Peaking at just the right time

Back to writing. Hoping to have a lot more time to write as a lot of things in my life reach a peak.

First and foremost, my MBA education is two classes and one final away from its conclusion. This past Monday I (hopefully) successfully presented and defended my final project. As Becca can attest, this project took up an inordinate amount of time over the past 14 weeks but 41 pages, 20 PowerPoint slides and a 15 minute presentation later, my primary research on customer satisfaction for a local Portland firm is complete and if do say so myself, not half bad. I'm not the greatest public speaker by any stretch of the imagination but my final presentation was one of the first times I've felt truly comfortable up speaking in front of a group. Heck, I even transitioned to the wrong slide and was comfortable enough to quickly shift the topic, address the "new" slide and continue to move right along (the issue with shifting the order the day before the final presentation). I can definitely point towards this as one of the things that my MBA program has helped me the most with. Doing group projects and having to get up in front of people to present findings has definitely helped me become more comfortable with speaking outside of my more comfortable areas of 1-1 or small groups.

I'll likely have more to reflect on once I'm done with the program but getting my MBA has been a bit of a mixed bag. My classmates have been great; while some have put a greater effort than others into the program everyone is there to learn and when push comes to shove are willing to put in the time and effort to be successful. Now the amount of time or effort largely depends on how challenging our professors are. With Willamette's Portland program being a relatively new program, teaching quality has been a bit of a mixed bag. As a result, unless properly challenged the class as a whole tended to step up (or down) to the quality of professor. Additionally, with the program being new our class have had to deal with the program not always being well organized from certain perspectives. For example, as a student I should not have to be proactively asking for information regarding our final project in the weeks before we're supposed to start.

There's a part of me that wishes I'd tried to apply to the upper echelon business schools. But life is about choices; Becca and I had made ours to live in Portland and haven't regretted it one bit. With a new nephew here, another on the way plus our own baby 16 weeks away from joining us we're very happy to be here and within spitting distance of the family. And the program has allowed me to learn quite a bit, challenge myself in places, learn across a number of fields what constitutes good customer service, meet some very great people who I plan on staying in touch with and potentially even help me come up with a business idea or two. So with a slight tinge of what could have been, I finish my MBA program this Tuesday. Exciting stuff.

With one major mental milestone comes an accompanying physical one. I leave in about 7 hours to fly down to Sacramento and run the California International Marathon. Late in the summer during my effort to get in shape for Hood to Coast, I decided that now was as good a time as any to train for a marathon. Unlike my effort in the 2004 Twin Cities Marathon, my goal this time is not simply to finish. My primary goal is to qualify for the Boston Marathon (since I'd be running it in 2010, my qualifying time is 3:15). My 20 mile training runs have been around this pace so I feel good about my chances of hitting this number. However, come race day it can be a completely different story. With a net downhill course however, I wouldn't be surprised if I make it well under the 3:15 number. For now I get to settle for being edgy physically due my tapering my mileage, neurotically mentally as i check and recheck my packing list and just generally ready to be done so I can start drinking beer and eating fried foods again.

The one constant through all of this? The support of Becca. She's been my absolute rock providing me everything from in depth counsel on my MBA work to chocolate milk and bagels after my Sunday long runs. Come Wednesday morning, I'm all hers again. And sweetie? I promise to start working on the nursery on Wednesday :)

Off to go catch a flight and run fast. More from the other side.

BD

I think I'm officially old...

Your Merrian-Webster Word of the Year:

1. w00t (interjection)

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay" w00t! I won the contest! (and yes, those are zeros, not o's)
(used my online games quite a bit evidently)

This, coupled with my learning this week the some current undergrad & MBA students have been corrected on their misspelling of "because" in their papers, makes me think that I've certainly missed the whole texting/shorthand language phenomenon. Not that this makes me sad; I'm quite happy to be the result of a liberal arts degree with the capability to write and sometimes even write well.

I'm a huge fan of technology and the acceleration of certain parts of our life it has created. However, when people don't/can't take the time to spell something correctly, is this really a good thing?

As you can tell, I'm slowly getting better and as a result more ornery. I'll be back soon.

Brian

Beware the Ides of March...

Ok, so work isn't doing me in like Caesar yet but something else is looming the horizon:

Next semester's classes.

