Whatever happened to the concept of ramping up? After the very first day of classes, we were assigned 2 Statistics chapters to study, 2 cases to mull over, an online quiz, 3-4 readings for the Organizational Behavior class, an hour long audio to listen to, and a 3-page paper to write analyzing the issue discussed. All to be completed within a week, before the next class (which was yesterday). We now know why it's called a Fully Employed MBA program and not a Part-Time MBA program. I'm afraid that if the workload gets any worse, some of us may end up as FUMBAs - Fully Unemployed MBAs.
Last week was honestly insane. I had breakfast with stats, lunch dates with the OB papers and dinners with the guys discussing the subprime mortgage crisis on the assigned audio. The one day I managed to hit the gym, I read a paper on the treadmill. I missed a friend's birthday dinner, didn't call my family, and the gallons of coffee I consumed gave me acidity. (I tried to stay off coffee at work but then dozed off and hit my head on the keyboard. Thank goodness for a private office with a door.) On the bright side, I managed to complete the assignments aaaannd I feel smarter already so hi five!
Fortunately, the homework for the second week is a little less crazy. Of course, to maintain the balance, my day job workload has shot up but I can live with that. After all, I chose to do this. And as a classmate pointed out, the WEEKLY amount we're paying for the program, is as much as what we paid for a whole YEAR of undergrad engineering. Gulp. That is motivation enough for me to refrain from whining and giving this my best shot.
I sign off with an insight to why most of us found the OB paper so frikkin' challenging.
Have a good week y'all!
Cheers,
Femba Girl
p.s. : Hats off to my classmates who had work travel, wailing babies, talkative spouses and other such added distractions!
That's one hell of a week! And you know, I too wondered about classmates that had families, work and the same amount of uni work to juggle with...never understood how they did it!
ReplyDeleteI managed to survive last week by not studying anything for Data and Decisions. Now it's coming back to bite me. In class I noticed everyone had solutions to problem sets. I didn't even know we had problem sets!
ReplyDelete@Psych - Seriously, I can't complain at all given what some of the others are going through. And that's true for many aspects of life..
ReplyDelete@mario - Lol, you didn't know we had problem sets? Well you were lucky in a way. Less stressed out perhaps!
Just to nitpick, how did your classmate figure that one week of tuition is an entire year? If I'm not mistaken, FEMBA is roughly $40k/year with 30 weeks of instruction. That's $1333 per week. What undergrad program was only $1333/year?
ReplyDeleteHi Mike - Just seeing this. I should've clarified that my classmate was referring to undergrad education fees in India :)
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