Hella

In the spirit of the Olympics, life has decided to throw a nice set of 110-meter hurdles right in the middle of my week. It started with knowing that I’d have a waiver exam on Tuesday night. So this past weekend, I enjoyed myself in preparation to buckle down. Seeing where I stand now, I guess I should have been saddling up.

Monday, I got fed up with my laptop making a bunch of noise (clicking so loudly you can hear it in the next room with the door closed) and decided to give IBM a call. It turns out that my brand new T42 (barely a month old) already has a bad hard drive. I purchased a Thinkpad back in ‘97 and on the third day I had it, the video adapter went completely out rendering the machine useless. Needless to say, I don’t have a good track record. Well I emailed Computer Connection (the campus store where I got my computer) but they said they cannot accept a return since it’s been over 30 days (33 to be exact) and that the manufacturer must service it. After numerous calls to IBM’s support line, I called the customer satisfaction line to see about a return. Evidently customer satisfaction isn’t high on the list; I waited on hold over 30 minutes on two occasions today and neither call was ever answered. Did I mention I am loving my iMac these days?

Tuesday evening (technically last night), I had the statistics waiver exam. I felt good when sitting in the five lectures over the past couple of weeks and was scoring reasonably well on old exams. As I went through the actual exam tonight, I felt somewhat confident about it. I know there were several that I missed, but I think (fingers crossed) I’m above the passing threshhold. Maybe by the first of next week I’ll have something to report. This waiver is important to me because several of the electives I’m looking at taking have this course as a prerequesite.

Speaking of electives … I’m going to get into the auction for my first semester. I’ve waived several courses (though I thought I wouldn’t initially) and now that Pre-Term is almost over, I am feeling better about the decision to apply for the waivers. I remember more than I thought and I think the marginal benefit of sitting through the courses again is much less than the marginal cost of not replacing it with an elective (and we all know you set marginal revenue equal to marginal cost … ok, bad Pre-Term MGEC 608 joke). But back to the auction and these electives. It seems that of the few courses I managed to find that would fit in my schedule for which I have the appropriate prerequesites, none of them have open seats. Lovely! What’s even better is that of the courses I’m interested in that do have open seats, I do not have the prerequisites. Delightful! I have a lot of research to do because surely there are some courses I’m overlooking that will fit into my schedule and meet my first-year-not-done-with-the-core-yet position. Hopefully the “First Year Schedule” seminar later today will shed some light on my options.

Also this week I’ve been swimming through the Career Management website and taking various indicator tests. I retook the Myers-Briggs and one of my letters has shifted since undergrad. After discussing the results with a career advisor, I learned that sometimes it is best to stick with what has already been indicated, but after having read through the materials, I think I just might have more N than S (I’m INTJ). I also took the CareerLeader that helps me understand strong areas and opportunities for improvement. Interestingly, some of the careers I thought I’d least likely be suited for came out as strengths and those that I have strongly considered came out on the extreme low (weak) end. I’ll be thinking about this a bit more because I don’t think it’s entirely off the mark.

Laptops, waiver exams, navigating the course auction, career confusion … why again did I want an MBA? Just kidding :). Things will be much better after Saturday’s accounting placement exam.

Filed under: B-School