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

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/

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