Burton Simmons’s “Adventures in Business School”

So you write one post critical of a few things about Willamette, and - because I’m a computer nerd and I pay attention to the logs - 6 unique visitors (all from Willamette University) visit the site within an hour. (Notable because I rarely get more than two visitors in any given day, most of which are people looking for hints on Markstrat.) All visits were directly to that somewhat critical post. I strongly suspect someone saw the post and emailed it around, which makes me an unhappy panda.

In the interests of not stepping on too many toes until I’m safely out of here, I’m going to go ahead and make that post “private”. I’ll re-enable it when I graduate. If anyone is that curious about what I wrote, all you need do is email me and I’d be happy to discuss it.

… by the way, if anyone knows who “Reader Zero” was, I’d love to find out how they found my post so quickly.

Tomorrow is the Northwest MBA Consortium Career Day up in Portland and, being close to graduation, I shall of course attend. I’ll be trying to find a job in IT Management, IT Consulting, or something of that nature that allows me to leverage my background and the education I’ve thus far received. It will be an interesting experience.

Trying to find gainful employment is why I set up my burtonsimmons.info domain and why I had new business cards made (thanks, Ink Spot!) to reflect that. I went for something simple, easy to read, and somewhat classic looking.

Now that I’m working through my last semester of business school, it’s time for me to start looking for a job when I get out. (I probably should have started doing this earlier, but I chose to focus more on the academic side of business school than the career side.)

So the short of it is, I’m looking for a job.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to update my resume slightly and make it available online. Let me introduce burtonsimmons.info, my own usage of the relatively new .info top-level domain. I hope to use this site (which has information that’s still otherwise pretty easy to find out about me) as a way of sharing my resume and adding context to the information on it. We’ll see if it work, but I like it!

One of the three classes I’m taking is “Leadership”. The class is about (if I understand correctly):

• What a leader is
• What makes a good leader
• Knowing ourselves
• What we can do to make ourselves good leaders

I’m looking forward to the self-examination. Tragically, this involves taking a lot of personality tests - something I’ve always disdained because they never seem to take into account the nuances of a person. The reasoning behind taking them, though, is simple: know ourselves and be able to see how we stack up against a so-called leader. (Then knowing what areas of self we have to work on to be most effective.)

The class is a lot of work. Not that I’m one to complain about work, I just find it to be occupying a disproportionate amount of my time. The professor’s method is to assign us a bunch of reading - all of it relevant - but trust us to read it and not test us on it or even necessarily discuss it in class. The idea, it seems, is that we’ll read it because it’s good for us. I, of course, always do the readings, but I cry with frustration whenever I try to decipher the syllabus to figure out exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. I mean, it says things like “on the first and fifth sessions, do [this]“, and makes me cross reference the reading we’re supposed to be doing with the list that tells me who wrote it, since I have to hunt it down in the library catalogs myself. Just a minor frustration, really, but a frustration nonetheless.

Since a leadership position is a goal of mine, I hope I get a lot out of this class. I’ve already known some areas I need to work on for a long time and I know many of my weaknesses, but it will be interesting to see what’s revealed through this class.

Tomorrow is my first day of school of my last semester of my MBA program (if, of course, all goes according to plan.) I’m signed up for a paltry three classes at this point, which is precisely the number I need to graduate. There are, of course, plenty of classes I want to take, but financial reasons (if nothing else) prevent that.

I’m currently registered for:
Data Mining/Information Based Products
Operations Management
Leadership

I’m hoping that these three classes will round out my education nicely as well as giving me the background I need for success in the future. Hopefully, too, the schedule will give me plenty of time for job hunting - and I assure you, my dear reader(s), that a job is something I’m eager to find.

It’s just days before spring semester starts (and a full month after I took my last final), and I finally received all my grades for fall semester.

Business & Economic Forecasting: A-
Negotiation: A-
Marketing Strategy: A-
Public Finance: A
Project Management: A

While my grades were better over the summer, my GPA then was based off just one class. This time I took five graduate courses and managed to end up with a 3.82 GPA for the semester and it pushed my overall GPA up to a 3.74!

