Apartment 219: 10 August

Well, after a short interlude in London and Switzerland, I'm on the move again. I'm sitting on the floor in apartment 219, a few papers scattered around me. There is no furniture, just a chocolate brown carpet and whitewashed walls. In case you are confused, I'm not an inmate at Wormwood Scrubs but a student at Harvard Business School. And although, there is nothing to show that I actually live here apart from a few clothes and the bed which I bought yesterday, slowly I will buy knives, forks, lamps, a kettle, and other things to turn this into my home.

I'm living on campus, just 2 minutes walk from the Spangler building (think club house with food, drink, social life, etc), 2.5 minutes from the Arbuckle (where we'll be grilled three times a day), and within spitting distance of Shad Hall (the gob-smacking gym).

Everything is in exquisite condition: the grass perfectly green and manicured, each building's red brickwork immaculate, and not a sign of flaking paint on the gleaming white spires. I'd imagine that you'd need an army of workers to weed, groom, polish, buff, and scrub 24 hours a day to get it to look like this, but if such an army exists I haven't seen it (yet). Without the hub-bub of students (the bulk of whom arrive in about 3 weeks), the campus has a surreal quality. It's almost like walking around a movie set, I'm never quite sure if it's real or not.

On Thursday morning, horribly jet-lagged, I woke early and went for a run along the river. Lone rowers sculled silently, slicing through the flat water whilst teams of four powered past with coaches barking orders through megaphones. This scene of university athleticism was fairly unremarkable on its own. But what struck me is that in Durham the coaches raced along the tow path on their bicycles dodging people, dogs, and large rodents. Here in Cambridge they have their own mini motor-launches allowing them to cruise alongside the boats whilst reading the Wall Street Journal.

Analytics - a 2 week boot camp that HBS run to teach non-bankers/consultants about financial modeling, statistics, regression analysis and all other kinds of weird and wonderful analytical tool - starts on Sunday. I've been told it's going to be "pretty intense", by which I'm guessing mind-boggling and grueling would be a more apt descriptions. I'll let you know.