Not To Be Trusted With Knives

So I realized that this is the most first world of first world problems, so if you don’t enjoy people whining about how they are being given money, but not in the way that they want to be given money, you should probably stop reading right now. I’ve been meaning to blog it for a while, but was recently reminded about it when I took my giant pile of papers to my accountant to file my taxes. Why did I have a giant pile of papers, you ask? Well, a big chunk of these papers were from my scholarship, and they were completely unnecessary. As you may recall, I have a scholarship that pays for the lion’s share of my tuition fees. The scholarship is sent from the funding agency to my university. I would like for the university to just keep the money for my tuition and then I can just pay the part of my tuition fee isn’t covered by said scholarship. Basically, what I want to happen is this:

What I want to happen

But apparently the department that receives the cheque from the funding agency cannot, does not, or will not talk to the department that takes money for tuition, so instead they think the best idea is to send me a cheque every month, along with a tax form for that instalment (as opposed to, you know, a single tax form at the end of the year). They will do this every month for two years, and then I have to take each of those monthly cheques to the bank to cash, and then I used that pay my tuition fees, which have been split into 7 installments over the two years. So what happens is this:

What is actually happening. You don’t need to be an MBA student to see that this is much less efficient.

That’s 24 cheques, 24 tax forms, 24 envelopes, 24 postage stamps, and 24 trips to the bank – all completely unnecessary, because I’m just giving all the money (and then some) back to the university anyway. Now, I realize that Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable are separate departments and I’m very well acquainted with different departments having computer systems that don’t talk to each other, but really? Surely the people there could do transfers between the departments. And at the very least, I could get one tax form per year instead of 12.

This reminds me of the time in grad school that I had a departmental scholarship and then, partway through the year, I was informed that I had won a university-level scholarship worth $0.00. Upon further investigation, it turned out that they had more university-level scholarship money than originally anticipated, and I was next in line to get some, but they saw that I had a department scholarship, so they weren’t going to give me the university-level money, but wanted me to be aware that I had earned a higher level scholarship. Of course, my department wanted me to get the university money so that the money they had given me could go to someone else from our department, and the university’s reply was that I should give back the department scholarship and then they would give me the university-level scholarship. Midway through the year. Like as if I hadn’t already spent my scholarship money on tuition fees and rent! I’m not sure exactly what the university thinks people do with scholarship money, but I think it’s safe to say that most of us spend it on going to school and living expenses! In the end, my department secretary was able to convince the university to just transfer money to the department, since obviously I didn’t have that money any more, and it made no sense for me to give them money so that they could then send me a cheque for the amount I would have just given them. I haven’t had as much luck in getting the different departments to talk to each other with my current scholarship, so it looks like the monthly trips to the bank will continue through 2013 for me!

Tags: first world problems

Isn’t it sad that I’m so thankful to have had a weekend without classes… so I can get more homework done?

The past two weeks have been just killer for me. It started off two Sundays ago with a 10:30 pm hockey game. Which meant – after playing, getting all my gear off, driving home, showering, and coming down from the adrenaline rush – I didn’t get to sleep until 2 am. And I get up for work at 6:30 a.m. This lack of sleep was compounded by a 9:30 pm hockey game on the Wednesday – again, not getting to sleep until way past my bedtime, especially given I was still exhausted from the Sunday night game. But the following weekend didn’t give me any reprieve, as I had class all weekend, including an accounting “quiz”¹, plus a playoff hockey game on Saturday night. And then every single night last week I had some sort of event – or two events on some night. By Friday, I was so very, very, very, very tired.

But this weekend was good. I got to sleep in both yesterday and today, and I had no appointments or events² or anything else to get in my way of being a productivity machine! I marked all the assignments from my students³, I studied a bit of accounting for my final exam next weekend, I created a PowerPoint for a group presentation (which serves) as our final exam for one of the courses I’m currently taking, I played a game of hockey, I talked to my sister and my BFF, and I did this:

Hooray!

What I didn’t do, however, was attend my Grandpa’s 90th birthday party, as he (along with all of my family) lives out east and I couldn’t get out there. I heard that a fantastic time was had by all – and the pics on Facebook certainly made me wish I could have been there. In particular, I like this photo which I shamelessly stole from my cousin Eliza’s Facebook:

It’s my grandpa with his great, great grandson, Rooke. Nice to see that even after 90th years, he still has his great sense of humour! Happy birthday, Grandpa!