What better way to spend two summer nights a week than by taking Accounting followed by... Statistics! Kind, gentle folks those Willamette schedule makers are not.

That just had to be put down somewhere official. Hopefully more over the weekend. It also seems strange this year that I didn't even watch a NCAA tourney game tonight. First time in as long as I can remember that I have zero connection with the tourney. Guess I must be getting old or something :-)

Brian

Midterm Report...

Excuses, excuses... we all have them but none of them are really good enough for not posting. However, here's a few things that have kept us busy over the past 10 days or so:

• I finally took the GMAT. I'd been conditionally accepted as long as I received an acceptable score in the first semester. While I didn't do as well as I hoped, I did well enough to stay in school. In fact, the folks up at Lake Wobegon would be proud.
• I elected to stop my marathon training. I'm still running but to put in that sort of commitment while in school and looking for work just wasn't going to happen. However, before I bailed, I did get the opportunity to race a 25K in the mud with my friend Mark and his friend Tony.
  

(before: this won't be so bad...)

(after... yes it rained over an inch before the race started and didn't let up)

• The course was such a bog, I finished 31st out of over 230 people averaging 8:50(!)/mile.
  
• We moved! After almost two years, we again have a place to call our own. We spent the weekend unpacking and trying to get things organized. It feels REALLY good to have a place to call our own, even if it is just a rental.
• School. Right, the big white elephant in the corner. We're just past the midway point of the first semester and I'm surviving. I'm really quite thankful that I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the rigors of academia on a more flexible timeline before going back to work. It's allowed me to adapt without being completely overwhelmed. Both classes are interesting and most of my weekend is spent either at the library studying or meeting with study groups to discuss the work, etc. At least the study groups are giving us the opportunity to get to know one another; there is only so much socializing you can do on your 30 min dinner break and usually people are too beat/ready to go home when class ends at 10pm.
  
• That being said, I've got a laundry list of work that has to get done this weekend, so much so that I'm contemplating having a bathroom installed in our office :-)
• Becca's consulting continues to go well, but exhausting. Hopefully in the next month or so she can wrap up her work and actually start to look for work out here in Portland!
• As for my job search, it continues. I haven't had as much time to work on it the last week or so but some of my previous efforts may be bearing fruit. I don't want to jinx anything yet but I might have semi-exciting news to report shortly. Let's put it this way, when it rains, it friggin' pours.

More from the new Davis compound soon!

Brian

Being busy isn't any excuse for not posting...

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, here's what Becca and I have been up to as of late:

• The big news is that we have a place to live as of March 1st. We found a townhouse in SE Portland about 2 miles from J&L's. Their hospitality has been fantastic but it will be nice to have my own office and a kitchen where grilling meat and drinking a Mt. Dew will not be endlessly heckled. The house is in SE Portland and could end up being a potentially long commute to some job locales but in the short term we elected to go with a great place in a nice neighborhood with the other things we wanted: groceries & stores within walking distance as well as a close proximity to running/commuter bike trails.
  
• Becca continues to be very busy with her consulting with Boston Scientific, splitting time between Portland and Minneapolis. It's not an ideal situation by any means but it also is a paycheck that allows us to have a slightly smoother reentry into Oregon life. Plus it's further reminding her what she does and doesn't want from a job.
• I'm quite busy with school. I even got back my first case analysis for my Marketing Strategies class. The analysis, which started as a steaming pile of... stuff, eventually turned into a A-. However, I'm also writing this entry in an effort to procrastinate on my second analysis. Good to see that some parts of being back in school come back easier than others.
• Becca is keeping busy contemplating all the varying nesting techniques she can use in our new townhouse. :-) Needless to say she's very excited about having a place of our own again for the first time since May 2005. Yes in the end it will have been almost two years since we've had an actual home of our own.
  
• My job search continues to go. I made a conscious effort this time to focus on networking and more company research than just finding jobs I like and applying for them. As a result, it feels like it's been a longer process; there is only so much networking you can do in a given day vs. time intensive tasks such as writing cover letters, etc. However given my somewhat narrow scope (sports business first, online marketing second) it's been extremely helpful. I have a few possibilities floating out there so hopefully something will allow me to get my foot in the door sooner than later.
• Becca hasn't really started looking for work yet; partially because of her current consulting and partially because she doesn't know what she wants to do. The good news is her background is such that finding a job is likely going to be a very quick process for her!
• Oh and if the hectic schedule of job hunting and school wasn't enough, I decided to put my body through the grinder again. I'm currently training for another marathon, with the likely target San Diego in June. I've also got an eye on breaking 3:10 and therefore qualifying for Boston. Not sure if the training is going to hold up given the general chaos of life but for now I'm giving it a go. Sure I have to shave a good 15 minutes off my time from two and a half years ago but I figure the 20 lbs. I've lost is at least worth 5 of 'em.

