The agony and the ecstasy

“Hey how are your six classes coming along?”

Why, I am glad you asked. It’s been rough and also pretty exciting. The pricing class meets at 8am and there has not been a single Monday or Wednesday morning in the past two weeks that I have not said to myself, as I am dragging myself out of bed at 7:25am, just what did I get myself into. But then an hour later when I am listening to the professor talk about how companies should price their products, I realize that having gotten up early was worth it.

This pretty much sums up this Mod so far, I do not regret taking any one of the six classes I have signed up for. The one class that I was considering dropping was strategic innovation and I am so glad I kept it. A lot of the topics we talk about is really interesting and applies to the industries I want to work in. Just the other day we were talking about online publishing and one student said “I am amazed at much many people reads blogs and find interest in all this self-generated content.” To which another student said “I don’t believe anything I read on blogs.”

The biggest challenge to not allowing these classes to bury me has been to keep myself fired up and focused. It’s pretty easy to do the former when your classes are on interesting topics. The latter is much more challenging. On Tuesday night after I wrote our last blog posting, I received an email which made it substantially more difficult for me to concentrate on school for the next two weeks (and possibly beyond). I wasn’t going to write about this just yet because it’s one of those things ….. like getting pregnant where you want to get past the first trimester and feel comfortable that it’s going to happen before you tell the whole world about it. But I think to not mention it would be to do the audience an injustice because it would be the equivalent to ignoring the giant elephant that’s just walked into the room and sucked up all the oxygen.

The email came from a recruiter asking to schedule a phone interview. I am not going to use my words to hint the identity of this company, except to say that it’s a media company that I very much want to work for. I am really psyched that I have an interview but it worries me. I worry that I will be eliminated after the phone interview, I worry that I will get invited to a second round but won’t receive an offer. I also worry that if my classmates may judge that “I am hitting out of my league.” I was feeling the exact same way last March when I had a phone interview with the world’s largest software company. I was excited and yet I was embarrassed to tell people and actually worried about how they might react if I had gotten the internship. One day I told a classmate I had to prepare for a phone interview and when he asked what company it was, I lied told him it was another company. I am feeling very much the same way now. So far I have only told one classmate, and I told him only because he had told me about the position last week during our MBA bible study. I think that at the very least, keeping this to myself (for now) will save me (in a secular sense) from having to field constant questions from well meaning classmates over the next two weeks about how the interview went.

After dinner last night, I got home, napped for two hours (I never get enough sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays) and when I woke up I decided to get my work done after failing to find the UVA versus NC State basketball game on TV. When I saw the 33 pages I had to read for today’s strategic innovation class, I paused and momentarily wished I had dropped the class. But when I saw what company the reading was about, I laughed. It may not be a sign or omen from God Almighty but it shows He has a good sense of humor and impeccable timing.