my EMBA Chronicle

If you are thinking about going back to school to get an EMBA — be prepared for challenge.  After being in my profession for fifteen years, I did not realize how accustomed I’ve become to “getting it” and being able to speak the language of my business.  I can navigate my environment, I know my customers and I’m used to getting results.

This week I realized that succeeding in an EMBA program requires something different from how I succeed in my job.  I’ve struggled a bit in the past two weeks trying to keep the theories of economics and accounting straight and to put the learning into practice.  I’m accustomed to thinking big and believing that I can do almost anything.  And so this week, school is teaching me to accept my limitations.  I’m learning about moments of fail.

I know that I do not have the natural inclination for economics or accounting.  While this program is giving me a solid foundation and good understanding of both disciplines, it is unlikely that I’ll be an expert — or have the mastery to pursue a career in either field.  And I certainly will not be skating through graduate school with straight A’s.  As I reflect on it, these are not really moments of fail…but moments of great discovery.  Time to dust myself off and move on.

Discovering great art in Schaffhausen

Considering it took almost two months to get into the school groove, I was shocked at how how little withdrawal occured over the winter break.  Before the holidays, I had grand intentions for using the two week break to catch up on accounting and get an early start on my final papers.  Instead, I easily settled  into a rhythm of work, visiting family and friends, watching football and doing everything except school work.

It was tough preparing for class this week and I found myself second-guessing my commitment to the remaining year and half of the program.  After a brief immersion in non-school life, it was hard to see the appeal in the intellectual intensity of the EMBA program and time demands for studying.  Thankfully, coming back to class this week put me right back in touch with the value of being an EMBA student.  It was a great day of learning made even more meaningful by the perspectives and insights of my classmates.

The end of module one has led me take a few days off from school to celebrate and to reflect on my EMBA experience to date.  The realization that the technology industry is as much about business as is it about tools and systems is what led me to Loyola’s EMBA program.  And one of my goals in pursuing a MBA is to compliment my experiential learning with a solid academic foundation in leadership and business fundamentals.

Looking back on the past ten weeks of study, I see that I’m well on my way to getting all that I hoped for.  Just as valuable as the amazing amount of learning that has taken place — I am in a diverse and challenging cohort of accomplished professionals.  Getting outside my industry and being in a class with lawyers, entrepreneurs, publishers, real estate developers, marines, engineers and educators creates rich dialog and broadens the learning.

As I look back on module one, I am delighted with how far I’ve come and also realize just how much more I can learn.

This is an expansion on my thoughts from last week about Father Brown’s lecture and the “Is Google Making us Stupid” article.  Technology does promote a high speed, in/out model of gathering information.  Because I access information in a much more fragmented way I have become more fragmented in the way I think and learn.  As I started getting worried that too much skimming was dulling my brain, I had a few instances this week that made me wonder if learning that seems fragmented on the surface does in fact, lead to deep linking and deep learning.

I have always been a fan of lists and paper-based information archiving, i.e. writing everything down.  From my point of view, by writing it down I free up value disk space in my brain that can store bytes of new information.  Since I am such a fan of information archiving, I’m not so great at information recall — paper is my memory.  But this week, I had a few cases where I was randomly inspired to recall information.  In one instance I opened an old document that had ideas about a project I’m working on simply because I happened upon it while searching my archives.  In it, I discovered a to-do item that I nearly forgot to do.  This made me wonder about whether the connections we make to data are deep — regardless of our fragmented methods of access.

It seems that my I/O brain is retaining more information that I thought, I hope I don’t need to add more disk space.

www.flickr.com/photos/fornal/394740182/

As today’s guest lecturer, Father Timothy Brown inspired me to think about how ideas and imagination unlock doors and open possibilities.  He mentioned Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which is a great read.  Like Carr, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”  My experiences as both a user and creator of technology have changed my approach to learning — but it’s too soon to tell whether it is a change for the better.

I really thought the biggest challenge of the EMBA program would be time mangement.  It’s actually learning how to learn.

I’ve always considered myself to be quite dedicatd to my on-going education.  I spend a fair amount of time reading, writing and exploring in an effort keep up with technology (my day job), politics, business trends and the world in general.  But this did not really provide me with effective study habits for graduate school.

Being out of school for…well…(quite a while), has made the adjustment to being in school more significant.  Quite simply, I’ve forgotten how to study, how to comprehend and how to retain knowledge.  After self-learning for the past ten years, it’s quite a shift to adapt one’s learning style to such a demanding program as Loyola’s.  And it’s astonishing to find myself reverting to the old habits and behaviors from my early school years (like the foods I crave while studying, locations where I’m most productive, etc.)

I’m sure I’ll look back on this post a year from now and laugh — by that time I’ll be so used to learning that I probably won’t be able to remember what these early weeks were like.  But next Fall is a long way off — in the meantime I could use all the fruit pies you can send my way.

New accounting equation:

Fruit Pie for Susan = Great results on Accouting Exam + featured blog post for YOU!

Mom's Amazing Cherry Pie