That's it from here. More writing soon. I'd promise but I'm not a big fan of breaking promises :-)

Brian

This is not your typical Oregon driver...

The weather has been a bit rough the last few days. As a result, Becca, my sister in law and I have been having our own little party at home being semi productive and doing cool stuff like baking cookies. I even got to go rescue my brother in law from Wilsonville yesterday, therefore fulfilling my driving requirement for the week.

Here's what happens when you don't use common sense:



Two things of note about the video. First, this happened right next to my old work. I half expected to see my old co-workers car get plowed. Second, this totally reminded me of the glory days of living in NW Portland. We'd go buy a 12 pack, sit out on my friend Matt's porch and heckle the people trying to parallel park in the neighborhood. I can imagine they were doing the same thing, only with Irish Coffees on Tuesday.

Finance class is starting... Now. Gotta run!

Brian

I did move... right?

Portland has been in a tizzy this morning thanks to a very small amount of snow last night (so much so that it only stuck on vehicles) and some intermittent black ice (more of an issue out here since you don't see it until it's too late). My sister-in-law, a high school English teacher, sat dutifully in front of the TV hoping for a 2 hour delay this morning. She was left disappointed (she works in Tigard, a Portland suburb) however the Portland city schools were two hours late. As I watched the whole thing unfold I was amused at the huge deal Portland makes over the temperature gauge hitting freezing and the mere threat of snow.

Well, they're going to have fun now!

(The Great Blizzard of '07)

As of about 8am here it start coming down heavily; still not enough to put more than a half inch to an inch on the ground but I'm predicting gridlock and general hysteria the rest of the day. And here I though by moving from Minnesota I was running away from the snow. Instead I suppose Mother Nature is just gradually weaning me off the white stuff.

Just as I'm being weaned off one thing, I'm slowly getting addicted to another. Unfortunately that addiction is school. The first week of class is in the books and I'm a bit on the overwhelmed side. It's not a case of subject matter; if anything I find that both my Marketing Strategies and Finance are both things that I have a little bit of experience in so I'm able to comfortably add to the discussion. In addition both professors have strong personalities and have a very good understanding of how to teach to us "mature learners" (our MarkStrat prof's term).

Instead for me it's more the issue of the workload outside of class. Suddenly there are cases to read, chapters to highlight and all these other things that come with being a student. Unfortunately it's been 10 years so I'm a wee bit rusty. I'm hoping my ability to learn new concepts quickly will bail me out but as of now I see my social life for the next two years quickly shrinking. In the meantime, I am getting very familiar as to the locations and business hours of our local libraries and coffee shops. And Becca is getting very familiar with me having my head buried in a book and cursing under my breath.

It's 9am now, the snow has stopped (in fact it looks like it might even be melting), the sun is out and for me, my work day has officially started. Time to go find a job.

Brian

The MBA Experience Begins...

Yesterday was orientation day for the Willamette University Professional MBA program. A few brief thoughts:

• When orientation starts at 7am, one should most likely not start out with the tech guy. Although most of us could space out during his spiel (given it included describing what a URL was) it was still a rough way to start the day. At the very least it made me wish that I drank coffee since drinking a Mt. Dew at that time of day has been deemed socially inappropriate.

• Strangely enough, there was never a formal introduction of everyone. Although people got to know each other during the day it seemed unusual to not at least have a basic intro at the beginning of the day.

• Our cohort, although small at 15 people, has quite a diverse set of backgrounds. Ages seem to range from 25 to 40ish and employers from big companies (Nike, Intel) to smaller companies to non-profits to none at all (me!). This should make for a wide variety of experiences to draw from during class discussion.

• Our personality test facilitator had Lasik eye surgery a few weeks ago and evidently they over corrected her sight. As a result, she's gone from one pair of glasses to three. Plus as an added bonus she could barely read our nameplates so occasionally names were a little slow in coming.

