Category: school

I started my new MBA class on Friday. It was actually really awesome. The class is all about starting a new venture and the professor told some amazing stories about businesses that he’s triumphed. The following is paraphrased

Prof: “and if you follow the strategies of this book you can almost assure success because it goes about product development in a more surefire way. There will be times when you can’t think of ideas and are struggling to get off the ground but when you do you’ll succeed. At one point I was unemployed for 14 month and that was a very stressful time. But when I finally got the business off the ground I was earning about $30,000 a month.”

Wait… what?

Unfortunately, as we were leaving class a student asked for the syllabus

“oh, I’m sorry. I’ll have a syllabus for you next time. Just read the book and we’ll talk about it in our next class.”
“how far should we go in the book.”
“no, you misunderstood me. Read the book. Finish it for next class.”

darn it!

Anyway, the countdown is on. It’s been a long time since this post. But I’m finally on the home stretch. I have a notably finite number of classes left at school (both schools), in fact, I think I can change the units from months to days to hours left.

Soon. soon.

Last night I took a quiz.

for the curious amongst you this is my 10 minute MSPaint recap of said quiz..

That right there is, I’m reasonably sure, the correct way to solve that problem. It’s simple, elegant, the length of the beam cancels itself out, all of the given values are used. The method is accurate.

The problem is that at a real test you’re given a time limit. You’re stressed so you’re not thinking clearly and you tend to dive into problems instead of thinking about them carefully and rationally. My answer on the quiz was completely wrong, a disaster.

Granted, I still did a moment analysis around point P. But I included the mass of the beam in my spring analysis. UGH. and then I got the spring constant of the spring (k) confused with the spring constant for the whole system. This is such a foolish mistake! And it’s exactly that – a foolish mistake. While I respect that mistakes result in wrong answers and wrong answers result in space shuttles breaking up in re-entry, being tested in such a manner still seems silly. When given a job at work that requires ANY equation, I dig through it systematically and always verify my results with known experimental results to make sure it makes sense.

If given this problem in real life, I’d take a lot more than 20 minutes to make sure that it was perfect. Of course the other side of the argument is that if I truly had a mastery of the content, than I would have swept through the problem quickly on my first try – regardless of the environment or a time limit.

Maybe my complaint isn’t the method of quizzes. It’s simply that I’m really sick of school.