Burton Simmons’s “Adventures in Business School”

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.

Well, the important grades (for the five graded classes I took) are now posted. To my infinite delight, my grades are:

Quantitative Analysis: A

Accounting for Managers: A-

Managing Exchange (Marketing): A-

Economics and Finance: A-

Managing Organizations (HR): B+

This gives me a first semester GPA of 3.68. Considering my extremely lackluster undergrad GPA, I’m quite thrilled at this. Woohoo!

Well, it seems I won’t get to know my final grades until January 3rd, when they’re due to the school.  That’s right, the professors get far more time to grade my work than I ever did to study for it.  Here’s to hoping, though, that my grades will be of scholarship-saving quality!

So the for-profit side of our PaCE team, of which I’m not a part, had to give a presentation on a marketing plan that’s a big part of all of our grades (15%) on Friday.

Considering I’d been getting “A”s and “A-”s in that class up to this point, getting an 86 that was completely out of my control (I was busy on another project for our group) is somewhat upsetting, I’ll admit.  It puts more pressure on me for the final grade to try to pull off SOMEthing for this class.

Yeah, I’m actually kind of pissed.

Twice in the last two weeks I’ve been used iMovie (and iDVD) with great success.

The first time was for our Salvation Army presentation. We videotaped the presentation (as was the requirement) so it could be viewed by the faculty later.  Instead of just handing them a VHS tape (we used an old university camera) I took the tape to the video lab on campus and imported it into iMovie on my computer.  From there, I added some chapter markings, exported it to iDVD, created a professional-looking menu (complete with a slide-show and all our presentation material included on the disc) and turned it in.  Everyone loved that.

The second was  for a presentation this morning in for our HR class.  We were tasked simply with “a presentation of our PaCE group.”  The only suggestion we were given was to be creative.  So we came up with the idea of a promotional video, our team leader wrote the script, and I went to work narrating it, editing it, and putting together a kick-ass video that left jaws dropped when my classmates saw it.

I really enjoy using iMovie.  While few other applications can fill a hard drive so quickly, it’s a fun, powerful, easy-to-use program!

So I got the grade back for the midterm that I was 40 minutes late to a couple weeks ago. My grade on this particular midterm is a “B+”, which is good enough for me, considering the circumstances. I certainly studied hard… I guess I’ll never know how I would have done had I been there for the whole time.

Well, the good news is that on my scary midterm two weeks ago I got a 97% (which is very good), I passed my oral exam last week (with some constructive criticism), and I got an assignment back with a “no-pass” that, when I asked the professor why, was immediately changed to a “pass” because he didn’t that I actually answered the question. So that was pretty good.

Of course, now I have an economics midterm tomorrow and I’m scared beyond capacity for reason since I feel like I understand very little in that class and I didn’t leave with the best feeling about my midterm yesterday… plust there’s a LOT of working coming up. Lord, let me make it to December 15th! (Winter break!)

The other day we had the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Sandy Baruah come speak to us. As a former Atkinson alumnus, he was in town for something or other and was offered the opportunity to speak to us.

So he did, and the big thing I took away from his talk (and I’m paraphrasing) is this:

“A manager MUST be able to distinguish between to the good and the best.”

That is to say, as he explained, that most people in a situation can come up with a good idea; it’s not hard. But coming up with the best idea, the most efficient use of resources or the most helpful decision… THAT is what a manager must be able to do.