A nightmare I had gotten nowhere

I've been having some very stressful dreams (nightmares, even) in the past few weeks. Although I'm generally happy while I'm awake, I have been waking up in something of a panic, probably because I'm overwhelmed by all the important tasks before me.

Last night I dreamt I was back in Texas and was receiving e-mails from SOM as if I had been admitted (telling me about orientation and classes and so forth), but I suddenly remembered I was actually waitlisted, not accepted. In addition, I had been persuaded into taking a buyout from the Star-Telegram in light of the fact I was returning to school. After realizing I would not be going to school, I tried to get my old job back, only to find out that they were pretty happy I was gone and that they weren't going to be considering me for my old position. So I asked for, and got, my old job back at the newspaper in Corpus Christi, where I worked before I went to the Star-Telegram.

To be clear, in real life I loved working at that newspaper in Corpus. But in the context of the dream, being back there represented having failed at moving forward -- so much so, in fact, that I was moving backward. And I blamed myself entirely; I internalized that I had blown the opportunity at the Star-Telegram by not working hard enough.

I admit I have some insecurity about not working hard enough. I tend to assume everyone else is working constantly, and that when I'm not working, I'm falling behind. The other night, Mike and I hooked up my old Nintendo and conquered Super Mario 3. It was a lot of fun, but part of me couldn't help but ask -- shouldn't I be improving my resume, or researching companies, or doing some of the work I volunteered to do for the Media & Entertainment Club, or getting a head start on reading for the classes I'll be starting next quarter? I know there's a legitimate answer -- that it's OK and necessary to relax. But it's easier to say that than it is to truly believe it, when there are so many other things to do.

Maybe the real issue is that I need to switch to decaf.

Grades are rolling in

I've mentioned before, but it bears repeating, that there are no "grades" at SOM. The deal is that at least 80% of students in a course receive a "Proficient." (The motto around here is "proficient is sufficient.") Then, at the professor's discretion, up to 10% of the top students can receive a "Distinction," and up to the bottom 10% can receive a "Pass" or, if they failed to meet minimum expectations, a "Fail."

There's no GPA or ranking system, so these grades don't mean much, except that if you get a Fail, you have to retake the class write a massive paper; you can't graduate if you have more than four Passes; and if you receive a Distinction, you can put that on your resume, and you're eligible to be a TA during your second year.

There's a bit of a contradictory feeling around school, and from me, about the grading system. On one hand, it's designed to promote cooperation, and, I think, to not punish people from unconventional backgrounds who might be less familiar with, say, accounting and economics. It also gives people flexibility to focus their priorities on what's most important to them without feeling anxious or burdened by a competitive grading system.

Irrational as it may be, however, people do still want positive affirmation. So I still hurry over to my mailbox every day to see if there are graded assignments in there. A pat on the head feels nice, especially after you've worked hard.

There's some suspicion among my friends that, since the grades themselves don't matter, the grading process itself isn't perfect. People noticed having identical answers to certain problems and getting different amounts of points taken off, depending on which TA is grading them. That's further evidence to suggest that it's best to break out of the approval-seeking mentality and just do work for the sake of learning.

I'm back like Baby Got

I'm well-rested and have been properly fed and watered, and now it's time to return to classes. This week, SOM puts the "Management" back in "School of Management" with a weeklong class called "Managing Groups and Teams." There are eight three-hour sessions spread over the next five days, and I've heard it compared to summer camp. We'll be rotating through different topics, with a variety of lecturers, activities and readings.

Learning how to lead may sound, to some, a little soft and touchy-feely, but I think it's crucial. At both the newspapers at which I worked, training in general was lacking (which happens when money is also lacking), and it seemed to me that some managers hadn't received much training in the leadership aspect of their jobs; that's not a knock against any particular people, just an observation about the priorities of newsrooms. But managing is a skill that takes knowledge and practice; effective leaders understand team dynamics, methods of motivating, how to define a clear vision, how to set boundaries, and so forth. So I'm looking forward to starting to learn these skillz, which in due time I can only assume will pay the billz. Holler?

