A Hard Lesson

I received my final grades from the previous module in business school. Overall, I'm pleased. I did score top of my class in Management, and respectably in Financial Accounting and Marketing. Finance, not surprisingly, was amazingly challenging. I'm glad just to have passed that class.

However, I did learn a few good lessons, one of them hard:

In the finance final, I struggled. I knew the concepts were pretty basic, but I had trouble adapting the concepts to the difficult, or even intermediate-level questions. I questioned whether I even passed the exam. Then I received my exam grade and yep, I passed. Barely.

About two weeks later while walking out of class for the night, I'm chatting with a classmate about the break that followed the finals. He said something along the lines of "well, when you left the Finance exam early..." I said, "hold it! What are you talking about?" He repeated, "you know, that rainy day, you finished the final early and left." I replied, "no I didn't! The exam was 4 to 6p.m. and I turned in the exam at 6pm." He said, "Deb...the professor gave us an extra half an hour...until 6:30pm." I cussed so loudly I thought the roosters that wander around the university (they really do live on campus) would wake up. Honestly. I couldn't believe it! Since then, I've found out that EVERYONE knew the exam was an extra half an hour; a half and hour I sorely could have used well. I'm not sure how I missed that critical piece of information, but I'll be damned sure to find out when every final exam ends from now on!
So, that's the lesson-- don't hand in a final until the proctors ask you to do so!

Secondly, I realized that I need tutors. I can't manage all alone, just taking notes and trying to make sense of this stuff on my own. Especially as the finance module continues this semester with Investments. I've asked a classmate who worked at a hedge fund to tutor me this module, and he willingly agreed.

So, this is going to be a HARD module. My classes include Investments, Managerial Accounting, Quantitative Methods and Management Information Systems. I'm not even sure I know what the last classes are, except that the latter probably has to do with databases. (So far the professor has just talked about his research and, believe it or not, medieval history. Don't get him going on about the Jewish shtetls, either.)

This module really scares me -- none of these classes speak to my strengths, and all to my weaknesses. I figure, this is a heavily-quantitative program, which is stuff I need to know to be a good manager, but stuff I probably never in a million years would have learned on my own. So, I'm heading off into the wild mathematical, statistical, quantitative yonder...hopefully to be seen from again!