I just got my graded accounting midterm back, and let's just say I'm not making the dean's list. In fact, it's safe to say that at this rate I'm not even going to make Craigslist.
It's a shame because I had written an entire paragraph for this journal entry professing my newly discovered love for all things accounting (I called it funny, sexy, and more), but I am sad to say that this relationship has proven to be wholely one-sided. I feel so used.
Welcome to the "uh-oh" section of my MBA journal. The work keeps coming; I keep working. Last week was our accounting midterm (take-home, 12 hours), an organizational behavior presentation, and major strategy project deadline. This week doesn't look much better, and I'm taking off to attend the Net Impact Conference in California this weekend.
Net Impact is a national MBA club that exists to facilitate dialogue among students and businesses about the concept of a "triple bottom line." Businesses who look at their net impact evaluate themselves using three success measures: profit, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility. The club holds a national conference each year, and about 15 of us UW MBA students are going. I'm excited to meet other people in MBA programs who share my interests.
I have gotten involved on campus in other ways, too. I have started an "arts and culture" section of our school's Student Support Network, a club that organizes social events, although I have been decidedly ineffective at communicating the value of the arts to my classmates. People don't seem to be terribly interested in attending a poetry reading, unless they'll be sitting next to the CEO of Starbucks.
The good news about my involvement with the SSN is that I was given my first MBA title. Of course, when I heard that I got a title, I said, "I want to be the Vice President of Arts and Culture." I was informed that SSN officers are called ministers, not vice presidents: the Minister of Conversation, the Minister of Confusion, etc. I was allowed to choose my title. I chose to be the Minister of Vice Presidents.
I am also involved with the MBA program's Identity Initiative. From what I can tell, this means that I will be working to help develop our program's "brand," if you will: the qualities that our program wants to be known for, both internally and within our community. Little did my classmates know when they chose me, a hippie in a business suit, to spearhead this Identity Initiative.
Complete with MBA titles, homework, and exams, I have completely reverted back to the student's lifestyle. My world exists within one square mile of Seattle. I am shamefully out of touch with political and social current events. And, last week, I sent my parents the link to add money to my Husky Card account so I could buy vegetarian lentil soup from the Balmer Hall Cafe. I have conversations in terms of economics and statistics. I have been explaining and defining the world in terms of graphs and figures: normal distributions, supply/demand curves, and price elasticity of demand. When buildings explode in the movies, they always seem to take a short breath in before they burst into the air. First quarter core is the short breath before the explosion.
As far as classes go, I'm taking five and a nubbin. They are:
• Economics: The Art of Making Simple Concepts Very Complicated
• Accounting: The Class That Broke My Heart
• Statistics: Seeing Perfect Normal Distributions in Everything, Including Light Fixtures, Breasts, and Volkswagen Beetles. My statistics professor can recite pi to 50 digits. I can recite it to 10 because of a song on my iPod.
• Strategy: Eight Hours of Preparation Before Each Class
• Management: My Last Hope for a Decent Cumulative GPA
Management 510 is the nubbin: a yearlong, two-credit course developed to help us with our presentation, writing, and communication skills. This is a new concept for UW, a concept that came from research suggesting that presentation, writing, and communication skills are the most important qualities that employers seek when recruiting MBAs for jobs. Unfortunately, these are also the most difficult to teach.
All of my classes follow the same progression: start from square one and proceed at an exponential rate. In other masters' programs, people are expected to already have a good deal of knowledge about the subject before they enter. The MBA core classes are different. Some people in my class are CPAs but have never supervised staff before. Others come to the program with a BA in Economics, but couldn't tell you the difference between a balance sheet and a balance beam. For this reason, our classes begin with the basics and take off from there. The trouble is, it seems we're covering from freshman level to graduate level material in one quarter. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but the first two sentences out of my economics professor's mouth covered the entire quarter of preparatory economics I took at Portland Community College.
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