Well, I think that I might have taken my last structured class, completing roughly an 18 year journey, leaving me where I am today. I guess my only request would be that if you’re going to start reading this, you might as well finish it, not because it’s probably not going to be that long, but also because without the end I don’t think it’s going to paint a coherent message.
I don’t usually do this — and by that I mean that I don’t usually take time out to reflect on things that have happened as I spend most of my professional vocal strength painting the simple ways to not lose money on the portraits of people’s minds the best way I can.
Anyway, I figure that it’s worth reflecting on what I did in the past. Heck, maybe you can do it better.
Walking out of my classes today was less of a transitional lifetime moment than walking out of my last elementary school 5th grade class. I had just spent the day listening to several MBA final presentations. It was clear to me that the majority relied on their ability to emulate good decision making abilities ignoring the likelihood (in my opinion) that their ideas were refined bullshit. But, what do I know, I think my groups did the best job in both classes even though I didn’t help them present (I have a kidney stone). Our business plan was actually feasible and professional. Our negotiation exercise made a mockery of the idea of an exercise by putting a “study person” against a “party person” in a group project situation where they needed to fairly distribute hours spent working on the project, drinks at the bar, and job contacts. I got that sense of urgency today, like I have been getting throughout a lot of my schooling which always boils down to a couple key points:
1. What am I doing here?
2. How is my time best spent?
3. What am I waiting for?
Anyway, I think the majority of why I still feel like I haven’t transitioned is for 2 reasons.
1. I am relatively unsure whether or not I passed this last series of classes.
2. If I did pass, my parents have asked me to walk for graduation, so I’m tied down here for 2 weeks anyway.
As far as point 1 goes, this is mostly because in negotiations class, my strategy, which is unlike the strategy of any of my fellow classmates (competitive, collaborative, integrative, etc.) is that of avoidance. Needless to say, combine that with the fact my submissions for “reflective essays” were reflective essays and not “meet the rubric” essays, and you have what appears to be a out of control student with a disinterest in negotiations class.
In elementary school, my teachers pulled my parents aside and advised my parents to let me do whatever I wanted to do. I only found out about this last year. My mom quizzed me with math flash cards and I always got good marks in the deliverables but lacked the “neat, orderly, clean” soft skills that the girls always got but the semi-outspoken hard to control boys like me found out of reach.
In middle school, I digressed in my language abilities in 6th grade and took it upon myself to switch schools. Maybe my realization that my language assignments were solely graded on the neatness of my handwriting and not the content led to that. I’ll let you guess how I figured that one out. I spent 3 years in all boy classes taking my language skills to a level where at least I could be taken seriously.
But, I switched back in high school, 10th grade to focus on programming, robotics, and to surround myself with computers. I found myself getting sent to the vice principle’s office *kicked out of class* because I enjoyed handing in completed assignments before the teacher was done handing them out to the class. I took gym class as a 10th grader (a 9th grade class), and didn’t mind being perceived to be incapable of passing it the first time. I worked 10-20 hours a week as a soccer ref, or at the concession stand at SoccerZone on top of school. I volunteered to help repair electronic components of school corporations at the NIESC and I started taking college classes in such things as “Cisco Network Certification.” Everything I ever wrote for school apparently was par or below par, and I was always short of being able to write something worth reading in those days regardless of how hard I tried. Surpise, I got Journalist of the Year Senior Year for hand coding a student driven autonomously updating website thepennant.com which has since been overhauled and looks better and is less buggy. (But mine was cooler). So, I applied to a few colleges and chose Purdue Engineering since my parents went there and I was good at math (I ended up teaching myself 2nd year calculus my winter break senior year of high school so I could pass the AP exam).
I came to Purdue, was going to be in the CEM program – Construction Engineering Management, mostly because my friend did it. It ended up that GE offered me a job in Louisville as an Industrial Engineer (IE). Combined that with the fact that Professor Barany gave a lecture in ENGR 100 suggesting that if you wanted to learn how to make money, IE was the ticket. So, I’m a Co-Op student, working every other semester and I joined a fraternity, pledged over 60 weeks (the hard way), and everything made sense. The cool thing about engineering principles is that they make sense. Completely different from MBA school in some cases. Anyway, at this point, I decided that I wanted to figure out how to value businesses, especially since Barany again came to me and advised the 3+2 program for outstanding undergraduates, which apparently I was.
So, I go to MBA school, and everything goes mostly as expected until my 2nd semester, at which point in my first Finance class, I’m advised to believe that it makes sense due to the EMH that companies should target leverage ratios, and as such, when their stock price goes up, they should buy back their stock at these higher prices to target the leverage ratio. My grades start their decline. Anyway, at this point, I had begun paying my college education from stock market proceeds, with the initial generated capital coming from student loans, my savings from GE, Construction, SoccerZone, cutting grass, home repair, etc. It made more sense to me to learn from minds like Buffett rather than my professors in this case. I began questioning everything.
