Closing the books for 2006

Tomorrow is the last day of classes but for me my last class was yesterday when we had an in-class final exam for services marketing. There were four graded essay questions followed by two that I didn’t quite expect. The first was on a scale of one to four, how rigorous did we consider this class and the second was what grade did we expect to receive for it. Initially I began to answer by indicating that I consider the class slightly below average in rigor and expect to receive a P (pass) for it. Then I decided that since my grade has yet to be determined and the grading is such that I suspect there is a bit of subjectivity involved, it may be smarter to say that I find the material above average in rigor and I expect to receive an H (high pass) for the class. Before turning the paper in, I decided to give the “smart” answer instead of the honest answer. I hope this pays off and that I will remember to keep this “skill” in mind when I talk to potential employers and recruiters.

 

I came to school today for a Career Management Center workshop on how to conduct an off-campus second year job search. As I said before, from this point forward, less of the job search effort will be on the part of recruiter coming to campus and more on the part of students looking off campus. The counselor said that “unofficially” the CMC believes that approximately 47% of the second year class has an offer, I am not sure whether this number represents the number of students who have received an offer or have accepted one. I was out in the hallway earlier talking on the phone with a friend of mine, one who would kill me if he ever finds out that I blog about him but I have no worry about that because as he has said many times “I stopped reading your blog long ago because it sucks, you should delete the darn thing.” I was telling him my next steps in the job search process and he said “well, sounds like you are in the driver’s seat.” To which I replied, “no more like I am in the passenger seat but at least I am enjoying the ride.”

 

As we were talking out in the hallway, I paced around looking into several classrooms where there was a class was in session (the classroom doors have a small glass window that you can look through). I saw the fixed income professor teaching the advanced derivatives class, the first year finance professor lecturing about stock options, and saw a lot of faces that I have not seen in a while. It dawned on me that since I had only Monday and Wednesday afternoon classes this year (except for the negotiations class which met an entire day on three Fridays), I had missed out on a large part of the daily life at Kenan-Flagler and had almost become a stranger in my own building.

 

Hopefully the next two Mods will let me spend more time during the day at Kenan-Flagler and still allow me to go to the main campus at least twice a week to enjoy the festive atmosphere there.