Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My classmates and I are working on a marketing project that requires us to do some market research and I just *know* that you want to help me out with this, right? (If you already saw my tweet about this, feel free to ignore!)

All you have to do is fill out a little survey about coffee. It will take you less than 5 minutes, I swear! And you will be filled with joy at helping me out, which really is its own priceless reward.

Go here for the survey goodness: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GFX25PP

Then I recommend you celebrate your generosity at helping me out by buying yourself a nice cup of coffee!

Image Credit: Posted by Javier Benek on Flickr.

Tags: generosity, help a sister out, market research, school

I just invented a new rule. When doing homework, every time I get up from my desk (e.g., to go to the bathroom, to make tea), I have to do 5 pushups. I figure this will deter me from getting up  from my homework for frivolous reasons and/or make me do a lot of pushups. Either way, I win!

I think I’m going to have some kickass biceps triceps and pectoralis muscles by the end of my 28 months of school!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think this blogging break warrants at least 15 pushups!

Image Credit: Posted by Jenica on Flickr.

So I just finished four solid days of classes. That’s 8 am to 5 pm on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, plus homework in the evenings. Plus a welcome dinner on Thursday night. I now have 3 assignments and 2 rounds of a business simulation due before the next weekend of classes, two weeks hence. Plus prep for both a group presentation and a group in-class experiment, though I won’t be there do either since I’ll be in Ontario for my Dad’s brain surgery. To make a long story short, they weren’t kidding when they described the core part of the MBA program as “intense.” As I was going through this weekend, which thankfully is the longest weekend we’ll have in this program and the only one preceded by three exhausting weekends of pre-core courses, I kept noticing similarities between this program and the 10-day long hockey game I played in back in the summer. And thus, I give you this list:

Ways that MBA School is Like Playing Hockey For 10 Days Straight

• thrown into an extremely intense situation with a whole bunch of people that I don’t know¹. And, happily, all of them are friendly, supportive, and tonnes of fun!
• took the optional preparatory course (Bootcamp for the Longest Game and pre-core Quantitative Methods/Accounting/Economics for MBA school) and it was exhausting, but so worth it²
• long, long hours of doing the same thing (playing hockey vs. sitting in class)
• sleep deprivation
• delirium
• people hitting walls at different points, and be able to see in their eyes that they are just so done with this right now³
• immediately losing track of what day of the week it is⁴
• cycling between thoughts of “this is the worst idea ever. Why did I agree to do this?” and “this is SO AWESOME! I’m so happy that I’m doing this!” about a thousand times per day

We have a very long haul ahead of us, but I’m going to stick with what I learned in the Longest Game and take it one day, one shift, one Accounting lecture at a time.  I think I may also post this photo of the sign that gave me so much strength during the Longest Game by my desk to help keep me going:

1. My 29 new hockey sisters I made during the Longest Game and my 50 new best friends in MBA school [↩]
2. both to get me ready and to meet some of my teammates/classmates in advance [↩]
3. happily, they are back into it the next day after getting a few hours sleep [↩]
4. “Is it Saturday today, or is it Sunday?” is something I’ repeatedly heard from both classmates during this past weekend of classes and teammates during the Longest Game [↩]

Tags: book learnin', list, Longest Game, MBA, school

So apparently the world continues on no matter how big the tumor in my dad’s brain is, and so this weekend I was back at school for the third of three pre-core courses. This time, it was economics. Economics, according to our good friends at Wikipedia, is “the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” I had to look that up, which shows you how much I knew about economics before this weekend. But now I’ve done the 20.5 hours of pre-core, so I know all there is to know!

Some random stuff I learned this weekend:

• Opportunity cost represents the value of what you gave up to do something – specifically, the “what you gave up” is the next best alternative (as you could probably identify many possible alternatives). For example, if you buy a coffee for $4, the opportunity cost of buying that coffee is whatever the next best alternative use of that $4 would be – like, buying half a beer (assuming that beer costs $8). If you pay $40,000 for tuition for an MBA program, the opportunity cost would be whatever the next best alternative use of that $40K is – namely, buying 5,000 beers¹.
• The Law of Demand says that, all other things being equal, when price of a good/service goes up, demand goes down.
• I’m sure I learned a bunch of other stuff, but my brain is too tired to remember any of it!