Dara caught a lizard

My niece is dexterous. She caught a lightning-quick lizard with her bare hands ... twice.

Here are five more pictures from Florida.

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I still can't believe she did it!

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"What's life all about?"

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It's a big, blue, watery road!

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Dara's grandparents

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The ducks' fear of Dara running at them outweighed their hunger/interest in the lettuce she was holding.

Five pictures from Florida

It wasn't easy to get here, y'all. My alarm didn't go off Thursday morning, and I awoke more than two hours late. Somehow I made it from the warmth of my bed onto an airplane in Providence, two hours away, in 2 1/2 hours ... despite being out of gas, and having a malfunctioning GPS, and originally going the wrong way on the Interstate. It's a freakin' miracle.

And here I am, visiting my parents, my brother, his ex-wife and their daughter (my niece). I just turned in my last paper for the quarter, so I can actually enjoy the weekend! Who'd have thunk?

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My niece has good taste in dessert -- vanilla ice cream and chocolate chip cookies.

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For some reason, I find this photo kind of precious! My dad and his granddaughter.

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Dara and her mom, Keri.

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A typical scene -- my mom acts like a martyr in the kitchen while my dad puts his feet up.

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My brother Rick tries to capture the moments.

Stats exam is over

I did it. It's over. My work was neatly done, and I had what I felt were decent answers for all the questions. I cannot ask for more.

Tomorrow: Flying to Florida -- and finishing a Careers paper on the plane.

I make brilliant decisions

Here is the forecast for New Haven, where I live ...

And here is the forecast for Sanibel, where I'll be ...

I make brilliant decisions!

Exam post mortem

After trying to scribble words, graphs and numbers to persuade a TA that I learned some economics, I like to enjoy my three favorite things -- food (not pictured), beer (right) and the company of the delightful and academically helpful Mike.

And that leads me to my fourth-favorite thing: Resting on the couch.

Econ exam is over

I did it. It's over. My graphs were neatly drawn, and I had what I felt were decent answers for all the questions. I cannot ask for more.

Tomorrow: Stats.

It's getting hot in herre

Last night I got the chance to spend quality time with my neighbors because our building caught on fire. (Or so say the fire alarms throughout my building.) The alarm activation transpired twice, although I missed the first go-around because I was taking an exam. My neighbors, many of their pets and I gathered outside as firemen casually uttered "How ya doin', folks?" as they entered the non-burning building.

I can only gather that the alarms had something to do with the heat kicking on. Yes, the temperature has dipped just enough that the old, familiar smoky smell of heat is in the air. Having lived in Texas, the smell makes me a bit nostalgic, since I associate it more with my long-ago youth than with my adulthood. I can't wait for it to snow. Oh goody, snow!!

In our apartment, some of the heaters are covered with attractive heater-cover-things. Come to think of it, all of them are except the one in my room. Observe:

As you can imagine, the lefthand heater thingy seems like a nice place to leave things, like stacks of papers, or a candle. Apparently one should leave nothing atop the heater, as it gets hot.
Speaking of things I'm afraid to touch, there's an Econ exam this evening. Study time.

Accounting exam is over

I did it. It's over. My stuff balanced, and I had what I felt were decent answers for all the questions. I cannot ask for more.

Tomorrow: Econ.

3 accounting fun facts!

Why get an MBA to learn accounting when you can just read this blog??

1. Customers spent $220,000 on merchandise over the accounting period. Forty percent was in cash; the rest was on account. The merchandise cost $160,000 to buy. The journal entries look like:

Dr. CASH ............ $88,000
Dr. A/R ............... $132,000
Cr. SALES ..................... $220,000

Dr. COGS ............ $160,000
Cr. INVENTORY ........... $160,000

2. During the accounting period, the last principal payment was made on a loan, as was interest. The former is a financing expense; the latter an operating expense that, if paid in cash, would not appear in the indirect statement of cash flows because it would not be an adjustment to net income. (It would, of course, appear on a direct statement of cash flows, because it would be a use of cash for operations.)