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty awesome about that.

I wanted to take a moment during my winter break, after my last final of fall semester but before grades have arrived or spring semester starts, to thank those people who’ve supported me during my MBA adventure. I’m not going to name names, but if you’re reading this, chances are pretty decent that you’ve been a good friend to me during my trials and tribulations as a broke college student (again).

I have some of the best friends on the planet; friends who have been kind, patient, understanding, and supportive as I run through this particular phase of my life. I have friends that give as much as they can while understanding I can’t reciprocate - and they don’t complain. Those friends are the friends I’ll cherish for life, and to whom I am deeply indebted.

And to those friends, I can only say, “Thank you. You are appreciated.”

As I noted a few posts ago, my team managed to be the co-champions of the MarkStrat simulation. In the spirit of showing off, we were actually given a nice-looking certificate by the professor for doing such an awesome job. (He said something like, “Burton, I was impressed. Not only did you talk a lot of smack at the beginning, but your team actually managed to win, too!”)

Anyway, here’s my piece of paper:

In my Public Finance class, which ended yesterday, the other half of the final was that we had to give a small-group presentation on ways to fix Oregon’s revenue problems. You see, Oregon relies on income taxes for most of the money for the general fund which, combined with the lottery, gasoline taxes, and federal funds more or less makes up all of Oregon’s budget. The problem with income taxes is that they’re generally volatile and highly responsive to positive or negative economic indicators. (For instance, tax revenues were way down in the 1981-83 biennium due to timber issues and almost catastrophically low in 2001-03 due to the tech crash.)

How do you solve the problem of such amazingly high revenue swings?

Two groups approached the problem from a tax diversification standpoint. One encouraged the raising of property taxes (due to several measures in the late 90’s which limited property taxes), and another group advocated switching almost entirely to a sales-tax funded system, much like the State of Washington. Neither of these solutions appealed to my group; we don’t necessarily like taxes that much and we dislike the income tax the least because it’s very progressive in nature.

Looking at the problem, we realized that Oregon tends to have high highs and low lows. Moreover, Oregon’s revenues tend to be strong in all but recession/depression years. Another issue is that, due to the balanced budget amendment Oregon has, we can’t borrow to cover short years. Furthermore, when we do have a good tax year, we refund most of the excess collected taxes in the form of the kicker.

My group’s (highly elegant) solution was to eliminate the kicker, instead redirecting those funds into a rainy day fund that would automatically be added to the budget during periods of revenue shortfall. (I say “automatically”, as opposed to “by legislative or administrative action”, so that it can’t be used as a political tool.) Had we started this after the 1981-83 recession, we could have more than halved the effect of the 2001-2003 crisis on state government, which - considering that the State of Oregon is the state’s largest employer - would have resulted in remarkably positive results. Add to this the economic bonus of NOT slashing all government spending during a crisis - which, in our opinion, is vastly more beneficial than the small economic bonus provided by kicker checks - and I think our presentation was pretty solid.

Today is the beginning of the end of the semester for me. Tonight I take the final for my public finance class.

I’m pretty terrified.

Yes, I have - of course - put time into studying. I’ve read darn near the entire textbook, and I’ve attended every class and done a good job on all the homework. The problem is going to be the format of the test - which will be the same as that of the midterm.

Now on the multiple-choice midterm, I had the second-highest grade in class. I was only one point behind, too. However, the problem is that the midterm (and final) were written by the authors of the textbook. Our class discussions have been helpful (and I have pages and pages of notes) but the questions asked are truly obscure.

For instance (and I’m generalizing here):

“This phrase” is an example of:
a) something
b) something else
c) a third thing
d) even a fourth option

I’ve never heard of “this phrase”. I even went back to the book (as did the person who got the highest grade on the midterm) to try to look up the answer. We looked up all the different things that could be the answer, and still never found it. That makes it a little difficult - even on a multiple choice test.

I’m looking forward to this test, though… because after I take it, it’ll be done.