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.