It’s time to get real with you Social Edge readers, my fellow travelers.

My favorite (favourite?!) band is Keane (British lads, appropriate given my current location).  A line from one of their songs often echoes in my mind: “You’ve wandered too far / from the person you are.”

Thanks to the Skoll World Forum, I’ve returned to the person I am. It educated me, to be sure. But more importantly, it both grounded and moved me, and reconnected me with my core.

My head is bursting with social enterprise ideas. My gut is telling me to get started. My feet are walking on air. My heart is singing and I’m inspired in my bones.

Why? Well, it was partly the content of the breakout sessions, partly the organic conversations (with social entrepreneurship luminaries, moral compasses and modern-day heroes like Bill Drayton, Jeff Skoll, Eric Schwarz, J.B. Schramm, and Paul Farmer—to name just a few), and partly the plenary speakers (how could you NOT be inspired by Al Gore and Jimmy Carter?!).

Even at a school as socially-minded as Haas (see our recent #1 ranking in CSR), it’s easy to get disconnected from the social enterprise community. There are lots of distractions, carrots and open doors—clubs and case competitions, academics (), interviewing for companies you couldn't care less about, and generally questioning who you are and what you’re meant to do.

Sometimes it’s hard to feel like you’re moving in the direction of your dreams—that you’re exercising your passions day in and day out and staying plugged into a world that really excites you—when you’re immersed in learning finance and accounting skills, and generally way busier than you want to be with things that, frankly, feel a bit peripheral. It’s not an indictment of Haas, it’s just a fact of life in business school.

Maybe it’s strange to type this from a country in which I’m a foreigner and have never visited, but the World Forum brought me home. I felt like a local amidst this sea of humanity, passion, empathy, power, possibility, hope, and realistic idealism.

 
What an incredible way to spend my spring break. There’s no way I would have traded the pounding rain and wind chill of Oxford for the sun and sand of my tanned classmates laying on tropical beaches sipping pina coladas.