The Fuqua Experience

Where the hell have I been the last couple weeks?  Unsure.  Last I remember, I got off the plane from Shanghai…and then 4000 pages of Strategy reading and 100 Finance problem sets later, it’s Midnight going into the 4th (?) week of the term and I just finished the Finance mid-term.  30 minutes before the deadline.

Funny thing about said mid-term…I actually finished at 3 p.m. today.  Or so I thought, until I needed to actually write the answers into the Word document.  Forget that the business world runs on Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint when you need to ‘explain’ complex ideas to people who can’t understand or pay attention long enough to understand complex ideas.  There I was, 8 p.m., hand-calculated formulas and unformatted spreadsheets in hand, no closer to getting an SP than when I downloaded the exam.  Last Tuesday.

No kidding, it took me 2 hours to complete the exam while simultaneously studying (it was open-book, of course).  I took another 4 hours trying to format complicated math into Microsoft Word.  Equation editor looks pretty good when you are done, but I’m not sure it could be any more difficult to use.  Why Microsoft insists on having the formula real-size on screen when you are editing it makes no sense, other than they are masochists (as proven by the stupid Ribbon interface inflicted on the World).  Once you get to putting in a subscript, the cursor is so small that you actually lose it on screen.  And speaking of losing things, I was about to lose my temper if not for…

Jim Gaffigan.  The quote in the title above is from one of his stand-up comedy acts I was listening to while taming the Finance monster.  It’s funny, growing up I never listened to music when I studied (if I studied at all); now, I generally can’t work unless there is music playing.  Although, I have to be listening to music through headphones; outside noise is distracting enough where I can’t work.  But that’s an oddity to explore another day.

Since I’m already tired, I’m going to wrap this up by saying this is the worst exam I’ve taken so far at Fuqua.  Not because of the material mind you (Accounting still wins by a mile), just the extent to which the submission is torture to the student.  I’ve written a lot of technical documentation in my career (Remember statistical modeling?  You should see what a model write-up looks like at work), but I’ve never tried so hard to put the ‘square peg in the round hole’ like I did tonight.