Burton Simmons’s “Adventures in Business School”

Finally, we’re at the tail end of the semester.  Brownwater’s over - I even managed to crawl out of my funk long enough to attend a few events.  All that’s left between me and the summer internship I haven’t got is three finals, a project, a short paper - and IKEWs.  Thankfully, the finals are take-home, which means I can work on my own schedule.  Classes are done with, so my schedule is my own for the most part.  I can sleep whenever I need to - though I haven’t been sleeping well lately.

But the end is in sight.  Lots of stress is gone, and it’ll just be a matter of putting everything together.  Keep your fingers crossed, kids!
Oh, and hopefully, we can get this season’s AMT up and published soon, too.  That would be nice.

So I’m currently struggling a lot with a case write-up for my finance class.  I feel lost (just as I did last semester) because there’s all this talk about stock valuation and corporate models and all that and we’re NEVER taught any real way to connect that to the real world.  Nowhere can I find a simple “take these 10 variables from the 10-k, plug them into this equation, and here you go.”  As a result, everything I’m reading uses terminology that I can’t actually relate to the real world.  Oh, discounted future cash flows?  As of when?  It’s all a guess anyway.

So yeah.  Finance is a joke.  It really is.  Understanding things like opportunity cost and the time value of money are important, but obscure arcane things like “stock valuation” which have little or no effect on things like “stock price” are irrelevant and stressful.

I have a really big presentation tomorrow - in front of a bunch of people.  It’s a major chunk of our grade in one of our classes.  I’m really stressed; we just finished the powerpoint slides (at some point I’ll write about how much I hate powerpoint) and I’ve written down three pages of what I need to say… and have memorized by tomorrow.

Of course, I have another presentation (a big chunk of another grade) on Monday (along with a paper due) and a final on Wednesday - as well as a big write-up for IKEWs.  So I’m not going to be having a whole lot of fun for a while.  (As if that was allowed in this program.)

I have a midterm in 35 minutes.  That’s stressful.  Tomorrow I have to have a paper ready to give to the Salvation Army.

Next week we have:

• A PaCE for-profit presentation (culmination project)
• A PaCE not-for-profit presentation (culmination project)
• A presentation on taking our for-profit project international.
• A case write-up due (these take between 10-20 hours.)
• Another homework assignment due

The following week I have:

• Our Ethics in Business Presentation
• A final exam in our Strategy class

The following week I have

• Final IKEW (pass/no pass)
• Data modeling project due
• 4 take-home finals

… and somewhere in there we have to publish for AMT this semester and have our Brownwater 3-day party (I’m on the planning committee as VP of ASA).  I feel like I’m forgetting something, too.

In the ongoing drama of super-curricular extra work, in our first year at Atkinson we have to get ourselves a Microsoft Excel XP Specialist certification. The total process, thankfully, takes only about an hour and a half between the practice exam (highly recommended) and the actual one. I took my test yesterday and scored a 90% - quite the disappointment for me, though only 70% is required to pass.

The test is highly structured and demands answers in very precise (and, let’s face it, bizarre ways.) We were given a series of 15 questions that involved doing stuff on various worksheets. You’re actually penalized for knowing shortcuts in Excel during this test since your actions as well as the results are tracked. So while I only got 90% of the test right, I’m absolutely convinced that my results were 100% correct.

I mean, let’s look at some of the things I’m now certified to do:

• Insert, delete and move cells
• Check spelling
• Save workbooks using different names and file formats
• Modify row and column settings
• Insert and delete worksheets
• View and edit comments

While this list isn’t comprehensive, I knew how to do all of it before taking the test. Seriously, this certification isn’t anything I’ll ever put on my resume because (for me) it would be out of place among the “5 years supporting Microsoft Office in an enterprise environment” and “1 year programming Cicso routers”. Yeah… I’m also certified to run the Excel spell checker…

I’m having a difficult time right now in the program. I’m getting very disillusioned with the MBA process here for a variety of reasons.

I’ve never been a fan of the concept of having people do as much work as possible and calling that a learning experience. There’s a lot in this program I’m missing because of the way groups are set up. The design here is to throw as much work and as many learning objectives at us as possible and hope that some of them stick. The breadth of work is so vast that depth isn’t possible, and I feel like I’m not getting as much from this program as I deserve (and am paying for.) It’s for that reason that I feel like I couldn’t recommend this program at this time.