In related news, here’s a photo of my “to do” list of all the things I need to do before school officially starts on Thursday:

1. Of course, in my particular case, the opportunity costs of paying $40K for tuition is actually nothing – since I got a scholarship that pays for my MBA, but which I can’t get for any other purpose. Thus, if I didn’t do the MBA, I would, sadly, not have the $40K to buy 5,000 beers. [↩]

Tags: Nerdery, school, tired

This past weekend’s pre-core course was about accounting, which means I spent Friday night and all day Saturday and all day Sunday journalizing, posting to ledgers, and making statements of income/owner’s equity and so forth. I can feel your jealousy. I’ve never done *any* accounting before, so this was a pretty steep learning curve. When I went to bed on Friday after class, my head was spinning with thoughts of “An increase to an asset account is a debit” and such stuff¹. Also, I’m not a very detail-oriented person – I much prefer big picture thinking – so I kept making little errors, like putting things in the wrong column (by accident, as opposed to thinking they actually belonged there) or putting too few zeros. Happily, the prof wanted us to understand the concepts, rather than just being good at the mechanics with no understanding. In the end we had a quiz to test ourselves to see how well we’d learned and I got 85% (even though I didn’t get to the last 3 questions), so that made me feel like I’m doing OK.

Here’s some random things I learned this weekend:

• Debits  go on the left side, and credits go on the right side, of a ledger. Whether an increase (or a decrease) is a debit or credit depends on what kind of account you are talking about.
• The double-entry bookkeeping system, which we still use today, was first described in 1494.
• Expense ≠ Cash Out. Expenses don’t happen when you give someone money – they happen when you benefit from the asset (e.g., product or service) associated with that expense.
• Revenue ≠ Cash In. Similarly, you don’t make revenue when the money comes in – you make the revenue when you deliver your product/perform your service.

Also, I got this swanky backpack as part of being in the program. Not bad for $41,000, eh?

1. I also spent the first half of the first period of Sunday night’s hockey game with my brain racing with thoughts of accounting. I couldn’t seem to get my head in the game for that first 10 minutes, but I could easily have told you that accrual-basis accounting follows the revenue recognition principle. [↩]

Tags: Nerdery, school, tired

So, I was in class for 20.5 hours on the weekend¹:

• Friday – 5:30 to 9 p.m.
• Saturday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Sunday – 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

It was a lot of hours and it was all math and – I’m sure this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me – I quite enjoyed it. I mean, it was rather exhausting, of course, and I really didn’t like having to get up at 6 a.m. on the weekend, but the content was interesting and the professor was excellent. And it was really nice to meet some of my classmates for the first time! Since the program I’m in uses a cohort model and involves predominantly group work, I’m going to be spending *a lot* of time with these people over the next 28 months, so it was great to meet so many friendly and interesting people!

One thing I found myself telling a lot of people is something that I learned when I played hockey for 10 days straight – don’t think too far into the future! Take things one shift class at a time. Anytime someone mentioned that we were going to be spending four weekends in a row in classes – 20.5 hrs for each of the first three weekends, followed by 32 hours on the last weekend of January (Friday to Monday) – I saw this look in their eye that I recognized as showing what I felt whenever I started to think too far ahead during that game. It’s a look of overwhelm, a look that says, “I can’t do this.” And so I would say, “Don’t think of it like that. Just think of this weekend. One day at a time! We can totally do this!” And it was a really good reminder for me too! And I just typed this out, I’ve realized something else – it’s hardest at the start. The first 3 of the 10 days of hockey were the worst, and I bet the first weekends of classes are the worst too. Just like in the game, it will get better once we get used to the new routine.

Anyway, I learned a whole bunch of stuff – and get a refresher on a bunch of stuff that I knew before but didn’t remember all that much – I’m looking at you, calculus! Here’s some random things I learned this weekend²:

• The symbol used for “profit” in business math equations is π . Dr. Dan‘s theory on why this is so is because π goes on forever, which is what you would want your profits to do. Also, π  is delicious!
• Bill Gates and Warren Buffet started a movement to get the mega rich to give away a lot of their money. And by “a lot,” I mean at least 50% of their wealth, within their lifetime or upon their death (in case they haven’t given out the 50% before they die). In the case of Buffet, he’s giving away 99% of his wealth. To give you a sense of how much money he has, he says that even after giving away 99% of his wealth, he won’t notice any change to his lifestyle or that of his family! You can check out a list of the mega rich people who have taken this pledge at givingpledge.org.
• Calculus is all about slope and reaching limits.

