Peter Sherman, until recently one of our student writers but now a newly minted MBA graduate, reflects on the time that he has spent studying at IESE business school in Spain and looks forward to returning to the cares and stresses of day-to-day working life

I guess I can no longer call myself an MBA insider – I graduated last week, so I’m now more of an MBA outsider. Combine that with the fact that I have spent the last month out of Barcelona and that this is my last column for The Times and this is a good opportunity for to give an objective end-of-season review of my time at IESE.

Sitting in the Great Hall as my friends were being called up to receive their graduation certificates, I was struck again by the diversity of the student body. There were students from 45 countries in my year alone; their ages ranged from early twenties to late thirties, and people’s working backgrounds varied from banking to molecular biology via engineering.

N. R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman of Infosys Technologies, gave a speech about the global nature of business management in the 21st century, but he was preaching to the converted – the vast majority of people in the room had started in country A, studied in country B and were now off to work in country C.

The other thing that struck me as I sat in that room was how glad I was to be leaving. There is no denying that I have had one of the best experiences of my life – living in Barcelona, making new friends, jetting around the world on an endless succession of holidays – but it is time to rejoin the real world.

Two years is a very long time for a 30-year-old to be out of the rat race and there is only so much relaxing you can do. I was in the Russian and Turkish baths in New York yesterday and, as I looked around at everyone sweating off the stress of another hard week, I realised that I had no such stress and hadn’t for a very long time. The first year of the MBA is very tough and involves a lot of work, but even that is not real stress – it’s just a lot of reading and a lot of time commitments.

Maybe I’m unusual, but I think we all need a bit of stress in our lives to make us appreciate the good times and to help us to feel alive. I’m looking forward to the stress of the real world, if only to help me to appreciate how great I have had it over the past couple of years. This is the final article in our MBA Insider series.

Next week we will begin a new series looking at how to cope with information overload.

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