1. Though I find it difficult to call something that lasts 90 minutes a “quiz”. [↩]
2. Well, save for hitting a pub yesterday to celebrate St. Patty’s Day – but a girl has to eat, right? [↩]
3. Did I mention that I’m teaching stats again this term? Because, did I mention that I’m insane? [↩]

Tags: birthday, family, homework, rampant narcissism, school

14 months ago, I started my MBA. Given that my program is 28 months long, that means I’ve reached the half-way point! *happy dance*

These past 14 months have really flown by – it seems like only yesterday we were starting this program! But at the same time, when I think about all the things I’ve done in these 14 months, it seems an eternity! In that time, we’ve finished the extremely intense core part of our program – including running a simulated business, creating a full-fledged business plan, covering dozens of subject areas – and started off on our post-core modules¹. Of the 51 people in my class, we’ve had, by my count², 4 babies (with one more on the way), and 6 engagements (and 2 weddings).

I’ve had this idea in my head that I should be blogging about all the many interesting things I’ve been learning in school – and sometimes I even jot ideas down in a draft blog posting. But I haven’t been doing it consistently and then I get this feeling like I can’t post the list because it will be incomplete! However, I’m coming to grips with the fact that this needn’t be a complete list in one blog posting and am considering it instead the first in many incomplete lists of random interesting things I’ve learned in school:

• The importance of constructive conflict. I remember many moons ago when I took a course at McMaster in “Nursing and Healthcare Leadership & Management³, I read an article from Harvard Business Review about the importance of conflict. That article really stuck with me, as it changed the way I think about conflict, which I’d previously viewed as A Very Bad Thing. Without conflict, we get mediocrity. We get Groupthink and Yes Men and we don’t get the best of what the group can do. We’ve learned about this in our Organizational Behaviour course and I’ve seen it in my group work as well. Of course, too much conflict can be bad – as can conflict that isn’t about the work itself. But conflict allows us the opportunity to explore if decisions being made are the right ones, as opposed to just the first ones that are voiced (or the loudest).
• Cash flow statements are really important when looking at a company’s financials. Before I started my MBA, I couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a income statement from a hole in the ground⁴. Now I can pick up a set of financial statements and have a reasonable idea what’s going on in that company. And the cash flow statement is one of the things that I’m sure to look at!
• Fail early to succeed sooner. This was a saying I picked up from one of our profs about the importance of trying things out. Experimenting… and learning from those experiments… and applying the lessons you learned – that’s where you’ll get somewhere. Don’t be afraid to fail – be afraid of not learning.
• People don’t buy a 1/4″ drill. They buy a 1/4″ hole. This was from our marketing class and it’s about knowing your audience. People generally don’t care about the features of a product (the 1/4″ drill bit), they care about the benefits that product will give them (the 1/4″ hole in the wall that they need to hang their picture). Think about what’s in it for them!
• Everything is connected. This was a strong message that came across in the core part of our program. Every part of an organization affects every other part. Things that marketing does affects sales and operations and accounting and HR and all those things affect all the other things. You can’t make a change in one without considering what happens with the others.
• Point of diminishing marginal returns. This is a phrase you’ll hear even in every day settings⁵. It’s basically about the fact that what you put in does not have usually continue to result in an equal amount of output over time – and you really should ask yourself if continuing the input is worth it. Studying is a perfect example. Perhaps your first few hours of studying will get you from scoring 0% on the exam up to 75% and then the next hour of studying will get you to an 80% and the hour after that to an 82% and the hour after that to an 83%. Is that last hour worth investing to get one extra %?

As I mentioned, I’ve learned tonnes more stuff than just the above – these are just things that I happened to jot down⁶. I’ll try to be more diligent about capturing my learnings over the next 14 months!

Speaking of which, while I’m very happy that my program is halfway done, I’m also thinking, “omg, I have to do the same amount of time that I’ve already put in all over again? That’s forever!!” So I think it’s time to pull up my inspirational photos of the signs that some lovely volunteers made and put up at the rink to help me and my teammates get through our 10-day long hockey game:

Amen!

1. So far I’ve done 3 and am partway through 3 more [↩]
2. I feel like maybe I’m forgetting some here [↩]
3. I had a work-study job in the School of Nursing and part of my work was doing admin stuff for the distance ed version of the course. The material looked so compelling that I enrolled in the course one summer out of sheer interest – I got university credits for them, but they didn’t apply towards my degree. Foreshadowing that I’d one day do an MBA, perhaps? [↩]
4. I also didn’t know a stock from a bond! [↩]
5. But usually misquoted as “point of diminishing returns.” [↩]
6. And I’m too tired at the moment to thing about more! [↩]

Tags: MBA, Nerdery, school

How did students ever get by without the modern conveniences of online journals and Skype and Google Docs? Case in point: I just got off a Skype chat with a group for one of my courses – we are preparing for our class on Thursday
and while on the call, we were brainstorming and then looking up resources to check out some of our ideas – we sent links via the chat function of Skype and emailed articles from online journals in mere moments as we talked.

