Friday, September 24, 2010

Back in School

I feel like I have bitten off more than I can chew this semester. I signed up for two classes instead of just one because 1)it seemed like a good idea this summer when I was taking a summer session (and therefore double-time) class and still having time to be bored (because it was slow at work and everyone I knew was out of town) and 2) Because I needed to see if I could do 2 classes at once-I have 16 classes (not counting this term) to do and I would like to get my MBA before I am 60. I picked two classes in subjects that I actually wanted to learn about. I have Accounting (that's a core requirement) and IT Project Management (which is an elective but since it's part of what I do for a living I thought it might help.)

The good news is that in the Project Management course I get to work with my reliable team mate from MGT 650 so I know at least one person on the team and i know he's reliable-I will not be left holding the bag. Accounting has no group work at all! So I have only one team to deal with. The bad news is that both courses carry a heavy weekly homework burden. Either of them alone would be no big deal but with both I'm still feeling twitchy. I have class on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. This means that everything needs to be done by Monday night. I know that it's Tuesday because that's when I have an anxiety attack. This Tuesday I was sitting on the Commuter Rail train headed into Boston when I got all worried that I didn't have the technical chops to take part in my Project Management course. I calmed myself down by reminding myself that although a good portion of the class are IT professionals there is no such requirement to *take* the class. Furthermore, one of my team mates is a waiter and I do desktop support (and occasionally IT project management) for a living. No, I'm not a developer but I do, in fact have some geek cred.

I calmed myself down from my latest "OhMyGodIt'sOnlyWeek3AndI'mAlreadyBehind#!" by scheduling next Friday afternoon as a half day off so I could catch up with whatever I was behind in (mostly Accounting Problem Sets.) The reason I was freaking out was that in spite of the fact that I wasn't being a slacker my homework was still not done on Sunday evening for the second week in a row. I prefer to deal with problem sets on the weekends during the day when I have the brain power to deal with them as opposed to after work. But even without being a slacker there are still things one must do and these things take time away from doing Accounting prob sets. One must visit the grocery store at the dry cleaners. One must unclog one's toilet one must visit the Maul and transact business there. And if you are me, one must see one's friends every now and again and go to the beach with one's Poodle therapist. Touching base with friends is as important as unclogging the toilet. I don't need to be a social butterfly, but I do need to see people every now and again or I will go mad.

So I do what I can to make all of these things work out-I can see I will be carefully juggling them all this term (not to mention my full time job which has projects-as yet undefined for me this Fall.)

While I am distressed to still find myself as twitchy as I was pre-term, I have to say some part of me is standing back and asking "Who are you and what have you done with Slacker Cantabridgienne?" My project management class has teams of five. This may just be because my 650 class team was a three-person team (they were supposed to be four but we blew the professor away with our first assignment so he let us be three) which, in the end turned into a two person team, but five seems to be excessive. Do you really need five people to write a 25 page document? Five people. Me and four nerd boys. Cat-herding.

One of them suggested a project for us to work on and put together a few power point slides for us to present to the class on Tuesday. Unfortunately, he made a faulty assumption. I told him so in e-mail-I quoted the syllabus at him. I used to hate people who did that sort of thing. I probably still hate them-when they aren't me. This is what I mean by who the hell am I now and what happened to slacker Cantabridgienne who got by on native brilliance (and the occasional font or spacing change to make the paper long enough)?

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