I was told by an administrative staff member the other day that this is a professional degree, so it’s not just academics - it’s networking and career activities, too. And I’d better start doing all three if I want to get the most out of the program. If that means going from a 3.6 GPA to a 3.5, well… so be it.

That rankled me. We’re all feeling overwhelmed by the workload right now (it’s not just me) and the amount of ourselves that we can put into our projects is dwindling quickly to zero. There are health effects, too. It’s hitting us all, and I don’t like it. In all fairness, the faculty is starting to see this and maybe one day in the future it’ll get fixed.

Thank God.  Spring Break starts in just a few hours… a week off.  I need it.  I’m feeling particularly burned out lately.  Of course, the final month of this semester’s going to be a killer: multiple big-ticket presentations, assignments, readings, etc.  THEN we have finals.

And I actually have work that I’ve been putting off that I’ll need to do over the break.  Sigh.

We’re wrapping up midterm season this week, which will be nice.

First was our Statistics midterm. This was not the best midterm I’ve ever taken. Despite my preparations, I actually ran out of time on the very last question and - to my infinite shame - just made up a number. Literally. The rest of it I feel pretty good about so hopefully that won’t ding my grade too much.

Then we had our midterm in our Operations and Information Systems course. This one caught me off guard. I even organized a study group (which helped) but I again ran out of time (after two hours) in the exam. Since I certainly wasn’t the only one, I feel a little better, but I wish I’d had time to go check my answers.

This week is our midterm in International Business. I’m pretty worried about this one because the topics we’ve covered are so broad and I don’t know which direction the test will take. However, I’m sure that with enough studying I’ll get by.

We do have a second midterm in about a month in my Statistics class, but that’s a problem to worry about another day. And thankfully we don’t have midterms in my Finance, Strategy, or Organizational Management courses.

So I had a heck of a weekend from a schoolwork point of view. As was mentioned previously, I’m involved in a lot of school activities. Friday we had a “leadership retreat” at the Tilikum Retreat Center where we (those of us who are involved in various committees) got together out of cell service range for meetings on events for the upcoming year, basketball games, and canoing. That was a lot of fun.

Saturday I was also involved in MBA Preview Day here at Willamette. I got a chance to meet some prospective students and talk to them about the MBA program here (without spilling the secret of the wretchedly uncomfortable room that all first-years spend their time in) and got a free lunch out of it.

The rest of the weekend was spent on homework. Friday night, the rest of Saturday, and almost all day Sunday was on homework. We had to do a case write-up for our strategy class where we look at Dell’s entry into the China and write various strategic recommendations and we also had a case to do for our finance class where we looked at the benefits of international portfolio diversification from a return and volatility standpoint. That one took like 20 hours this weekend, and it’s not like I just started working on it.

So aside from the two events I participated in, I set foot outside my apartment like twice this weekend. Lots of work!

One thing that really sucks about the first year at Willamette (I won’t go into the comprehensive list) is that all the classes are core classes. Since there are roughly 55 people in their first year of the program, they shove us all in a room for 5 hours a day (Monday through Thursday) and talk at us for huge blocks of time. The problem is this room is a nightmare.

First, the seats are are attached to the tables via swing-arms, which makes getting in and out rather awkward. Secondly, they have minimal back support which makes them painful to sit in for as long as we’re expected to. Finally, with 10 minute breaks between classes (we have one 20 minute break on Tuesdays and Thursdays) I spend a huge chunk of my day sitting down typing on my laptop. This starts to really, really hurt after a while.

So imagine - if you will - my absolute frustration when the rest of the class votes to have an bonus Finance class immediately after our normal Finance class (which goes from 11:10 to 12:30 Mondays and Fridays.) The majority of people want to have a class immediately at 12:30 for another hour and half. So the net result is that I will be sitting still (with no significant opportunity to move or eat lunch) from 8:00 AM until 2:00 PM.

To be honest, I’ve gained about 15 pounds since starting this program. There’s a variety of reasons for it, to be honest. One is that I barely have a kitchen in my apartment so cooking isn’t very effective. But the biggest problem I see is that my life has become VERY sedentary in this program. I spend several hours a night doing readings for class. More time doing homework. And even more time sitting still in this goddamn room. When do I have an opportunity to move? When do I have the chance to get some exercise, which is very helpful in health, well-being, and clear thinking?

It’s frustrating.

Edit:  Please see the following OSHA recommended ergonomic seating positions.  I’m guess that having to look up, then down for my laptop, then up, then down again while I sit hunched over in these miserable seats for hours and hours with no breaks to walk around doesn’t meet their recommendations.