Whole New Ballgame

I would like to apologize for not being as diligent over the last few days with the blog. I will do my best to make sure there is new material for my faithful readers (whomever they may be) in the foreseeable future.



Since I never seem to get a chance to talk about myself, let me tell you what has consumed my time as of late. For those of you that do not know, I am currently enrolled in the One-Year Immersive MBA Program at the University of Kentucky. I have spent a lot of time preparing for this experience (mostly figuring out how to pay for this thing and filling out forms and information sheets). I even had to take an Accounting pre-test last month before we started classes. All this in addition to the pressures and rigors of classes for my undergraduate degree and working part-time at the wonderful Toyota plant in Georgetown. So now the program has started and my schedule has eased up because I can now concentrate on just the MBA program, right? Wrong. Let's look at the excitement I've gone through over the last few days.

Saturday & Sunday

I was enjoying some much needed rest in Madisonville, KY over the weekend, but alas UK does not allow for much in the way of rest. I had to travel back to Lexington for orientation Sunday afternoon at 3pm. The orientation lasted for about 2 hours and then we had some bar-b-q afterwards. I also had a chance to meet with the other 51 students in the program as well as the Dean and some of the instructors. We were given some information as to our schedule for the next month as well as an overview of the entire next 11 months. The amount of information and expected work involved in the program was a little overwhelming. My first month's schedule will be classes from 8am to 5pm Monday - Friday with optional help from 6pm to 9pm Sunday through Thursday. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? After the first month, my schedule will switch to 8am to 12pm Monday - Friday.

Monday

I didn't start my classroom training today, instead I was at Shilito Park participating in some teambuilding exercises with Georgetown College's Alpine Challenge group. Basically, we had about 6 activities that taught us the importance of communication, leadership and trust. There were blindfolds and funnoodles involved and we actually had some fun. There was a discussion after each activity to help us to learn from what we just did and hammer home the point or points of the exercise as well as brainstorm on things we could have done differently or better. We then broke for lunch which turned into a mad scramble for the local bookstores to get the 3 books we need for this month. It turns out the bookstores didn't really take the MBA Center seriously when they asked them to order our books, because there were very few available and none left by the time I got down there. The afternoon consisted of a guest speaker, James Geisler, a UK alumnus who now works for United Technologies Corporation. UTC has 6 companies under its umbrella including Carrier (air conditioning) and Pratt & Whitney (aircraft engines). Geisler is the VP of Finance at UTC and gave us a brief presentation on UTC and his experiences as an executive. It was an interesting presentation that he punctuated with the fact that UTC is one of the top employers of MBA grads. After the presentation, we broke into groups and participated in another activity that stressed the need for effective communication and empathy of others. It was entertaining, but went on way to long. Most people had the rest of the day off, but I had to drag myself into TMMK. I worked until 4:10am, stopped to get gas on the way home and climbed into bed around 5am. Now this is where the insomnia has its priviledges. I woke up before my alarm went off at approxiamately 6:45am.

Tuesday



I awoke to find the above schedule online. I will be enrolled for a total of 44 hours over the course of the 11 month program including the 23 hours that I am currently enrolled in. Things will ease up in a month (or so I keep telling myself), but I will be extremely busy over the course of the next year. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.