3. Accumulated depreciation goes in a contra-asset account. If a piece of equipment was purchased for $4,500 and has an estimated life of five years, and is subject to straight-line depreciation, then after one year the $4,500 remains in the Equipment T-account, but $900 is credited to the Accumulated Depreciation contra-asset. On the balance sheet, this may appear as two items, or as one $3,600 item listed as "Equipment, Net." The depreciation is balanced with a depreciation expense that will appear on the indirect statement of cash flows in the operations area, because it is a non-cash adjustment to net income.

Somebody check my work.

My study methods: Effective?

At SOM, our professors are kind enough to supply us with previous years' exams, which is also terribly unkind, as the extra study materials ruin the weekend by (a) taking away excuses to not work, and (b) making John feel stooooopid.

Take Microeconomics. Please! How I cry when I simply cannot proceed with a problem. But practice makes perfect, and now I can invent problems and then solve them! Let's do just that.

Suppose I want to start a business selling chocolate milk. I can produce the milk using a machine that has two speeds, low and high. For whatever reason, it has to run at that speed all day, it can't switch midday. The slow machine makes 100 gallons/hour, costs $90/hour in labor and uses 2 oz. of the magic chocolate ingredient per gallon. The fast machine makes 120 gallons/hour, costs $120/hour in labor and uses 3 oz. of the magic chocolate ingredient per gallon. The ingredient costs $0.16 an ounce.  The machine is being lent to me for free for 12 hours/day. How does the market price of chocolate milk determine the speed at which I run my machine?

Funny you should ask:

LOW SPEED (100 gallons/hour)
Makes 1200 gallons/day
Therefore costs $1080 in labor/day
And costs $384 in secret ingredient/day
Average Variable Cost (AVC) = Total Variable Cost (TVC) / Quantity (Q) =  ($1080 + $384) / 1200 = $1.22

HIGH SPEED (120 gallons/hour)
Makes 1440 gallons/day
Therefore costs $1440 in labor/day
And costs $691.20 in secret ingredient/day
Average Variable Cost (AVC) = Total Variable Cost (TVC) / Quantity (Q) =  ($1440 + $691.20) / 1440 = $1.48

The answer is that you would not start manufacturing this chocolate milk until the market price is $1.22. Then you should run it at low speed and make up to 1,200 gallons/day. Keep doing that until the market price rises to ($1.48 x 1440 - $1.22 x 1200) / (1440 - 1200) = $2.78. At that point, switch to the high technology and run it at full capacity. The reason you should wait until the market price gets that high is because there's an opportunity cost to running at high-speed. That's the part that's a little counter-intuitive. For example, if the market price were $2, you might think you should run at high speed. But if you run at low speed you sell 1200/day for $2 each, making $2400 at a cost of $1464 for a profit of  $936. But if you run the high machine you'll sell 1440/day for $2 each, making $2880/day at a cost of $2131.20. Still profitable, but the profit is only $748.80. So it only becomes worthwhile to run at high and incur those costs when the profits offset them enough to make it a better alternative than running slow. If the market price is $3 for example, running on high you'll earn a daily profit of $2188.80, vs. $2136 at the low speed.

Ain't that something?

Far-Too-Happy Hour

Every Thursday night, SOM has a happy hour, recently rebranded as Closing Bell. And each is sponsored by a different student club. Last night's was put on by Q+ Gay/Straight Alliance, of which I am a member, seeing as I'm gay and prone to allying.

Although they do serve food at these events, it's not dinner food, and I wasn't yet hungry, so I never ended up having dinner. Big error. After a couple glasses of wine, the evening quickly dissolved into mayhem as I scooted along with second-year students to a party, and then to GPSCY, the grad-school bar that has free beer till 10 on Thursday nights. Things got wacky and wild, relatively speaking, and wound down around midnight or so, although the end-of-the-night details are blurry. (No, I didn't drive.) Eh, it was the last day of classes.

This may sound like the words of a functioning alcoholic trying to justify his behavior, but I do happen to think that these types of occasional evenings are good, even professionally. I met loads of second-year students I hadn't, including a girl who knows people doing what I want to do when I graduate. I'd say that alone is worth the cost of a little embarrassment and a hangover.
The day's getting off to a very slow start, though, and I need to get my head in the game. Exams! Exams!!

