ardenstone

We’re back in sunny San Diego, and happy to be so. It was delightful to see our friends and family, but Ohio really is a gloomy place this time of year. We had a great time over the holidays, and much thanks to the many kind folks who hosted and entertained us through a whirlwind ten days.

I ended up sneaking a few hours of walking around Columbus a couple of days before our scheduled arrival (during a trip from one set of parents to the other). Wandering about in the chilly, grey, familiar streets made me smile and the gloomy, urban isolation was much needed. Columbus is a remarkably easy city to live in, and certainly as we cast our minds forward to what happens after grad-school (now less than a year to go!), it is by far the strongest midwestern option. There are a surprising number of really good restaurants, bars, art galleries and fun things to do and consume in a small, walkable area. We have friends there, and family two hours or less in either direction. The housing prices are also reasonable, which translates to ridiculously low in comparison with here. These are all attractive.

On the other side, Columbus is just so small. It seems a little limiting, and dear lord do they get a lot of grey days. Even when the sun shone, it was weaker than it is here. Obviously, San Diego is going to win the weather comparison with most places, but the larger city is non-trivial. Our apartment right now requires driving to anything interesting, and that’s a big negative. There are some neighborhoods here, and moving into one of the few seems a necessity. Southern California is really addicted to its cars and urban sprawl, things that really get on my nerves. I spent today (my only day here and between classes) limited to what I could walk or bike to since I don’t have a car and didn’t get up early to take Christy to and from work. I had plenty to do here, so the main problem with this was getting a hair cut at the only local option, one which speaks mostly Vietnamese (the diversity in this place is great) and when that is put together with me being fairly clueless as to how I want my hair to look, the result is the shortest haircut I can remember. I snapped a photo, which is the one thousandth shot I’ve taken with this camera (the first was taken 2006/06/30, so that’s about about a thousand in six months):

It’s good to be home. Happy 2007, everyone!

While my fellow MBA students are rejoicing in being done with classes, I am grinding out one last gigantic project. Our adviser sent out a, “congratulations on finishing, now enjoy your holiday!” note that about caused me to jump out my window in exasperation. If you are contemplating being a full time student at an MBA program, especially any MBA program that considers itself somewhat competitive, let me let you in on a little secret: you will have no life until you are done. You see, there’s this thought that some of the value of an MBA program is to test, push and develop your time management skills. One of my professors described this as, “giving you more work than you can possibly do on your own.” Now, this isn’t because it’s hard work, although there is a lot of challenging material, especially if you’ve never taken statistics and haven’t thought about economics since high school (<ahem>). It’s simply that the mass of work thrown at you is intentionally vast. Consider yourself warned.

As such, when you do show up to your first semester all happy and positively oozing with confidence and eagerness, for the love of all things holy do not take an extra class. My girlfriend barely knows who I am anymore. It’s a good thing I have no friends in this city, because I certainly couldn’t meet with them on any regular basis. One of the main reasons for this is that my extra class (yes, the one you really, really shouldn’t take) was a web design class that I enjoyed a lot. More than the vast majority of my MBA classes, frankly. This isn’t a huge surprise, I’m a computer nerd so this is sort of what I do. However, it was also a ton of work. The professor had no difficulty in assigning lots and lots of practice, all of which I think is the best way to learn these skills and none of which I really had time for. Especially the last project, which consists of a website either built from the ground up or re-designed, a paper discussing what choices were made and why, and a presentation. The site is done, and I just finished the first draft of the paper. All 52 pages of it. For a three credit class on top of my “real” classes. Midway through the semester, I heard that 10 credit hours was full time. I later heard that 9 graduate credit hours is considered full time. I’m taking 19. This is why I am a complete moron.

For those of you with free time to do things like read and listen to music, I recommend browsing Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006. I’ve only looked at the top 10, and have already realized some bands I like actually put out new albums recently. I’m going to listen to so much good music. In 2008.