Also, as part of our course package, which costs one zillion dollars, we got a swanky business math calculator. It’s the calculator that we have to use on all of our exams so that no one has any unfair advantage of having a more advanced calculator than anyone else. The problem, of course, is that everyone in the class has the exact same calculator, so it will be quite easy to accidentally pick up someone else’s and if you lose yours, how would you ever be able to figure out which one of the 50 in the room was yours³? This is my solution to that problem:

1. Hence the blog radio silence for the past few days. [↩]
2. This isn’t *all* that I learned, but I figured that most of it would bore the hell out of you. [↩]
3. This reminds me of my undergrad, where all of the thousands of students had to use the Casio fx991 calculator, and one day the Calculus prof made an announcement at the start of class in front of the 200 or so students: “Someone left a calculator in the lecture hall after class last week. It’s a Casio fx991. You can come and claim it at the end of class.” [↩]

Tags: Nerdery, school, tired

So today is my first day of school. Well, it’s not technically the start of the MBA program per se, but rather it’s the first of three “pre-core” weekend courses¹ that will get us ready for the actual program, which starts on the last weekend of January. And it’s not technically my first “day” of school, since it happens at night. But it costs lots of money and we’ll be learning things, so I figure that counts as school.

I’ve had terrible insomnia all week², which I’m ascribing to anxiety about school starting³, so hopefully once it actually gets going I’ll see it’s not that bad and calm down a bit. Either that, or it will be that bad and I’ll use all that extra awake time to do homework.

Wish me luck!

1. The three courses are Accounting, Economics, and the vaguely-named “Quantitative Methods.” [↩]
2. Where my definition of “terrible insomnia” means that I’ve lain awake for an hour or two each night, rather than falling asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. People with actual insomnia, feel free to tell me to STFU. [↩]
3. But which may also be due to the abrupt shift from my holiday schedule of stay up late every night, sleep in every morning and/or bf-withdrawal, since I spent the entire Christmas/New’s Week with him and have gone cold turkey this week as we are now both back to work! [↩]

Tags: book learnin', Nerdery, school

So I was reading a Stats Can report the other day¹ and came across some interesting data on housework^2,3:

Time spent on domestic work varied among women according to their working arrangements. Among women who were working at the time of the survey, those who were part of a dual-earner couple and worked part-time spent the most time on domestic work—an average of 21.0 hours per week. Less time was spent on domestic work by full-time working women who were part of a dual-earner couple (13.9 hours per week), or women who were the sole wage earner in a single-earner couple (15.2 hours per week). The least amount of time was spent by single working women. On average, they spent 7.7 hours per week on domestic work. [emphasis mine]

To me, this seems like quite a drastic difference! Women who were part of a dual-income couple did quite a bit more housework (13.9 hrs per week if they worked full-time and 21 hrs per week if they worked part-time) than single women (7.7 hrs per week). Most surprisingly, women who were in a couple where their partner didn’t do any paid work did more housework (15.2 hrs per week) than women in couples where their partner did paid work (13.9 hrs per week)! Shouldn’t they be doing less housework?

To me, the most striking question from all of this is: how come single women need so much less housework done than coupled women? Remember, the data on coupled women is only the housework being done by the women – there is also housework being done by their partner! For example, in couples where both partners work full-time, the women do 13.9 hrs and the men do 8.6 hrs for a total of 22.5 hrs per week. Compared to the single women doing 7.7 hrs per week, that’s nearly three times as much housework being done in that household⁴! I realize there there is a bit more housework to be done when two people live in a house – twice as many dishes, twice as much laundry – but the total workload shouldn’t even be twice as much as there are some things that don’t take longer by having more people in the house (e.g., vaccuuming). I suppose some of the extra workload could be attributed to housework related to children that isn’t child care per se (e.g., I know from my friends with kids that they generate a heck of a lot of laundry, especially when they are very little), but would this make the workload three times as much? I suppose it’s possible that single women are more likely to hire, say, a housekeeper, since they don’t have anyone else in their house to share the housework with, but that data wasn’t provided. Another possibility is that more single people rent (as opposed to owning a place) compared to coupled people⁵ and owning comes along with more maintanance tasks that renters don’t need to worry about (e.g., fixing things, cleaning gutters). Any other thoughts on why single people do so much less housework than coupled people? Or am I just bringing down the average?

