Category Archives: grad school

end of the football

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We had our last football game last night. This picture isn’t from last night because no one came to take pictures of us. It was freezing cold. We were down three great players. We didn’t have our jerseys. Everything was against us. We got our collective trash kicked…which is too bad since the team we were playing wasn’t that good. Anyway…it was fun. And now it’s over. Sad. I don’t like when things end. Well, things that I like.

registration madness!

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We had a little registration get together tonight. What does that mean? It means that we could register for classes at midnight and so I ensured that a group of us had something to do between the hours of 9 and 11…and some until 1:00 am.

For some reason (I know the reason and it involves Julie and Lagoon), we all ended up with high, side ponytails and our friend, Brian, decided to snap a couple of shots. I love the first one because you can really see what is going on. I love the second because you can really see who we are.
I can’t believe I just registered for the last classes I will take as an MBA student. This is all going by way too fast. Maybe if I slept more it wouldn’t feel so ridiculous? I’m getting sad just thinking about it…although I do have great things (and friends who I miss dearly) on the horizon in NYC, so it’s really just a little bittersweet.
And in case you are all wondering, I did actually register for certain classes based on the fact that they didn’t interfere with my skiing time. Last winter in Utah for a while and you better believe that I’m going to take full advantage of it.

scene of the moment – football

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Getting home from: my last regular season intramural flag football game.

Reveling in: VICTORY!!!
Listening to: Explosion in the Sky (Friday Night Lights theme/DVD menu music)
Realizing that: this is my last fall in Utah for a while.
Thinking about: how lucky I am to be in graduate school right now…and loving that my brother is in school with me.
Excited to: celebrate my nephews birthday at his Sponge Bob party on Saturday.
Loving that: my darling niece and nephew live just four houses away from me.
Looking forward to: tomorrow’s Info Day for prospective students…being over.
Wishing that: everyone was on Twitter because these days that’s where most of my updates are happening.
Feeling: HAPPY!!!

grad school – year two

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When I started the MBA program, my oldest sister joked that it wasn’t a real graduate program, it was just finishing school for business people. The truth is, I kind of agree with her. It’s not that we don’t learn a lot. We do. But it is a type of finishing school. Of course, that may be because my focus is on the “soft skills”. Although, the fact that the skills are soft does not mean that acquiring them is easy for everyone, as I’m discovering. I thought most of these skills would be intuitive. Such is not the case.

So, here is a list of things that I am learning in “finishing school”:
  1. Thank you notes are very important. Writing them properly is less important, but spelling names correctly is…and lots of people misspell names.
  2. Leadership is not intuitive for most people.
  3. You should think before you speak. If you don’t think about you’re audience, you are going to be surprised by how you offend people. If you do think about you’re audience, you will still offend people. You just won’t be surprised by it.
  4. People like to joke about HR (think Toby from “The Office”) and it would be easy to get offended. To those people I say, “Just remember who had job offers and how many they had.” (Oh, and if anyone thinks that I’m like Toby, just try working with me.)
  5. Feedback really is a gift. And I am like, the best gift giver EVER. Oh, and when someone says, “I’d like some feedback on…” it’s a good idea to clarify what the person actually means. The question I like to ask is this: “So, when you say you want feedback, do you mean that you actually want me to tell you what I think, or do you just want me to give you a little ‘pat on the head’ and say ‘good job’?” And admittedly, I admire people who ask for a ‘pat on the head’ as much as those who want the real deal. I always admire honesty and self-awareness.
  6. Which brings me to self-awareness. I have been amazed to learn about the incredible lack of self-awareness that exists among the general population. On that same note, I have been equally amazed to learn the extent to which I am self-aware and that it probably merits some therapy (or a lot of therapy).
  7. Networking is an art. Some people are naturally gifted. Some really have to work at. But there are rules that we all need to learn.
  8. Decision making should involve some kind of strategy and end goal.
  9. Everything is negotiable…but not unless you actually know how and what to negotiate.
  10. Graduate school is way better than undergrad. It is making those four (or six?) years of college totally worth the effort (and by effort, I mean showing up for tests when I wasn’t skiing).
Yes, I am learning more than just the finishing school stuff, but the ins and outs of organizational structures, Kotter’s Leading Change model, McKinsey’s 7-S model, etc, just didn’t seem like they’d appeal to the five or so people who still check my blog. Or at least, not without a lot of explanation, and I don’t want my blog to feel like homework.

decisions

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I was raised to believe in right decisions. As in, I always want to be sure that I’m making the right decision. And recently, I realized that sometimes, this can be paralyzing. Sometimes, I get so scared that I will make the wrong decision, that I fail to make any decision whatsoever.

Recently I had a minor major melt down as a result of this thinking. The past year of my life has been decision filled and I started to second guess a decision I made and felt was right. And then I started to second guess my ability to tell when a decision is right or wrong. (Yes, I do realize that I’m relatively mental…so don’t think that you know some great secret that has somehow eluded me).
I was seriously in crisis mode.
And then I had this epiphany. That as people on this earth, we are given agency or free will with which to make decisions. That’s not to say that sometimes there is a right decision for you (please know that I am not referring to the moral sense of the word right…stealing is always a bad decision), but it is to say that sometimes there isn’t a right choice.
That was the epiphany. Some of you might be thinking that I’m joking because this is so clear to you…but it wasn’t to me. But it makes perfect sense now. I realized, in reference to the huge decision I have coming about where I want to spend the first few years of my new career, that unless I get a very clear feeling that one opportunity is the right opportunity, I can make the decisions that makes the most sense for me.
This was such a liberating epiphany. It also made me realize how much I like being able to fall back on the knowledge that I know that I made the right decision…especially when the going gets tough. It’s so much easier to deal with crap when you have someone else (in my case, God) who I can hold responsible for my difficulties.
And another little remembered insight; the nature of having to make a decision is that you have to choose, which infers that you will be sacrificing one option for another. And in difficult decisions, those sacrifices can be very painful on either side.
So, the bottom line. I feel great. I get to decide what I want to do and then own that decision and the sacrifices it requires. And the crisis is over. Yay!