Light At The End of The Tunnel
The last few blog-less days here at NTBTWK are directly attributable to the fact that I’ve been in school everyday, 8 am ’til 5 pm, since Thursday. While sane people may have been out enjoying the epic sunshine and glorious heat, my colleagues and I have been holed up in an underground bunker known as a “classroom” at UBC Robson Square learning about NPVs and IRRs and funding models and complex adaptive systems. The first 2.5 days of this stretch were focused on Healthcare Finance and the last day and a half, plus all day tomorrow is on Healthcare Strategy in an Economic Context1.
On the plus side, I now really get what NPV is2 and how to calculate it. We learned this in the core part of the program and have used it in a few projects and I would get it while we were working on it, but then I wouldn’t really remember what it was all about later. It just wasn’t really one of the things that stuck foremost in my mind3. Happily, the profs who were teaching the finance course were exceptional, so I think it will really stick with me this time! The prof teaching the strategy course is also excellent – she has so much experience at the executive level that she shares with the class and she got us to do some very thought provoking exercises to gain insight into the perspectives of a variety of different stakeholder groups in the system that I think will be helpful to make as a change agent. </jargon>
These two back-to-back courses are actually from the Executive MBA in healthcare – a different program than the part-time MBA program that I’m taking, but I’m allowed to take them because I work in the health sector. My cohort is actually done for the summer, but I’ve chosen to take these two courses now, which will allow me to have no classes after tomorrow4 until the very end of September and, in combination with some other courses I’ve taken outside my program, will allow me to finish my program in February instead of the regularly scheduled May end date for my program.
Light at the end of the tunnel – I’m coming for you!
Image Credit: Posted by Gordon Wrigley on Flickr.
- I have, however, managed to catch some of the sunshine in the evenings, since the sun stays up so late, in the form of a 5 km run one day, reading on the pier another day, and a 10 km bike ride tonight. And I also cleaned the frog tank tonight after my ride, so I have to say I’m feeling rather productive [↩]
- Net Present Value. But you knew that, right? [↩]
- This is a hazard of learning eleventy billion new things in every class – they can’t all stick! [↩]
- Though I do have two papers to complete, which I hope to get done before I go on holiday, though one isn’t due until September 20, so if worse comes to worst, I can finish it when I get back. [↩]