• Most of our day was spent dealing with learning more about our different personalities and how they all integrate into our group dynamics. I had been dreading this as I'm not usually keen on these sorts of exercises. However, it went by okay enough and the various breakout groups they did allowed us to learn about our fellow classmates and ourselves. In the end, much better than expected.

• Our Finance professor gained points from the class by answering the question of what was his biggest mistake teaching to date: "telling a Lewinsky/Clinton joke as an Indian guy in Australia to a Chinese audience. I've never seen more blank stares in my life"

• Our Marketing Strategies professor, on the other hand, casually dropped in our homework assignment during her spiel. I'm predicting the velvet hammer treatment from here even if she does look like my sister in law Lori in 30 years.

• In both good and bad news, it was made very clear to us that there would be no "Gentleman's B's" Both professors are expecting us to put in a lot of work which is good as I'm there to learn. That being said, I'm quickly watching my free time dry up even before I have a job!

• I truly think the concept of being in school hit me once I received my books. It suddenly made me realize I need things like hi liters and note cards, etc. Ugh.

• Finally, I'm one of three people in our class to have spent the last year or so traveling. The other two are a) writing a book and b) already employed. Guess my trip wasn't so special after all :-)

I'd love to write more, but I have two chapters and a few cases to read for next week. More from the halls of academia soon!

Brian

Rodney Dangerfield!

As the subject line hints, I'm going back to school. Not full-time mind you; I think that ship left the dock a long time ago. However, as of last Wednesday, I am officially a student of Willamette University's Professional MBA program.

Becca and I had talked about my going back to school for a while; I really felt that getting my MBA would allow me to strengthen my general business knowledge base. This more formal training would complement the on-the-job training I've had to date working for smaller companies. When we knew we were going to move back to Portland this fall, I started researching part-time MBA programs. For me, part-time was going to be the best way to get my MBA while also still gaining additional work experience. As a result, the one program that really stood out was Willamette's. The professional MBA is a newer program but its length (2 years as opposed to 3+), its class size (15-20) and the fact that it's focused towards working professionals put it in the proverbial driver's seat.

So over the past month or so, I'd invested in a GMAT study guide and started to do some preliminary work targeting a Fall 2007 start date. I knew that there was a January class but that realistically the house wouldn't sell in time and that it was probably too much to do in a too little time. Right after Thanksgiving, as we finished signing the contract addendum for the house, I got an email from the director of the program (who I'd been trading emails with). In it she stated that a spot had opened up for the January 07 class and that there was still time to apply. Would I be interested in doing so?

That was December 1st. After getting some concerns addressed and discussing it again and again with Becca, I elected to apply. An appealing aspect of the sudden turnaround was that I could get a large part of the program done before any hypothetical kids were around. Plus it would allow me to get started right after moving. As Becca and I discussed, if it was something I was going to do in the next five years, why not now?

So with that I had to move quickly. I can safely assure you that you can get a business school application done in a week, but I highly recommend not doing it while you're also packing a house and dealing with neurotic buyers. It also involves having extremely flexible and great people doing your letters of recommendation (thanks Drew and Jody!). However just under two weeks after I started the application, I was granted conditional acceptance to the program (I still have to take the GMAT's during the first quarter) and am left with another list of exciting to-do's to get done before the start of school.

I have to admit I'm excited about this opportunity. I actually know two people going through the program and they have felt it was a great mix of classroom learning as well as hands-on, more practical experience. In addition, having something to focus on upon our return to Portland will hopefully allow me to use my time wisely, what with school, looking for a job and a new home all on the docket.

At the same time, some nervousness does pervade. I haven't been in a classroom in almost 10 years. I'm scared witless about the idea of taking notes on my laptop (granted I type quicker than I write at this point). Never mind taking an exam on a computer; I may have to go old school and request a blue book. Do they even still have blue books?

Despite the yin-yang feeling regarding school, I'm excited. Education is always a worthwhile investment and this program should allow me to gain a strong business acumen while also continuing to build my work resume. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Finance being one of my first two classes, but I guess whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.

I'm sure as classes get going you'll get the occasional MBA story. Hopefully it'll be more ha-ha funny vs. WHY DID I DO THIS?

More missives from the hallowed halls of academia-

Brian