Had our first 506 – Management course this morning and it was actually pretty good. I had this fear that some Ivey-esque (that's the name of the business school here – some rich dude “bought” the naming right on it. I wonder who'd buy the naming rights to FIMS? The JK Rowling School of Library Science? The Stephen King School of Information?) business professor would show up in a suit & tie expecting us to wear similar outfits and speak in nothing but business buzzwords. But only one classmate wore a tie (and that's his style of dress anyhow – I'm no fashion critic but if I remember it was a dark black blazer wtih a deep red tie. Well, it wasn't a dark blue IBM suit – that's for sure!) so it's all good.
The prof actually seemed to take pleasure in pointing out the buzzwords he'd used in his lecture notes so that's a good sign as well. The workload isn't horrible but we have weekly reading reports which means no slacking off on the reading at all (like you could get away with a bit more in first semester.) One of the books I got from Chris Dixon is the text for the class (I didn't even realise it was – just sounded interested when I claimed it) so that's going to help a lot. The less photocopying I have to do in this program, the better.
Yeah, so anyhow: “Compression Depression”…
The prof is new to UWO and had to finish teaching some courses in the States so we didn't start until two weeks late. So to make up for the lost weeks, the rest of our classes will be half an hour longer (which means they start at the even more ungodly time of 8:30am instead of our usual morning start of 9am.) Which is fine and makes sense. Except that there are two Stat holidays that fall on Mondays over the summer and if you have a class on Monday, as far as I've heard from people, you won't be asked to make those up. (And worse, I don't have any classes on Monday so I don't get these “extra” days.) And there's one Stat on a Friday and same thing – no make-up classes. And some profs end up cancelling the odd class or not holding a class during the last week or whatever. So I'm not sure why we have to have a “compressed” schedule for 506? I guess some people feel they're paying for 14 weeks and they better get 14 weeks, dammit! But for me, I think we're in a professional program and I'm happy to have fewer classes (in any course) if it means more time to work on my other projects, my reading assignments or my extracurricular activities (I'm a bit behind on trying to get a May “Lunch Bucket” speaker as the two people I've contacted both have seemingly fallen through. Well, I'm still waiting for a reply from one but not holding out much hope.) I guess nobody's going to riot if they don't have a Lunch Bucket in May. But personally, I was really excited about the possibility of organizing an event every month while I was here. Oh well. More time for required readings.
Speaking of which, I got 95% (!) on my first assignment of the semester. Trust me – I can't believe it either. I've been feeling a bit burnt out and undermotivated the last couple weeks (especially compared to how gung ho I was last semester) realising that this semester is going to be a lot busier than the last one and my workload is pretty top heavy as well until the end of June. So getting that mark back gave me a bit of a boost and made me feel that my first semester wasn't a fluke (of course, there are many, many marks to come that could drop that ball right out from under me.)
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