One Down

Well, I survived my first Statistics class. Today was officially our last day of stats. As someone who only had one financial class prior to embarking on this MBA journey (and that was a pass/fail macro economics class in college), I was more than a little nervous about jumping into stats. Thanks in part to a brilliant and very approachable professor, and thanks to advanced statistical software (saving us from the pains of doing manual calcs), I have to say it was actually a great experience.

One course down, something like 85 to go. :-)

Mixin' It Up

Are Red Bull and Sudafed compatible? By "compatible," I mean: will taking both at the same time kill me? We'll see. That's the solution I needed tonight to persevere through this evil stats homework. I've had allergies for a week that are causing me to consume more Kleenex than the patients in an average hospital wing, and I'm wiped out tonight yet face a mountain of stats problems, so what else is there to do but chase my Sudafed with a can of Red Bull?

Ah, it feels like college again.

Coming Up for Air

It's 2:55pm on Saturday, and I'm about ready to run screaming from the conference center. Moments ago, we wrapped up our 3-day stats class. This 5-day exercise in pushing one's mental boundaries has come to an end. It was much more intense than I expected, and while I did pick up some good tidbits of knowledge (or at least it seemed like I did), we'll see how much of it I'm actually able to retain after driving home and putting my brain on ice. Thankfully, I think our class bonded over the intense frustration and study we all went through together-- the last time we all experienced anything this intense was likely college. Personally, my brain is full, just like that little kid in the Far Side cartoon. Time to go back into the real world. The respite will be short, though, as the homework will be piling up and I can't afford to take that long of a break.

Stats is Getting Old

OK, we're now into the afternoon of our second straight 8-hour session of statistics. But if you add the days this week before the class spent doing stats homework, or the time over the last two nights when I've been up to or beyond midnight doing stats, it's easy to see that this is all getting a little old. I'm getting sloppier in my homework and more frustrated with my growing inability to "get" the concepts. I'm burning out. We have another full day of this, so it will feel like libration tomorrow when we're released into the fresh air and allowed to drive back home to be with our families. Overall stats is interesting, but not for three solid days.

As I like to say, Disneyland is a great place, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Back again

Back again for my second week-- I must be crazy. It's 7am on a Saturday morning and I'm sitting with 65 other people eager (or foolish) enough to give up yet another Saturday to be on the campus of the University of Minnesota for school. Most of us had a rough week, crushed by the volume of homework we needed to have ready for today. I went through several gyrations of "how do I find enough time in the day to do this work?" and instead of pushing it all off to the mythical "after the kids go to bed" time period, instead I'm looking for smaller timeslots during the day when I can make at least a little progress.

Yesterday we had 12 hours of statistics-- that was about as interesting as it sounds. But I was surprised to find myself actually interested quite a bit in what was being presented. One of the reasons I've stayed away from math is because of a cadre of evil math teachers sent to torment me in high school-- this was the prime reason I didn't major in computer science in college. Now, with 16 years of the workforce behind me, I'm taking another run at it. It's amazing how the textbooks have changed since I left college-- they're much more graphical, informal, and segmented than I remember-- much easier to approach. And of course the Internet exists now, so the books have an online component that would have been unimaginable the last time I was in school. It's making everything more interesting.

Today's topic: accounting. (cringe) 12 hours learning the "language of business" as they say. I'm going to need all the caffeine I can get my hands on.