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.

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 [↩]

Ever so tired, brain too fried to put together coherent paragraphs, so instead you get bulleted lists. Because really, who doesn’t love a good bulleted list? Also, incoherence.

My Dad

• My dad’s operation, which will be at least 10 hours long (!), is scheduled for Feb 8. I will be flying out to Ontario to be with my family at that time.
• I’m so thankful that I have a very understanding boss and that my school is understanding as well.
• My friends and colleagues have also been so supportive and it’s meant the world to me. Kind words, offers of drives to and from airports, stories of similar surgeries that have been wonderfully successful and all the other support offered are all helping me and my family a lot.

School

• When I said that I’d likely be posting a lot fewer blog postings once school started, I wasn’t kidding – it feels like forever since I last blogged! In preparation for the first weekend of real classes¹, I’ve spent the last three nights reading pretty much from the time I’ve gotten home from work until the time I’ve fallen into bed exhausted. This is in addition to the fact that I’d started reading prior to this week AND I had to do a bunch of administrative-y things – like buying textbooks, downloading a course binder of materials, signing up for various websites, etc. etc., that I’ve been chipping away at over this month.
• One of our profs told us we aren’t allowed to whine about our workloads because if we have time and energy to whine, we should use that time and energy to get our work done instead of whining. So, for the record, I am not whining – I am merely stating facts
• Because I am a nerd, I’m tracking the hours I’m spending on homework using a program called Time Edition ((For the record, I have no affiliation with the Time Edition people. It just seemed like a handy time tracking program and I’m going to test it out. I’ll probably blog a review, should I ever have time to blog ever again)). I’m not sure if seeing this  will make me feel validated that I’m working hard enough or make me want to throw up when I see how much time I’ve spent on homework. Either way, I’m sure there will be graphs of this data in future blog postings.
• Tomorrow night is the welcome dinner for the program and we have to wear business attire. I’m very excited to have an excuse to wear my designer suit!

Work

• I really freaking love my work. I do such cool things and work with such great people. Things are ramping up for the AWESOME Project and I am SO EXCITED about that. Also, another work trip to Ottawa is coming up, which makes me squeee!
• In less awesome news, I got my first ever rejection from an academic journal for a paper that I submitted. Boo-urns! We are going to adapt it to submit to a different journal, so fingers crossed!

Health

• Given my January schedule of 8 hours of work or school 6 days a week, with the 7th day of the week being a 14.5 hour day of work plus driving plus school, I’ve done virtually no physical activity this month, save for a couple of hockey games that mercifully fell on Sunday nights after I finished school. I think I need to force myself to make some time for at least some short distance jogs and the occasional yoga class because I feel like crap when I don’t get exercise.
• These long hours are really not doing well for me nutrition-wise. I haven’t had time to go to a grocery store in ages and my game plan for this week turned out to be to order lots of pizza last night, so I’d have enough for not only last night’s dinner, but today’s lunch, today’s dinner, tomorrow’s lunch and probably Saturday’s lunch as well². Clearly, I need a better system!

I really thought I had something else to say, but now I can’t remember for the life of me what it was. Anyhoo, headed to bed now. So. Freaking. Tired!

Update: OK, I remembered what I wanted to say, which was: If this week is any indication, I think I need to buy stocks in Pepsi. Because at the rate I’ve be downing diet Pepsis, they are going to be one hellava profitable company in the next 28 months of my schooling!

1. As opposed to the pre-core classes I’ve had the past three weekends [↩]
2. School is providing tomorrow’s dinner & Friday’s lunch [↩]

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. [↩]

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. [↩]

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.” [↩]

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! [↩]

So last week I had a bit of a panic about this whole MBA thing. Thoughts like “What am I getting myself into?” were followed up by “I’m getting in waaaay over my head!” and “You know what would be a lot easier than doing this? Not doing this.” And then I realized that I have had the *exact* same feeling of panic – and thought the *exact* same panicky thoughts – before. This is the exact same way that I felt in the weeks leading up to the Longest Game for Cystic Fibrosis. When it started to get close, it started to get real. I realized what a monumental thing I was about to embark on – and I was scared. I started to doubt my ability to survive a 10 day long game of hockey. And now that the start of school is getting real, I’m having the same feelings. I knew when I decided to apply to the program that, if I got in, I’d be spending *a lot* of time in class and *a lot* of time doing homework. I knew that I would have to make some changes to my life – prioritizing school and eliminating some of the other things that I do¹. But now that my first classes are just a few weeks away – now that I’m getting schedules and textbook lists and workshop syllabi – it’s hitting me that I’m about to embark on a pretty monumental thing – and I’m a bit scared.

Of course, I did survive my 10-day long hockey game. And not only did I survive it, but it is one the best things I have ever done in my whole life. I made a tonne of amazing friends, I proved to myself that I could last through something that shouldn’t even be humanly possible, I had fun², I set a world record, and, most importantly, I helped raise lots of awareness and money for Cystic Fibrosis. And remembering that helps ease my panic now, because I know that I can do this too. Will it be a lot of work? Hells yeah it will. Will it take sacrifice? You betcha! But will it be worth it? I have no doubt in my mind. It’s going to be a wild ride, but one that I think I’m ready for!

1. But making sure not to go completely overboard – balance is really important to me [↩]
2. Even through the pain and the sleep deprivation, it was a lot of fun! [↩]

Hey, remember that time I said that a government agency wants to give me bucketloads of money so that I can get an MBA and that I needed to write the GMAT and then apply to the program and then hopefully I’d actually get in so I can have the aforementioned bucketloads of money? Yeah, that all happened. Schools starts for me in January.

Now, before you all going telling me (again) that I’m a Crazyface McGee, it’s merely an intensive 28-month, part-time program that I’ll do while still working full-time and that costs $41K+. You may now all call me crazy. But only half crazy, really, because of the aforementioned bucketloads of money.

Not the actual pile of money I’ll be getting. Mine will be Canadian.

After the crushing level of student debt I incurred to get my first three degrees, I swore I’d never borrow another penny for education again, but when I found out about the scholarship to do an MBA, it was really too good of an opportunity to pass up. Especially given that I actually won the scholarship!

I just found out about my offer of admission last week, celebrated on Friday with a fine wine and a three-year-old cheese, both of which I picked up in Oregon in the summer and have been saving for just such a momentous occasion, and paid my tuition fee deposit yesterday. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what this time commitment will mean for my life and a lot of planning of how I’ll get myself organized to juggle my life, work, and school, but the reality of the situation is really starting to sink in now. Expect some think-y blog postings about such topics over the next little while – please bear with me! Or, you know, tell me I’m crazy.

Image Credit: Posted by docwonder on Flickr.