I'm Famous!

Totally famous. See this picture? Cover of the Utah Chronicle on Tuesday. Like front cover. Page A1. Granted, that particular publication only has, like, 4 pages. Still. So see the guy on the far right in the dark orange jacket holding an invisible basketball? Totally me. Me leaving the library. There was a gas leak and the entire campus was evacuated. That’s me fleeing. I’m a little bummed though. If you look a couple of guys to the left, you’ll see my buddy Chris. Hand in pocket, head turned, sunglasses on…how did he end up being all GQ and I ended up being the ballboy?

Being famous is hard. I must have signed a hundred copies of that thing yesterday.

I guess it was pretty serious. The gas actually bubbled the asphalt. People could see the gas blowing through the grass. Craziest thing, though, was the news coverage when I got home. They had a helicopter filming down on the guys fixing the leak. I would expect them to have oxygen tanks and fire proof suits. Nope. Hard hats, levis, sleeves rolled up. That’s a Ford commercial if I ever saw one.

Those people around me in the picture are my group members. That’s us getting prematurely pulled away from working on a group paper. So Dr. Schallheim, if we missed the boat on what bond rating Deluxe Corporation should target when setting their debt/equity ratio, it was the gas’s fault and not my utter incompetence in your class. Who knew I would be so clueless in finance?

The worst part, though, was that my 4 hour night class was cancelled. We’re making it up with an “extra long” class during finals week. Technically, 4 hours is already extra long. I’m pretty sure anything over 6 hours is considered a seminar. If that’s the case, I want some shwag. There better be free pens, mini Nerf balls, and laptop bags or I’m walking out.

Incidentally, I had my first internship interview last week. You know what they say…A journey of a thousand miles that I should have started months ago begins with a single step that I should have taken months ago.

I lied last week...and it worked out.

It was an honest mistake. I was late for class and forgot that the most direct route between my apartment and Business Strategy with Prof. Bonita Austin went straight through the campaign booths for student elections. I had intentionally been avoiding these folks all week. But I turned the corner and there they were. From a distance, they looked like a crowd of those giant M&Ms you see in commercials. See, each party picked a color and had Tshirts made. The Tshirts were the party’s color with some black writing. Every party supporter wore those shirts for, like, 3 weeks so that you knew which side they were on. Kinda reminded me of those huge capture-the-flag games at summer camp.

Anyway, on this particular day, there were only members of the green team and the yellow team. Apparently the orange team had been knocked out the week before in a primary election. I was fine with that. Their party name was “Synergy”. Synergy? Really? That’s such a used-up Kleenex of a buzz word from ten years ago. The yellow team was the “Go” party and the green team was the “Revolution” party. Shouldn’t the “Go” party have been green? I’m just sayin.

That’s a picture of me and a ladyfriend with one of the green team. Actually, I better not suggest that, being that I’m holding a yard of margarita. That was in Vegas. Why was I with a giant M&M in Vegas? It’s a story I love to tell but really doesn’t have anything to do with MBA school. So I’ll resist.

In defense of the ousted orange team, they gave me a fortune cookie. People used bagels, hot dogs, pancakes, and coffee to curry my vote. But I liked the fortune cookie best. I was hesitant to take it at the time. Not supposed to take candy from strangers. But I figure cookies aren’t really candy. I know, that’s dangerous thinking.

Anyway, back to my lies. I was late for my date with Prof. Austin and her Business Strategy class, so I really didn’t have time to listen to the yellow and green team spiels. So I lied. I told them I planned to vote for them. I told them I was already on their e-mail lists. I told them whatever I thought they wanted to hear. Just so long as I didn’t have to slow down or stop.

I got to class on time.

Completely unrelated…Here’s a study music recommendation. Go to http://music.aol.com/radioguide/indie-radio and click on any of the stations. That will get you into the player. Once there, in the drop downs on the left, go under Lite Sounds and select “Ambient”. Mostly instrumentals, but not relaxing. Very kinetic.

Y the U? Y not the Y?

So Cory (my favorite blog follower by far) asked why the University of Utah? Value, Location, Flexibility.

That’s the short answer. If it were only that easy. To be honest, Utah was not my first choice only because I got my undergraduate degree in marketing from here. I felt like I should use my grad school experience to gain a different perspective. But the University in Utah is in Utah, which is good for me because I’m planning to be in Utah for a while after I graduate. If I had left Utah for school, I had planned to return afterwards. So when choosing schools to which to apply, I wanted a local one. For me, there were two I could consider…Utah and (gasp) BYU.

