less than 48 hours away. I'm not so much stressed as I'm just plain exhausted and on the verge of getting sick. I've put a lot into this event, so I'm really hopeful it goes well. Please send your prayers and happy thoughts my way! And to all the attendees, so that they all have a fab time!! And to the vendors so that every thing shows up, is correct, etc. and there are no major hiccups! And one last one for the weather. A dry night would be so very awesome!!!

Love to you all! 2 more days and I'll be back to the land of the living!!

Bonds, Bond and Bon

So I've been back in London a month, and have been so dang busy I haven't had time to post anything. My New Year's resolution was to have one "hilary" night a week, where I just say no to my friends and stay in and get things done. That's been almost every night! And I still haven't managed the truly personal stuff!! Anyway, the title is the three things that seem to be taking up the most of my time at the moment.

Bonds - It's funny that the last time I wrote was when I was studying for the Finance final, because here I am again, studying for the Part II Final. It's a week from today, and I've been so caught up with other things that I basically have to learn everything from the past 6 weeks of classes in a week!! Yikes! good thing is that I think I have about 1/6 of it down really well. Only 5 more to go!

Bond - I'm the chair of the Winter Ball. yes, i'm pretty much a glutton for punishment. But I love it. The theme is Casino Royale, and it's gonna be awesome. I've put a lot of work into it, so even if it's not, my friends better tell me it is. haha. here's the 'flyer' type thing we are using for advertising on campus

Bon - French class is up and running for me, and we've got our first exam the Tuesday after the Finance exam. It'd be fine, but this weekend is also the LBS Rugby Tournament, which of course I've also gotten myself involved in the planning of, because I just can't sit by and let things be!! Anyway, we've got 6 teams coming to play - IESE (Barcelona), INSEAD (Paris), Smurfit (Dublin), Columbia (New York), and Wharton (UPenn). We're entering 2 teams. The boys have INSEAD and Harvard coming to play, and they are also entering 2 teams. There are 200 people playing in the tournament! We have a dinner and a party, it's going to be a blast!

Other than that stuff, there's of course rugby still going on...we went to Cranfield for a Burn's Night party (famous scottish poet) - we won the tournament and had a great time doing Scottish dancing - it's like square dancing and was an absolute blast! My camera was dead, so I'm still waiting on pics from that one. I also went and skied in Austria for a VERY short weekend. BREATHTAKING! And talk about a testament to God's amazing creation! This cross was at the top of a very high peak as you got off one of the chair lifts. From the lift, you could see a whole range of the Alps...very very cool. Couldn't quite get that angle from below, but it's still pretty neat!

The house we stayed in was just what you would picture a ski chalet in the alps to look like. Check out that view! And it was ski in/ski out, which was very cool.
So right, it's a crazy busy couple more weeks, until the Winter Ball is over, then I'll be able to spend more time being a lazy student. Oh wait...there's also recruiting for summer internships!! haha. I'll slow down some day.

Thanks to all of you that have been sending me notes! I"m sorry I'm so slow on the response, but this is a much easier way to let you all know what's going on in my life at the same time!

Merrily we row along! :)

This one was started a very long time ago, but now it's finally done! A bit about sailing! I heart sailing. It is soo much fun, especially with Amy and the worm. So everyone reading this should know that my family has gone on a couple sailing trips over the years. Perhaps all of you don't know that in my freshman year at SMU I thought I'd be good on the sailing team. Ha. It was doomed from the moment my mom sent me my dad's wet suit to "use". It was from like 1902. The thing literally crumbled in my hands. nice. Anyway, I made it out on the water in these dinky little 12' boats twice. Capsized both times. That was the end of my SMU sailing team debut. When I got to LBS, I heard about the sailing club and laughed, said No Way, and moved on. But then a couple of my friends went on the first trip and had a great time. And when I saw the photos, I realized that the boats are like what we sailed as a family. So I signed up to go on the next regatta trip, but on the "cruising" boat. Amy and I were to just hang out and learn the ropes, but not race. Well, I made a friend the night before we left who happens to be in the group that assigns the boats. On the way down to Portsmouth, he asked me if Amy and I wouldn't mind filling in on their boat as 2 people had dropped out last minute and they needed the full crew for racing. So we stepped up. Here we are in our gear...yes...it's VERY cold!! We learned what to do and got underway. When you're going fast you have to sometimes lean out over the edge to balance the boat better - something about the best angle for the boat to be in the water to get the most speed. We had an amazing skipper who really knew what he was doing! So anyway, the format is that you head out in the morning and do a race that lasts somewhere around an hour I think. Then you make some lunch while sailing around waiting for the afternoon race,

after which you head into port, hang out for the evening, and do it all again the next day. You are ranked based on your best 3 out of the 4 races. So we have 3 brand new people on our boat (me and amy included) and head out to learn how to sail about an hour before the first race. We learned to fly the spinnaker! So cool! Above is a picture of us actually underway with it up (we're the one on the left - the club has our own spinnaker with the London Business School logo on it. Super cool!! And in fact, this pic was taken by one of the peeps on another LBS boat...as we were on our way to a win! That's right! Go us! We won the whole dang regatta! It's been awhile since...I think we placed 1st in the first 2 races, and 2nd in the first race on Sunday. It was really amazing! Here's the winning team on the way into port.
When we were done racing the first day, we headed in to Gunswharf, which is where we moored for the night. It's a pretty cool little water front town. Lots of new development right on the water, with restaurants, shops, bars, and lots of activity in general. This is a picture of the massive statue building thing in Gunswharf. It lights up blue at night and is pretty cool. We had a great time, but I was so exhausted from working so hard all day that I didn't go out with the crew that partied. We slept on the boats and had a good breakfast in the morning. Went back out the second day and as you know, won it all! I got a nice coffee mug as my trophy ;) It says "Hot brew for a hot crew" haha. I love it though. :)

So after that performance, Amy and I were invited back out for the Alumni challenge, in which alumni get together a couple boats, as do current students, and we race in another one of these regattas in the Solent. There were 35 boats entered in this one! And the weather was terrible. Quite a different experience. We ended up tearing a hole in the LBS Spinnaker! boo! Here we are trying to fix it in the boat. We also were experiencing engine problems, which is why there are people in the background looking inside the engine compartment!! Not good! We sailed in the first 2 races the first day, ended up throwing 2 people overboard at one point on a "chinese jibe" - aka, the mainsail caught a gust that threw the boom across the boat and took 2 people with it!! They were ok, except for wet and cold. Then we had the engine problems, and I think the ripped spinnaker happened right around then, too. We had help from the Sunsail folks that night and thought our engine was ok. But when we were between races we had more problems, and our skipper decided to forfeit the last race to make sure we got in before the tides got to strong in case we lost our engine again. The good thing is, this one was about the socializing as much as the sailing. And it was a great time with the crew and alumni. On the left is my boat for this regatta, on the right is Gloria and me with the biggest pint we'd ever seen. Apparantly it's the same size as a regular pint, the glass just made it look ridiculous!

So there's my sailing adventures. Amy and I are off to Thailand for Spring Break with the club...we're going to sail something like 10 days, after spending a couple days on land in Bangkok. I'm super excited and can't wait to tell you all about it!!