NaBloPoMo’09: College Lessons

Things I know now that I wish I knew in college:

1. Steal food from the cafeteria – you never know when you’ll be desperate for a snack.
2. Get everything done in the morning so you can screw around all afternoon.
3. Keeping your dorm room organized and spotless; it will help when you live in your own space.
4. Better yet: don’t live on campus if you can avoid it.
5. Start the project when it’s assigned, even if it’s just perusing Wikipedia.
6. It’s a lot easier to print flashcards to study than it is to hand-write them.
7. Learn how to be prepared when things go wrong on projects – it’s going to happen.

If You’re Gonna Spew, Spew in This…

As is the ilk with anything electronic that I own, my laptop has taken a semi-major dump. My wireless card is shot, meaning I need to plug directly into the router in my basement.

This is like that disgusting, wet belch you hear your best girlfriend make before she becomes a fountain of all the Long Island Iced Teas (“hey, there’s no tea in this”) that she just had.  I have spent the last two hours metaphorically moving all of my stuff out of my handbag and into my pockets in case she might need it to barf into. I’ve managed to get everything of great importance into storage to mitigate the damage.

A week before I have a mjor project due in my grad class, and as the holiday season hits full boar for MK, I need to start scouting the possibility of buying a desktop computer.

I’d been planning for the last six weeks or so that I’d needed to move my base of operations into a more business-like setting.  I really wanted to wait until Black Friday, when I could get someone to go to Best Buy for me (as I will be looting at the Ann Taylor Factory Outlet), but I might not have that luxury.

In addition, I had been hoping that there would have been major renovations to the basement office in preparation for the big move.  As it is, there are a lot of spiders’ nests (ew), the whole office portion is an unorganized mess, and there isn’t a sufficient amount of heating to make the space a comfortable work area. K suggested that I invent an adult-sized, electric onesie, but I highly doubt I can fabricate and patent that before I start working from my home office.

The only upside to all of this was that at least my computer managed to hold out until after Windows 7 dropped.

I guess there is a silver lining.

Conversation Fodder

This week in my Environment of Business class, we are talking about ethics as they pertain to business.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much this subject bores me.  Allowing students to take the floor to talk about their belief system as a symposium for academic thought is a waste of time: each party is convinced that their way of seeing the issue is right.  Ethics are a belief system, and belief systems aren’t objective conversation fodder.  I don’t see anything learned about that – it is just a great way to filibuster a classroom and create a rift.

I’m just not interested in discussing my personal ethical believes with a classroom full of strangers, just as I am not interested in discussing my moral beliefs (which for this chapter in class, are pretty much interchangeable).  I don’t care to be judged in an academic setting as to what my personal beliefs are in practicing business.

Sigh of Relief

Note: This post has been edited.  I shouldn’t be allowed to both blog and watch The Rachel Zoe Project.

I survived the end of the second half of the summer semester (even though I was sure that I wouldn’t), and so I will tell the abridged story of the disaster that was.

I had very high hopes for said semester: I was going to knock out another class, I was going to maintain a great GP; everything was going to be gravy.  Problem was, the class was crammed chock-full and the professor was not exactly what the doctor ordered.

This class would have been fine as a 12-week course, or as an online course.  But it was a 6-week course and the professor would not vary from the PowerPoint slides that the publishers of the text book had issued.  I tried to be a good sport about it – I really did – but six hours a week for six weeks and I was dying.  TFLN and I became very good friends.

The worst part came at the mid-term after spending 8 hours working on the take-home exam to come back with less than 50%.  I had never done that poorly on an exam in the history of my educational career.  And to make it worse, when we asked collectively to go over the exam, we were met with, “I made them ambiguous on purpose.” or “It’s obvious that the answer is ‘A’.”  Well, if it had been obvious, I would have answered that way.  So yeah, thanks for that.

I get it that a take-home exam has to be a little more difficult than a typical sit-in exam, but seriously?  Making a test so hard that half of your class fails is simply absurd.  It does not prove that we didn’t learn the material, it proves that we weren’t paranoid enough about answering your ambiguous material.

Normally, I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself over this, but educational reimbursement from my employer makes it mandatory to get a passing (C) grade in a course.  I did not think I was going to make it, seriously. I was losing my damn mind – oh, there was going to be a letter campaign, and meetings with department heads, and my personal mission was to get this adjunct booted.

My letter-writing campaign didn’t get off the ground: there isn’t a whole lot of grassroots activism that can be fit into three weeks.  Instead, I focused my frenetic energy into busting my ass and spending four days (including one personal day taken off of work) working on the final take-home exam.

In the end, my exam consisted of the finished (polished) copy of the exam, the scratch sheets, the makeup question from the mid-term and homework.  My stack required a binder clip, and I almost couldn’t slide it under the adjunct’s office door.

I went from less than 50% at the semester half to an 85% and a B.  I made it.

By the skin of my teeth; but I made it.

Workin’ Hard, or Hardly Workin’?

I had something pretty rotten happen to me this semester at CSU, and I don’t really want to talk about in detail here, because there will be a letter written to the head of the department about it, so I don’t want to get academically-dooced or anything.  But, when this semester is over, I’ll reveal a little bit more about it.

Part of the aftermath of this academic nuclear winter is that I’m taking a nice long metaphoric look in the mirror and trying to evaluate myself as not just a student, but as a productive member of society.  In many of the endeavors that I’ve had to tackle, I’ve usually half-assed it and come out above average and been okay with that, satisfied in the knowledge that if I really wanted to, I could be awesome.  Lately, I’m noticing that I have to work very hard in these business classes to keep up to speed.  I’m wondering if part of this is just because the material is so advanced, or because I’m cashing in some negative karma-points for my hubris about my intelligence level.  Coupling this with some of my self-doubting in my professional life, I feel borderline deficient.

I’m just feeling a little burned out and panicky right now, and starting to compare myself to everyone else, asking myself why I’m not succeeding the way I wanted to.  Of course, the super-ego says, “don’t be silly – perfection takes practice” but my id is throwing an epic meltdown that would make a two-year-old proud.

I’m just pissed because I’m not perfect.