Back at School

(Two posts in one day! I’m feeling somewhat motivated/inspired by the promise of a long weekend)

In the midst of doing something like 37 hours of presentations for our worldwide sales team this week at work (OK, it was only 8, but that’s still a long time to talk), I also began my second year at UC Berkeley’s Evening MBA program. Getting back on campus I was pleasantly surprised by three things:

• I’m very excited to be back in an environment where I’m constantly learning/doing something new.
• I was very excited to see all the people I had made friends with last year, as well as my battlefield brethren that I slogged through Finland and Russia with.
• I felt predictably superior to the first year students that had already been slogging away for almost a month of classes before we started our electives.

I hear that the second and third year are a lot less stressful, with classes being stretched out over 15 weeks instead of the insane 2-classes-for-9-weeks-twice-a-semester first year, and the material is looking very interesting so I’m in a very good mood right now:

Business Law is a review course meant to orient managers to “dealing with legal issues and productive use of their lawyers”. This is being taught by a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and for the first class he basically gave us umpteen examples of his disdain for the legal profession. I asked, “so what are lawyer’s good for?” and his response was simply, “by the end of this class you’ll really be asking that question.” This is gonna be fun.

Services Strategy is a case-oriented and guest-lecture heavy introduction to the challenges involved in operating a business where the primary capital is people and not boxed product. This is a bit of an off-beat course but based on the previous reviews (and the fact that there are 20+ people on the wait list) I have high hopes. The material here I think is very key for me as I haven’t been involved in true services businesses in the past, and moving forward I know that these will make up a bigger and bigger portion of the economic output of the US.

With the summer work I did this year, and by taking some one-unit seminars here and there, I’m actually on track to graduate a year early (end of ’07) or perhaps spread out my last couple of semesters to one class at a time. Right now we have not particular leaning, but one thing I will say is that if we decide to stay in Berkeley through the end of 2008 then being a student has a lot of nice benefits such as gym membership and campus parking privileges.