Another reason to skip graduation

From this morning’s Daily Tar Heel:

 

 “Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, will deliver the spring Commencement address, officials announced Wednesday.” 

 

This is what I write when I am too busy to write a real post.

Checking off the box in complex deal

We got back our complex deal exams in our lockers on Monday. I did pretty much what I expected to get. The scores ranged from a 24% to a 95% with a mean of 70%. One quarter of the class got an 80% or higher. I scored about one half a standard deviation below the mean. So it looks like we are on our way we are on our way to a P (pass).

 

The very interesting thing about the exam was not so much how I did on it but what I didn’t do. The three page exam was topped off with a cover page where we had to fill out information pertinent to the grading and the administration of the exam. There was a box to put down our name, section, locker and social security numbers, mother’s maiden name, political party affiliation, and name of church where we can be reached on a Sunday morning. Then there was a section where we had to sign our name verifying that the work was our own and we had plagiarized. I don’t have the exam in front of me so I can’t be specific but there was something about the verbiage (I believe it was written in past tense) that indicated that in order to be consistent with the spirit of what I was signing, I was not to sign the pledge until the very end of the exam. As you have probably guessed by now, after an hour and twenty five minutes of looking at balance sheets and income statements, I was so mentally out of shape that I handed in my paper without having signed the non-plagiarism clause. Surprisingly, the exam still got graded without my signature.

 

This reminded me of something that happened when I was in high school. We had to take a statewide exam and it had a similar pledge that had to be signed in order for it to be graded. At the beginning of the exam, the proctor went around the room making sure that everyone signed it before the exam’s commencement. When he got to my seat, I decided to become a smart aleck and pointed out that the exact wording was “I declare, at the conclusion of the exam, I had neither blah blah blah” His response was “just sign it.”

 

The response is quite revealing because if you think about it, there is no way you can declare that you have not cheated on an exam until you have finished taking it. His “just sign it” attitude indicates that he is not interested in the students making a credible pledge that they have not plagiarized. To him the pledge was nothing more than a box to be checked off so that a goal (grading the exam) could be achieved. I see a striking parallel between this man’s attitude and that of many Christians in America today in regards to their faith. We live in a country where an overwhelming majority claims to be of the Christian faith yet a majority of this majority considers their faith to be no more than a box to be checked off to fulfill a goal. That goal depends on the person. In some cases it is to fit in within a particular community (parents, in laws, circle of friends), to be considered a good person, etc. But many of the people that folks like me politely call “cultural Christians” hold no more of a belief in Christianity than that high school teacher has in the sanctity of the honor pledge.

 

I’d love to keep talking about this. I actually intended to write one more paragraph on how this mentality is linked to many of the accounting scandals we’ve covered in the accounting classes. But it is 1:30am and I have to do some research so that I can sound semi-intelligent tomorrow when representatives from the world’s largest software company come to Kenan-Flagler.  

Tags: MBA Experience, Faith, Job search

Reliving our darkest hour (Part 2)

"One day, we will think back on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and remember in crystal detail what we were doing when the first plane crashed into the north tower at 8:45 a.m.”                                                                                               The New York Daily News

 

I will never forget what I was doing on September 11, 2001. Not only the moment I learned that our nation was under attack, but also the moment I realized that it had been changed both physically and psychologically forever. When I arrived at work at around 9:50 that morning, a couple of employees were standing outside the building trying to make calls on their cell phones. I got to my desk, saw my co-worker Rob listening to his radio in his cubicle.

 

After checking email and sending a couple of IMs, I went downstairs to our technical lab where there was a television set. There, I found the technicians standing in front of the screen watching CNBC. One pointed to the cloud of smoke and told me that one of the tower had just collapsed. Very soon after, an announcement came out on the building’s speakers telling all employees to go home for the day.

 

On my way out of the garage, I spent about ten minutes sitting in my car waiting in line to get out of the garage. When my car got to the exit of the garage, I had to make a left turn to join the line of traffic leaving the AOL campus. As I sat there waiting for my turn, I heard on the radio that both towers had collapsed. I felt this incredible sense of sadness and helplessness while sitting in my car stuck in traffic and I did what was most natural to me at the moment, I cried. I remember looking straight ahead at the line of cars I was trying to merge with and spotted a convertible I was planning to get in front of. When I made eye contact with its driver and hesaw the tears on my face, he pointed his left index finger toward his ear and made a gesture as to communicate “this is insane.”

 

I ended up driving to Culpepper for lunch that day before returning to my apartment where I was able to see and smell the smoke coming out of the Pentagon from my window. A few weeks after that Tuesday morning I overheard a conversation where one person predicted that September 11 would become the most studied day in the twenty first century. I believe it. In the days since the attack, I became fascinated with many of the stories that were reported about what different people did that day. The story about the man who was on a floor above where the plane had crashed but made it to safety because he just happened to have chosen the one stairway that had not been destroyed by the wreckage. The man who walked out of the North Tower right around the time the second plane hit the South Tower without realizing that his sister was aboard that second plane. The sister was about to embark on a vacation to Los Angeles with her best friend and ironically the best friend was booked on a different flight, the flight that minutes ago flew into the North Tower.