My first summer as an MBA, I applied for over 500 jobs, the market had crashed, nobody believed in me, but thank god my parents let me come home for the summer to wait out the storm. Suddenly, as I had predicted, people started to believe in me when everything I had said was going to happen started to happen.
Heading back for my 2nd year… It became impossible for me to retain information that I didn’t believe in. My grades are barely passing. Teachers pull me aside and ask me what I want out of my education. I don’t tell them that I’m taking what I can get, but doing my best to overlook that which isn’t important to me. I began putting stock tips at the end of my exams (to make up for the lack of gradable content — actually the teachers could have made hundreds of percentages 100%+ by following them). At this point I dropped the idea of having a focus for my MBA and looked through all the available classes and asked for all the syllabuses and signed up for the ones that seemed the least miserable. I avoided all classes from the finance side. The accounting ones were good. Several concerned faculty members talked to the Dean about me, who then sat me down and asked me about my life and how things are going and advised that I go partake in the free psychological counseling offered at Purdue. She apparently didn’t believe that things were going as well for me as I told her they were. I wouldn’t have believed me either. I realize that the things I’ve been up to sound too good to be true in some cases, and for that I apologize. I’ll try to do less next time and fall in line with expectations. Not. I almost went, until I realized that it wasn’t part of my life-strategy to waste my time and the time of others. I always set the bar so high that I can’t reach it. You’d be surprised how far you can reach if you set your limits high enough. But, be realistic and don’t hurt yourself by overextending. I tried to learn to present more effectively, but came across Dale Carnegie’s book after that class, where in one speech I discredited myself as a speaker by pointing out the flaws in the various education histories of my audience. My grades actually aren’t passing, but now I’m passing on attendance and credibility that I’ve built from being a “good student” in the past.
And so here I am, at the end of the chute. I can’t say that celebrating graduation feels right in this case, because it’s like running a marathon in a sideways direction, tripping over the finish line and disqualifying yourself because you ran it under an alias. But, somehow, right now, I think that I made it. Do I deserve it based on their metrics, heck no I don’t. I definately don’t. But do I deserve it on the principles that I mastered business? Heck yes. I definately do. I mastered business outside of school. School was always that thing that was holding me back from really unleashing my full untapped potential. And here I am now, still stuck, because in 2 weeks, I have to be back here, for my last real class if I am invited to take it — and this class is called graduation. And, if I do graduate on that day, I will finally feel free. I will be done. I will be graduated. I will not be held back.
1. What am I doing here? I’m leaving.
2. How is my time best spent? Somewhere else.
3. What am I waiting for? Nothing. Finally, I made it.
I want to close with outlining an idea that I used to agree with. Anyone familiar with Penelope Trunk’s perspective of an MBA being obsolete or maybe a “waste of time” might think that I whole-heartedly agree with her perspective.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/10/04/yahoo-column-are-mbas-becoming-obsolete/
Here’s my take. Does an MBA add that much value to someone’s life? Sure. It buys you 2 years to sit around and think about businesses, how they work, how you could be part of one, and gives you a bunch of ideas and concepts (whether or not they are always right, you are given concepts and ideas) that you can use to apply using various techniques.
Even the people I found myself associating with that I considered to be inept are now better off than when they started, admittedly. Hey, they’re “worth more.” I think that at least they are more likely to ask the right questions, which would more likely lead to them finding the right answers in whatever business setting they are involved in. But sure, maybe 10% of the MBAs out there actually significantly benefit from going to MBA school. My significant benefit comes from the motivation that it’s given me and how it’s continued to build positive feedback loops within me when I reject what I consider to be “silly ideas” that other people broadly accept as truths. It’s driven me to go out and follow leaders, to seek truth, to read influential books and to try to understand incentive structures. The point is, I think that most of the additional value of being an MBA is due to preselection and the differentiating characteristics between the type of people that would think about applying for an MBA and the rest of society.
Sure, I was no Tucker Max. I didn’t party nearly as hard as I could have or have nearly as much social time as I would have liked to, even though freshman year I was voted most likely to fail out of my dorm and I got a 4.0. I was too busy laying a framework for my future. I made some serious personal sacrifices. Ideally, I’d be where I am today but have spent time in classes with better girl/guy ratios and softer disciplines (those classes that people call “easy A’s” never glossed my transcripts — and that’s my own fault). Note that my ratios started suffering in 6th grade and have persisted though completion. Programming, robotics, engineering, and business are just as biased to men as I am to owning undervalued companies, which is a huge bias.
There are a few pieces of advice I’d like to give Krannert, or any MBA school that will take it. But be warned. If you actually take this advice, you might find yourself being the #1 MBA school in the world. it comes with 3 points.
1. The difference between the best MBA schools and average MBA schools is leadership. In order to lead, you must inspire your students with the belief that they CAN do it if they set their minds to it. There was not enough of this “I can do it” attitude at Krannert.
2. Have a class structured on the book “How to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie”
3. I structured a class using similar concepts on glenbradford.com called Buffettology. Teach that.
Class Dismissed.