Tomorrow I have a group meeting with another group for another one of my courses – which we’ll be doing by WebEx, so that we can share our computer screens with one another as we talk and we’ll be participating from various places across the Lower Mainland, plus Calgary and Kelowna¹. In preparation for that call, we’ve been brainstorming by adding our ideas to a shared Google Doc.

When I was a post-secondary student the first time – i.e., in my undergrad², Masters³, & PhD years⁴ – we didn’t have any of this stuff. Want to share a document? You had to print it out on a piece of paper and hand it to the other person! Or, if you wanted to be fancy, you’d save it on a floppy disk!

Group meeting? You had to do that in person! We actually went to the library to work together. But that was OK because you had to go there to photocopy that article you wanted from a giant bound volume of journal issues from the stacks.

We did have email – I got my first email address very early in my first year of undergrad – but the only other people I knew with email addresses were other university students and we all had to go to the computer lab to check email, since we didn’t have Internet access in our rooms. You were likely to see the person to whom you had sent an email in class, in the caf, or in residence before they actually got to the computer lab to see the email. And then when you did get an email, you’d print it out on a dot matrix printer, because it felt like you should probably have a record of that.

Hell, my profs didn’t even start to use PowerPoint until I was in my third or fourth year, and even then it was only the most innovative of profs and they had to have a back up set of slides on acetate because there was a 50/50 chance that the computer and projector wouldn’t actually be able to connect properly.

Now⁵, my profs post their PowerPoint slides lecture notes in our class Connect site, or in SugarSync or some other such marvel of modern convenience, I meet my classmates virtually, and I have access to virtually any article, website, or other resources in a millisecond. I collaborate on group papers in Google Docs in real time, I submit those papers via email, and my profs mark them using an annotation app on their iPads. And then I blog about it to a world wide audience! When you stand back to think about it, it’s pretty amazing how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time.

Floppy Disk Image Credit: Posted by ehpien on Flickr.

1. Unless our Kelowna-based group member is working in the field, in which case she’ll join in from wherever the heck she ends up tomorrow evening. [↩]
2. 1995-1999 – a.k.a., grades 13-16 [↩]
3. 1999-2000 – a.k.a., grade 17 [↩]
4. 2000-2006 – a.k.a., grade 18-23 [↩]
5. I.e., in grade 25. [↩]

Tags: computers, Geekery, Nerdery, nostalgia, school

My easy going start to the year has now come to an end. As you may recall¹, I did not take my usual weekend classes in Jan & early Feb, opting instead to take a Public Health Leadership class from a different Faculty at UBC. Given that I work in Public Health and I am building my leadership skills, it seemed like a relevant course to take. The thing with this class, though, is that it’s mostly online/self-study (with one in-person class per month² and it’s spread out over 3 months, so the relative workload is much more manageable than the intensity of my usual weekend classes. Until now.

My next two classes from my program start tonight – in fact, at this very moment³, I am Skytraining it into class. Tonight, we have Strategy class. I happen to *love* Strategy and we’ve just been studying Strategy in my other class, so I feel that I’m pretty warmed up for that. But tomorrow, we have Financial Reporting – a.k.a., Accounting. Which means that this guy is back in my life:

Although probably this is a better reaction to that:

Or perhaps this:

Let the number crunching begin!

1. What, you don’t keep track of my scheduling? Wait with bated breath to know what classes I am or am not taking? [↩]
2. Usually on a weekday so I just take a vacation day to go to that class and thus keep my weekends free. [↩]
3. I.e., when this publishes, not when you are reading it. Because I don’t know when you are reading this. What do you think I am, a psychic? [↩]

Tags: book learnin', school

Apparently I am on a publishing roll! First came my textbook, and now my latest literary masterpiece:

Adverse Events Following Immunization: Evaluating an Enhanced Nursing Role for PHNs

Sadly, you can only read the full article if you (or the organization for which you work or the organization at which you go to school) has a subscription to the journal – Canadian Nurse. But it’s well worth the read if you can get your hands on a copy. Riveting, I say!

Tags: journal article, Nerdery, publishing

How, exactly, is it February? It seems like just yesterday I was finishing up my lovely restful Christmas holidays and *poof* it’s February! This means, of course, that we are 1 full month into the new year and it seems like an excellent time to check in on those goals that I set for 2013, doesn’t it?

