So the year of the dragon has come and gone and is defined by my failure to post anything at all on my blog site. My husband pointed this out in about September, which I found a little odd since he is one of the people who actually knows what I have been doing this year, and since he is the one who is paying for me to be a student again, one would think that he would be glad that I was not spending my precious study time blogging.
It’s not that it has been a boring year, it is actually one of the better ones I have ever had, but there are several reasons people don’t blog about doing an MBA, firstly, at any given moment one is supposed to be reading, doing an assignment or preparing for an exam so blogging joins the list of guilty pleasures at the bottom of the To Do list, secondly, there is an element of self consciousness about doing an MBA. It always sounds a little smug.
Thirdly, what precisely am I supposed to post? My Macroeconomics assignment on the New Growth Plan (I got an A for that – a leap of unprecedented brilliance showing superior insight and a natural feeling for the subject – and a huge crush on the lecturer) or my HR Strategy Assignment on the Amendments to the labour laws? (I almost got an A for that, but I was told my response was “emotional”. What’s that supposed to mean?)
Finally, there is this panicked feeling about everything that I now write; if it can’t be referenced to an academic text it will count as plagiarism, unless of course I can prove that it really is an original thought. It is easier to just not have any original thoughts at all because you may be required to defend them in front of a class of 70, all vying for class participation points and looking for an entertaining argument to liven up a Monday night.
My path to an MBA was eerily smooth, once the thought was introduced to me by my sister in attempt to shut me up, I visited the GIBS (Business School conveniently up the road) website, and lo and behold there was an open information evening later in the week! The talk was funny and inspiring and the promise of being surrounded by very clever people who know how the world works was gut wrenchingly attractive. Of course a business school is as much a money making institution as it is a school, so this was a hard sell by in house doctorate level marketing experts, backed by extensive academic research on what an over competitive A type personality with boredom issues will respond to. Sushi, wine and lots of funny, clever and good looking lecturers promising a life changing experience and loads more money. What chance did anyone in the room have of walking away not burning with ambition and desire?
The application form virtually filled itself in, my matric certificate surfaced after only a cursory search, the aptitude test contained lots of conceptual diagram which are a doddle for anyone graphically trained and my boss gave me a glowing reference (he can’t wait for me to get another job). Before I knew it I was undergoing leadership training and being Myers Brigged.
They did warn us, they really did, but “challenging” doesn’t really cover the real (not fake or crocodile) tears shed over whether depreciation is real or imaginary money on a projected cash flow statement or the fact that there would be whole chapters of the statistics textbook that I just paged over because I knew that there was no hope in hell that I would ever understand it. My darling husband, who majored in economics and works for a bank, looked at my finance assignment and said, “Sorry Babe, you’re on your own here,”
Given my background it’s a wonder I understand anything at all, while I was enjoying myself doing French and Art and Biology at school I should have been doing Accountancy and Geography. Maybe then, instead of describing Columbia as a landlocked country (which it isn’t) in the Macroeconomics exam, I would not have confused the lecturer quite so much by declaring that Columbia needs to improve road communication with its neighbours in order to get access to the sea.
Lecture no:1 of the year was a talk on the nature and classes of profit, a subject far removed from my frame of reference at work. (we seldom break even, even in a really good year) Profit in my industry is a mythical creature, like unicorns or giant squid, but here is a lecturer with a doctorate in economics actually classifying the different types, so someone must have seen and measured these beasts. How did I get to 42 and not know this stuff? I always thought that double entry accounting was the practice of keeping two sets of books, one for yourself, and one for the taxman. It came as quite a shock to find out that it is a perfectly legitimate practice.
It is not all tears and confusion though, the lecturers are usually entertaining and very funny, clever or good looking. The nerd quotient is quite high in any given MBA class, in one of the early lectures, the kind and fatherly microeconomics lecturer was battling with his red dot pointer, he just couldn’t seem to control it’s movements across the screen as he tried to explain a graph in a heated discussion with a member of the class. Eventually he figures out that the class member in question was using his own red dot pointer to get his point across and he was trying to control the wrong one. Half the class fell off their chairs laughing and the other half frantically whipped out their iPads so that they can remind themselves to get their own red dot pointers ASAP.
Although competition is stiff, camaraderie is high. I never really got the point of Facebook until midway through the Corporate Finance module. There I am, late at night, lonely, struggling to concentrate, with the rest of the world asleep. Hop onto Facebook and there is the rest of the class on chat, posting jokes and silly pictures and encouragement and generally bolstering up the situation at 11:30pm on a weeknight. The purpose of Red Bull has also become clear; it gives you a perfect three hour window which comes in very handy when writing an exam the morning after a Lady Gaga concert.
My family have been very accommodating, my husband has finally left off calling himself “The Sponsor” and my daughters chivvy me along when they think I am about to be late for lectures. Their vocabulary has grown astoundingly in the past year as a result of me asking them what the constraint is in the morning routine or asking (yelling at) them if they expect a positive outcome from climbing a tree in their ballet kit. My six year old can use the word “scenario” in a sentence and my nine year old calls for strategic planning sessions when she doesn’t understand the procedure for the weekend.
So in closing I would just like to remind my husband, who had to pay three sets of private “school” fees this year, “If you educate a man, you educate one man. If you educate a woman, you educate a generation.” Or in his case two generations. Thanks Babe, now could you phone someone at the bank and ask them to help me with the Weighted Average Cost of Capital…………..?
Economic capital?