BYU has a good program. But they are BYU, otherwise known as the Y. In my own defense, I went to a recruiting dealy down there. I knew ten minutes into the 2 hour session (I want my other 110 minutes back) that it was not my cup of tea. It’s a Mormon school. I’m not a Mormon. Got nothing against Mormons. Some of my best friends are Mormon. But the culture is very palpable on the BYU campus and I think I would leave a bad taste in Provo’s mouth. Honor code? Who is this man you call “Honor Code”? Their “can’t do” list reads like my Friday night.

So once the essays were written and interviews were conducted (I had to drive to Las Vegas for one…fun, but what a pain) it came down to Utah and a fancy outfit back East. The other school was in Pittsburgh. I went and visited. Fell in love with the town. Found an apartment 5 minutes from campus with a fireplace. And the school was pretty prestigious, especially in my field. Plus, I’ve never lived anywhere but Salt Lake. I’d like to. Not because I don’t like it here, just because I feel like it’s something I need to do. Test my mettle.

Long story short, I could not justify $110K in debt at 6.5%-8.5% for an education that was not going to get me any closer to a job in Utah than staying here would. Utah is a great school. Prestige for the money is unbeatable. And the program is flexible. This isn’t the University of Indiana. You can taste all the chocolates before picking one once you get into the real world. This was important because, when I was applying to schools, I was considering veering off the marketing road and onto the finance path. That was, of course, before the finance path led right to the toilet.

Did I make the right choice in schools? I’ll never know, really. But earlier today, and this is totally true, the Gambler was playing over the muzak in the bookstore. Hate country, but not old country. I was frantically glancing back and forth to make sure no one was around to hear me singing to myself. I’ve known those lyrics for over two decades. And on the other side of the binder shelf, I heard the woman behind information desk singing to herself, too. This is my kind of place.

Prof. Schmidt-You Know the Final Isn't Going Well When...

…you press “Enter” on your calculator and read .0000000674. And that’s supposed to be your answer. D’oh.
So that was my Production Operations Management final for you. A frustrating end to a frustrating class. But a good class. Can’t say I wasn’t warned. Prof. Schmidt told us on the first day we would get frustrated. He also said we would probably hate him. He was correct on the former, incorrect on latter. The more he taught, the more I liked him. He wanted you to think and forced you to do it. He’d give you hints but wouldn’t tell you the answers. It’s disaster for someone like me, who overcomplicates making an order at McDonalds, let alone calculating inter-arrival rates. But I learned a lot.
And he’s tall. Real tall. With loooong arms. I recall once he had reached up as high as he could to write something on the white board. As I (5’7”) left at the end of class, I remember walking by the board and looking up at what he had written. Remember when you were kid and you would put your chin on the outside wall of a really tall building and looked straight up? Remember that feeling of insignificance and vertigo? It was totally that all over again.
He’s bright. The year I finished my undergrad (I’m older than I look) he was wrapping up his PhD from STANFORD. Isn’t that the school that gets mentioned in the same breath and Harvard and MIT? Yeah, well, how many BCS Bowls have they been to? Oh snap. Anyway, I imagine Prof. Schmidt’s research is intense. When he’d doing equations on the board, he can pull some wicked arithmetic off the top of his head. Calculator-lever division.
And he’s stoic. He always has a bit of a grin on his face. Every once in a while we ask a question that demonstrates we’ve completely missed a vital point. I know that, on the inside, he dies a little…but he doesn’t show it.
One aspect of the MBA program that spices things up is the fact that I’m having finals in the middle of the term. There are a bunch of classes that only run for half semesters. Prof. Schmidt actually taught us the last half of the first semester and the first half of the second semester. So we had a full semester final the middle of mid-terms. This was really my toughest week of the year, worse than finals. I had a midterm last Thursday, a final on Monday, 2 on Tuesday, and a couple of classes that just trucked along meaning homework, reading, and studying. And relative to some, I got off easy. But it’s over and I did all right, outside of the comically incorrect answers I came up with on Schmidt’s test.
I’ll miss Professor Schmidt. I would take a class from him again in a second but probably won’t simply because Operations isn’t my focus. It’s probably for the best. I don’t want blood pressure to become an issue.
I noticed I got my first comment…thanks Cory. Feedback is surprisingly validating.