First of all, since I actually set measurable physical activity goals, I’ve been using a spreadsheet to track my progress on those goals¹. For my pushup and biking goals (1,300 pushups and 500 km of biking, respectively), I have divided by 12 to set my monthly goals, but for running, I set individual month goals based on how much running I need to do in each month to train for the 2 half marathons I’m planning to do this year. I didn’t actually set goals for yoga or hockey², but I’m tracking those too. Turning to the spreadsheet, I can see that for January I completed:

• 212% of my monthly goal for pushups (230 pushups)
• 111% of my monthly goal for running (11 km)³
• 59% of my monthly goal for biking (24.6 km)⁴
• 370 minutes of hockey
• 460 minutes of yoga

I’m also happy to report that I’ve kept up with my goal of doing some kind of physical activity every day for a year, which I started on Dec 30! Some days it’s just been a little bit – like 10 pushups – but the point is to not break the chain and sometimes that’s all I can fit in on a given day⁵. So far, I’ve been able to keep the chain intact!

I have not, however, knocked anything off the 101 list, including the item that I chose to focus on for January, which was “78. Clean up my boxes of papers!” However, I have friends who will be visiting later in the month who will be staying in the spare room, which will be just the impetus I need to actually clean up those boxes, as they currently reside in the spare room! In addition, it’s almost tax season, so I’ll have to go through all my papers anyway to find the stuff I need to take to my accountant.

Also, in order to keep up with the goal of knocking 13 items off my list, I need to pick an item to focus on for February⁶, so I’ve decided to pick item #52 – “cook a decent tasting eggplant parmesan.” Mmmm, eggplant parmesan!

Of course, all of this is well and good in a month where I don’t have my usual classes⁷, so we’ll have to see if I can keep it up throughout February!

1. Thanks to Dr. Dan, who shared his physical activity tracking spreadsheet with me! (He actually shared it last year, but this year I’m actually using it to it’s fullest potential!) [↩]
2. My implicit goals for those are “go as often as I can given the yoga class schedule of whatever studio I currently have a Groupon for” and “go to every scheduled game that my school schedule allows me to go to,” respectively. [↩]
3. This is all thanks to Alicia, who invited me to go running with her on weekends when my schedule allows. She’s training for different races than I am, but we really like running together – it really helps motiviate me to get out there – so we are doing that when we can. [↩]
4. I’m not too worried about this being below my goal for the month. I usually ride the stationary bike in my building’s exercise room while reading for homework and since I’m not taking the modules from my program this month, I’ve not done as much reading as I normally would. I’m confident I’ll catch up once I get back to my regular school schedule in the middle of this month. [↩]
5. For this goal, I have to be realistic – I’m just too busy to do a big workout every day, but I can do a reasonable workout most days and make sure I do something else – like a few pushups – on the other days [↩]
6. Meaning I’ll have to do 2 items this month – my punishment for not getting an item done in January! [↩]
7. I have another class, but it’s stretched over 3 months instead of 2 weekends, so the intensity of the workload is much less! [↩]

Tags: 101 in 1001, goal setting, goals, January, Nerdery, physical activity, rampant narcissism, spreadsheets

Copies of my brand new textbook!

I have to say, it’s pretty amazing to hold this book – the product of so much work – in my very own hands!

For those of you who have been asking where you can buy yourself a copy of this fine book¹, you can get it directly from the publisher at the low, low price of just $40². And if I see you in person after you buy it, I’ll totally autograph it for you – at no extra charge³!

1. I.e., Rick. [↩]
2. Which is a pretty darn good price for a textbook! [↩]
3. Mom & Nancy, I already got copies for you. I’ll put them in the mail just as soon as I think of something witty to write along with my signature! [↩]

Tags: author, Essentials of Nutrition, Flat World Knowlege, legit, Nerdery, nutrition, publishing, textbook, Zimmerman & Snow

So apparently this is what I would look like as a zombie¹:

Is it just me, or does zombification actually make me look younger?

For the record, we now know what I’d look like as a zombie, a Simpson character, a South Park character, and an M&M. In case you are keeping count.

1. Courtesy of http://www.deadyourself.com/walkers, a promo website for the Walking Dead television series. As if you could forget that it’s starting back up in a few weeks! Props to my Aunt Lynn for bringing this important website to my attention via her zombifying her own picture. [↩]

Tags: deadyourself app, walkers, Walking Dead, zombies

While scrolling through my old emails to write my blog posting about letters the other day, I came across an email where a friend of mine brought this site to my attention:

http://www.universalrejection.org/

It’s an academic journal that is absolutely guaranteed to reject your submission, no matter what. In fact, they’ve never had an issue with any articles because they reject all articles.

Is it strange that I find this idea hilariously enticing? I think it’s the notion of the complete certainty of the situation – which is perverse, because the certainty is that you will get the result that you absolutely don’t want. Yet it seems less scary than the uncertainty of, say, submitting to a journal that *might* accept your work for publication.

Even more perverse: I want to submit something to this journal, but I can’t decide *what* to submit!

Tags: academics, analysis paralysis!, certainty, Journal of Universal Rejection, Nerdery, publication, rejection