Another thing in the report is, not surprisingly, that women do more of the unpaid domestic chores than men (on average) and men do more paid work than women (again, on average). But apparently that’s changing:

During the past quarter century, the involvement of men and women in paid work and housework has changed. A study¹ comparing three generations of young people—the late baby boomers (born 1957 to 1966), Generation X (1969 to 1978) and Generation Y (1981 to 1990) found an increasing similarity in the involvement in paid work and housework between men and women from the late baby boomers to those in Generation Y.

Despite the narrowing of the differences, men continue to have an overall greater involvement in paid work than women, and a lesser involvement in housework.

For example, at ages 20 to 29, late baby boom men did on average 1.4 hours more paid work per day than women. In Generation Y, this difference had narrowed to 1.1 hours.

Late baby boom women, when they were aged 20 to 29, did 1.2 hours more housework per day than men. By the time Generation Y arrived at the same age group, the difference had narrowed to 0.4 hours. This was due entirely to a decrease in the time women spent on housework.

When looking only at dual-earner couples, the dominant family form since the 1980s, the study found that young adults are increasingly sharing economic and domestic responsibilities. As women have increased their hours of paid work, men have steadily increased their share of household work.

Women aged 20 to 29 in dual-earner couples in Generation Y did an average of 6.7 hours of paid work per day in 2010, up from 6.4 hours for their counterparts in Generation X.

On the other hand, dual-earner women in Generation Y did 53% of the total housework done by couples, down from 59% for their counterparts in Generation X.

Average daily time spent on paid work and housework by men and women in young dual-earner couples is more similar for those without children and particularly so for Generation Y.

However, for both Generation X and Y, with the presence of dependent children at home, the contribution of women to a couple’s total paid work time declined while their contribution to housework increased.

My question about all this is: only 6.7 hours per day of paid work? Pfft! I could do that in my sleep!

1. What, you don’t read Stats Canada reports?? [↩]
2. What, you don’t think data on housework is “interesting”? [↩]
3. Note that “housework” did not include child care, which was discussed in a separate part of the report. Housework included unpaid domestic work such as “housework, yard work and home maintenance.” [↩]
4. Single men do 6.1 hrs per week, meaning there is nearly four times as much housework being done in household of a dual earner full-time working couple [↩]
5. This may be my Vancouver-based assumption, given that it’s nearly impossible to own a place on a single income here. Hell, it’s nearly impossible to own a place on two incomes here! [↩]

Tags: gender, Nerdery, statistics, Statistics Canada

And speaking of photos that I’ve been meaning to blog about, remember that time I said I was going to spend the first half of my Christmas vacation organizing my apartment? I totally did that. And I took photos!

My desk place that I stored “papers that I’m going to file someday” – before photo:

My desk – after photo:

Notice my corkboard of inspiration to the left of my desk – it contains my running medals, LG4CF player ID (not seen in photo), Polar Bear Swim button, a poster of yoga poses, and some inspiration photos. My diplomas remind me that I can really do this school thing, and the giant whiteboard is ready for to do lists/brainstorming.

Bookshelves – before photo:

Bookshelves – after photo:

And here’s my closet organization system – places to set out my outfits for every day of the week – and I actually have two of these in my closet, so I can set out two weeks worth of outfits at one time!

Let the school year begin!

Tags: efficiency, Nerdery, organization

Here is a quick summary of my blog and Twitter stats for 2011¹:

1. to see previous years’ nerd stats postings, click the year in the table [↩]
2. not sure why this value is not equal to the number of visits to my blog divided by 365 days. Probably some some of rounding error [↩]
3. ibid [↩]
4. thanks to the Hockey Hotties posting [↩]
5. thanks to the Blogathon! [↩]

Tags: blog, blog stats, Nerdery, Twitter