Hi everyone! I thought I’d do a bit of a reflection on my first semester in school as I’m starting finals this week! Tomorrow I have my final presentation for accounting along with our paper, peer evaluations, and much more due. Next week is our management final presentation. As I’m writing this I’m getting ready to go practice the presentation for accounting later today (Sunday).

I have to admit, today was supposed to be either a book, movie, or musical review however I haven’t finished the book I’m reading, haven’t seen the movie I’ve wanted to see, and didn’t buy tickets for the musical I need to see yet. So clearly this is going well! What I have been doing is preparing for my final presentation in my accounting class this week.

Anyway, I’m feeling good about finals, even if I’m fed up with my group. My part is done and I have somewhat prepared (I’m planning to use my note cards to practice today but won’t use them for the actual presentation). However I don’t think my group mates have at all. I don’t recall if I ever nicknamed them and at this point it doesn’t quite matter but we started out strong, quickly assigning each other work as we only had four weeks to put two projects together. But now everyone seems so over it.

The woman that freaks out about everything and has absolutely no chill volunteered to put together the paper and get it ready to turn in. Yet when I read it yesterday it was a mess! She better be working on it now or planning to fix it ASAP. She’s already on my bad side due to her poor attitude. Then there’s the sports graduate assistant. He works with the wrestling team and I don’t think he’s truly into it. He just graduated school and went straight into the MBA program so he doesn’t have any real world experience to understand why we’re all back in school. But he has the best attitude off all of us and is super easy-going so I don’t mind having him in the group. Lastly (besides me), is the sports obsessed guy. Last project he did a great job and did the most work out of everyone. This time around he’s been really lagging behind in terms of work. He offered to put together our presentation and, like freak out woman, he didn’t actually do anything other than copy and paste the slides together with no formatting. Also, I don’t think all the slides have actually been added, it seems like it’s basically my slides and one other person’s, and that’s it.

I’m not trying to make myself sound like the most dedicated or anything but it feels like I am. Last project I was not at all but this one I’ve done the biggest portions of work and gotten it done on time (even if I finished working on something two minutes before our conference call, it counts!). Plus I’m the one that has been trying to push everyone to get stuff done ASAP as I live the farthest and want to take advantage of the fact that I’m on campus once a week yet everyone kept missing deadlines and weren’t ready to practice. It was so frustrating! We would agree on a specific day to have stuff done and then when the date approached the others would say they didn’t think that they could get it done. I understand we had a holiday (Thanksgiving) but that was one day, and we didn’t have class that week so I finished nearly everything I had to do and then had to wait for the others to catch up. Long story short, I will definitely take into account what happens later today (yesterday for you) and the days leading up to the presentation before I finally decide what grade to give them. Oh, for accounting we have to turn in peer evaluations for each other. For management we’ll get the same grade but I have a feeling everyone is getting A’s anyway. The professor is 100% chill in that class.

However, this is basically what the real world is. You don’t get to pick your teams sometimes and you have to make it work. Sometimes you do more, sometimes less but you have to learn to adapt and get it done. I don’t think this experience will hurt me. I think it has taught me a lot as it’s just a different experience overall.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a “complain about my group” post. As a whole, the MBA life has been great. It’s been a lot of work in a short amount of time, so the pressure has been on. It’s so incredibly rewarding to learn and work to get homework done, then turn it in and get an A (mostly, one homework we all just gave up on). The deadlines are great and the content we’re taught is interesting. As it is a graduate program we’re not doing the detailed work we did in undergrad. For example, we’re not actually doing accounting in class at the same level. We do parts of it and then have to interpret what the numbers are saying. It’s almost like the focus has switched. In undergrad the goal was to learn to do it and in graduate school the goal is to understand it and use the data to make a decision.

While in undergrad, my experience was that I was in classes with other students like me, high achievers but we took our education for granted. I am lucky enough to have been raised with the expectation that I’d go to college, as had most of my classmates. We always expected to be in those classes and doing that work. This time around, it’s 100% our choice to be in the classroom again. And it does make a difference. We may not be overly thrilled about homework and projects but the fact that we made this decision does create a different environment. While I think that the people in my class may not be the most dedicated or high achievers, this does create a new perspective for me to learn.

I have to admit, I’m stressing to see my student loans increase. My loans are in deferment right now as I’m in school, which means I don’t have to pay them. But they are collecting interest so I am still paying the same amount I used to in order to keep it down as much as possible. But it is increasing as my amount is as well. For now, I can deduct what I pay in interest from my taxes but we’ll see how long that lasts due to that scam of a tax bill.

I’m so excited to be this close to the end of my first semester. I’m stressing about J-term and my upcoming deadline to select my specialization (kind of like a major but less official). But that’s a post for another day (planning to put that up after my semester actually ends!). My graduation date feels so far off still! But the first semester flew by and I can’t believe that I’m so close to the end of this portion! I am looking forward to winter break already.

So that post ended up being a lot longer than I expected. I hope that it wasn’t boring and if you’ve made it this far, you’re a champ! For everyone else in school, how has this semester treated you? Any group project horror stories you want to share? (I suppose they could be positive too!)

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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