Corporate Presentations

This week, I attended two corporate presentations at SOM. These are an integral part of the internship and career process. Companies come to campus and make their pitch to persuade students to apply to their programs, and likewise students dress in suits and try to ask intelligent questions to start building a bridge to a place they might like to work.

First up, on Tuesday, was Mars Inc. Lunch was provided -- pizza, salads, cookies and, of course, many Mars candies, of which I chose Twix. (Please watch the commercial above ... it's about 10 years old, and one of my all-time favorites.) Three people from the company, including a recent SOM grad, talked about the company and highlighted some of the aspects that might make it appealing: It's privately held, so they answer to their customers, not Wall Street. It's the 6th largest private company in the U.S. and boasts many of the most popular and recognizable brands in the world (including M&Ms, Skittles and Snickers, but also Whiskas and Pedigree pet foods, and Uncle Ben's Rice). It's a lean company (meaning it's not weighted down by lots of layers of management) with an open physical office layout (no private offices ... everybody sits together in an open room), and they encourage their employees to be free and creative. After they give the pitch, people ask questions, and some people hang around after to shake hands and say hello. (I prefer not to do that, but to each his own.)

On Wednesday (today), I went to the presentation for Thomson Reuters. Although that's a totally different company from Mars, it was a similar gig: food consisted of nice sandwiches, chips and baked goodies, a few people including a recent SOM grad gave a PowerPoint presentation and pitched their internship opportunities and post-MBA rotational program, etc. As different as the two companies are, each has appealing aspects, but it's all going to boil down to What I Want To Do, which is still an issue.

Back to the really important point, which is hilarious commercials from 1998, here was my other favorite. I don't know why I remember these commercials ... they just made me laugh a lot.

Exciting news for Catholics worldwide

At the Yale School of Management, a new pope has been elected.

I saw David Sedaris

I did! He read some stories and essays last night at the Shubert Theater. I'm a fan, though not die-hard. I've read two of his collections: Holidays on Ice and When You Are Engulfed In Flames, and back when I was a New Yorker subscriber (when I had time for such trivialities), I was excited to see his name in the table of contents. The "show" wasn't "thrilling," but I laughed a few times. I preferred it when he was just telling stories and answering questions to when he was reading.

I went to David with my friend (I guess we've been here long enough to use that word) Erika. Beforehand, she and Mike and I went to Pacifico for tapas, which I am starting to suspect restaurants are cleverly jumping on so they can make wider profit margins, since they truly are, in fact, ridiculously overpriced appetizers. I mean, let's call a spade a spade. That's fine for people with money, but I'm a struggling student for Pete's sake. Delicious, though. Well some of it was delicious. My soup tasted like flavorless chunks floating in packaged gravy.

Today marks the first time I will attend a "corporate presentation," the first of three I want to go to this week. Today is Mars Inc., the company that makes M&M's and other candies, as well as Pedigree pet food and Uncle Ben's rice. A corporate presentation, as far as I can tell, is an event to which you wear a suit and learn about a company. I will provide details later. The other presentations to which I have RSVP's this week are Thomson Reuters and Unilever.

I am so excited to report that the number of graded assignments remaining in the core, excluding three massive nightmarish finals, are three -- one more statistics problem set, one more piece of accounting homework, and a 6-page paper for Careers. It's very exciting to be wrapping these classes up, and despite the pain of stress, I've learned a lot in a short amount of time. I better have -- this quarter cost $10,000.

A party picture

Since I'm almost never in any of the pictures in this blog, here's proof I did something. This was part of a super-fun Friday night: Dinner (i.e. margaritas and appetizers) with my Australia group, followed by some quality time with a few folks at a cigar bar called The Owl, and then off to this joint JD/MBA party thrown in a super-nice apartment. Pictured is me with two other first-years, Suzanne and Rasanah.