 

As sad as I feel every September 11, I wish we never get to a point where we don’t pause to remember this awful anniversary for it serves as a reminder of what was taken from us. Our nation and its people were robbed of something, something that we have longed for since and can never be replaced.

Tags: Memories, Terrorism

Reliving our darkest hour (Part 1)

I remember it like it was yesterday. It began normally like any other morning and yet it was different than any other since. I was getting ready to go work and had walked out of the bathroom when Diane Sawyer returned from a commercial break by telling her audience “we want to keep you up to date on the latest information” and showed a live picture of the World Trade Center with thick smoke shooting out of one side.

 

Not know the full extend of what was about to unfold, I left my apartment and headed for work. But before I left, I called my father and asked him to turn on the news. Once in the car I turned on the radio and I remember thinking that the coverage on the radio was much more melodramatic than what I had seen on the television earlier. It wasn’t until minutes later that I realized that in the time it took to get to my car, a second plane had hit the South Tower.

 

I called up a couple of friends to tell them what had happened. Some were already in the office but had yet to hear the news while others were still asleep and had their phones turned off. BuckySis was on her way to work and had just gotten off of a ferry boat where she witnessed the explosion from the second airplane while crossing the Hudson River. I spent the remainder of my commute grasping the enormity of what had happened and began to consider turning around and heading back home when Jim Miklashevski reported from the Pentagon that something had happened at the Department of Defense headquarters. The Pentagon was located less than two miles from my apartment and for the first but definitely not the last time that morning, I began to worry about my own safety.

 

I am going to come back later today and finish my thoughts on this important topic that I have been meaning to write about for some time.

Tags: Memories, Terrorism

Déjà vu during complex deal

I have often noticed that in the MBA program very often I will encounter a topic in a conversation with someone or in a meeting and then a couple of days later, when I least expect it, that same topic surfaces again.

 

On Wednesday I attended a breakfast and a lunch panel sponsored by a telephone company that is hiring students for its management rotation program. The four Kenan-Flagler alums who flew up from Atlanta spent a good deal of time talking about the company’s pending merger with another telephone company. Then yesterday during my complex deal exam, the entire case on which the questions were based on was the acquisition of that company by the other company.

 

One thing I am really glad about the complex deal exam was that I did not spend too much time on the material. The class is pretty hard and I heard many of my classmates complaining this past week about how lost (in a secular sense) they were. Since the exam was open notes, all I did was make sure I knew the notes well enough to know which sections to turn to for certain topics. The first third of the exam was pretty easy. The middle third was challenging but do-able. The last third was pretty hard and most of my answers were blind guesses. I doubt I could have done better on the exam if I had spent three more hours studying for it.

 

I will find out the results of the exam next week. Also next week, the other telephone company that is acquiring the company that was here will be visiting Kenan-Flagler for its management rotation program.

Tags: MBA experience, Job search, Time management

In search of new opportunities

We are four weeks into my second year and so far the year has been coming along pretty well. There is just as much work as last Mod, the difference being that there is not as much pressure to get them done. My complex deal professor joked around in class saying the deals that will be presented on the assignments and on the exams will be complex because “the name of the class is not simple deals.” But he also emphasized that he would not assign a grade lower than a P (pass) as long as he is able to recognize the student’s name and face from having shown up in class.

 

During the last Mod of my first year, I was under the gun from having to worry about finding a summer internship. This year, I am under similar pressure from having to find a full time job but the pressures are different. The pressure stems not so much from having to find a position within a certain time frame but more from knowing that whatever offer I accept will not be limited to the summer but will be a full time job that I will be working for at least a year. Two weekends ago a friend of mine from UVA was in town and he spent two hours looking over my resume. He asked me detailed questions about what exactly I did during my internship and during my past professional experiences. I couldn’t believe how much better my resume looked after he rewrote a couple of my bullet points. The second year job search will officially kick off tomorrow when I attend a breakfast reception and a lunch panel sponsored by a telecom company that is hiring for its general management rotational program.

 

I have also become keenly aware that this will very likely be my last year as a student on a college campus. This has led me to become more diligent in allocating my time and maximizing my experiences at UNC. Earlier tonight I attended an open house for a campus organization that I wish to do some business development work for. I am not going to reveal what organization it is but let’s just say I have always had an interest in the media and I think this is a good way for me to get some exposure to it in case I one day get to fulfill my dream of owning or managing a broadcastmedia outlet.

Tags: MBA Experience, Time management, Job search

Fumble at the one yard line

As I was heading toward the exit this afternoon at the Kenan Memorial Stadium three minutes into the last quarter with the Tar Heels behind Rutgers by 11 points, I ran into a classmate who said “I cannot think of a school with as much money and as much history as UNC that has a football team that has consistently sucked as much.”

 

The only silver lining is that at the rate they are play, the Tar Heels will certainly lose to Virginia on October 19 when they play in Charlottesville and across the nation on ESPN.

Tags: UNC Sports, UVA Sports