Check Providence off the list

Yesterday I went to Providence, but not Boston. That was my compromise. In a previous blog I mentioned my original plan, to do Providence on Saturday and Boston on Sunday; then I expressed concern that I would get too far behind on work. But I do not want to be setting precedents, even in the core, of choosing work over friends, because if that becomes my tradeoff now, when will it ever end? So Providence it was, and I'll do Boston another time.

The child you see at top is Trinity, second daughter of my college friend Stephanie (below). The first daughter is the lovely Aliyah, at left. It was not only fun to see Stephanie and her husband, and meet their children, but especially nifty to see where they live, which is next door to the house Stephanie grew up in. Stephanie's parents still live in that house, and now Stephanie and her husband, Shane, live in the house Shane grew up in. And there are other relatives and family friends on the street. A far cry from my family, which has been scattered around these United States for 20 years.

So I am gracing Northeastern cities with my presence one a time. And now, it is time to work.

SOM needs an auditorium!

I mean it when I say there's not much to complain about at SOM. It's a great school. Some people are down about the facilities, but I usually come to our school's defense. Sure we have chalk boards, and the hallways get a little jammed between classes, and the bathrooms are tiny, and ... well, I'll stop there. But, you know, get over it ...

But one thing that has been a consistent problem has been that our school does not have a venue that seats all the students at once. Thus, when we've had a class-wide meeting or presentation, we've always had to hike to another school and use its auditorium. Today, we had a resume workshop (which also covered interview tips and cover letters), and we had it at the Forestry and Environmental Sciences School. As you can see, beautiful. Gorgeous! And apparently, unsurprisingly, green. In the bathroom, there was a toilet, which is no surprise, and above it was a sign explaining that for liquid waste, you should flush it by pulling the handle up, and for solid waste, you should flush by pushing down, because they activate flushes that use different amounts of water. I suppose this will save the Earth?

Anyway, Yale is constructing what promises to be a beautiful new building for SOM, supposedly ready around 2013. After seeing this other building, I'll say it's needed ... a first-class facility for a first-rate school.

One more week of the core

Yesterday I attended a roundtable about media and technology. We discussed, among other things, AP considering cracking down on non-subscribers using their headlines and linking to their content. Good luck with that ...

Oddly, it's the third time newspapers have come up at school this week. In Game Theory, we discussed a hypothetical case in which two companies were considering starting up daily newspapers in the same city. Of course, the professor pointed out that this was an outdated example. And at yesterday's debate-team callbacks, one of the topics was whether newspapers should be able to be 501(c)3 nonprofits. Unfortunately, by random selection that was the one topic I had to sit out on ... Instead, my topics had to do with TARP funds and healthcare reform. Not my finest hour, and I didn't make the team. I would've loved to have done it, although I am not sure my training in tit-for-tat high-school debate style was exactly what they were looking for. (Well, that's obvious ...) Maybe I should've been more passionate and bombastic.

Meanwhile, our core classes are winding down. Hard to be believe ... kinda. Classes end a week from today, and then exams begin the following Monday. Although I'm all for learning, I hope we don't cover too much material in econ and accounting over these next couple lectures, because I'm already a little behind as it is. After the core, we start the "organizational perspectives" courses, a cornerstone of Yale SOM's integrated curriculum.

What those multisyllabic words mean is that instead of taking traditional "silo" classes like finance and marketing, we take team-taught courses that each look at business from a particular perspective. So next quarter's classes are Customer, Investor, Competitor, Sourcing & Managing Funds and Intro to Negotiation. So this will be the fun stuff, it seems.

Not that the core hasn't been fun and all ...

I have plans to visit some old college friends this weekend in Providence and Boston. I realize, though, that this would be an ideal weekend to get caught up on studying ... So I'm considering a postponement, although philosophically I feel that to have a life of suitable work-life balance I need to learn how to make those choices now and deal with the consequences. I remember when I was going to undergrad my brother once advised me, when given the choice between staying in and studying and going out and doing something, I should always choose going out, because I'll remember that years down the road, but I won't remember staying in and studying. True ... but I do, like, need to learn accounting and econ and stuff.