Be Crazy About…

I really thought I’d be writing more about school life on this blog, but I find I am not.  So here is my forced attempt at fixing that problem.

ASU student: Jeremy Scott

As of this week I am in my sixth week of school.  Last week I completed the first round of tests in all my classes.  I had widely mixed results.  In my Financial Analysis class (FIN302) I am currently sitting at 100%.  I am glad, it is a business school general education requirement and my instructor challenged us to beat the one honors student, and I did (ha ha).  In my Financial Institutions class (FIN331) I am at 72%… below my standards for sure but easy to recover and I have the option of dropping this class without consequence for reasons I will explain later.  Finally, in International Management (MGT 302)… um, er, 60%.  If you’re reading this and you know me at all, that 60% is my first, and hopefully my last D grade on a major assignment in college.

I am taking only three classes this semester.  I purposely set this schedule for a few reasons… first I was at the time very unsure about my major, second I was a little concerned about my ability to balance work, university courses, and home life, so I wanted to take it easy, and third, “easy” to me would still have been 12 credit hours, but I couldn’t find 4 classes because of my late registration.

Lets take some baby steps through these bits of personal history that led me here.

WP Carey School of Business at ASU

Leading up to my “graduation” at MCC, I was dead-set on a Business Management degree.  That is what I was working towards.  My career goal is Socially Responsible Entrepreneur and I thought Business Management would have been for me.  An acquaintance of mine who is a WP Carey School alum suggested I was down the wrong path, as the Business Management degree at ASU teaches you middle management for a Fortune 500 company, not how to start and grow your own company.  I chewed on this, and changed to Finance as I felt that of the other choices I could have made, Finance could offer me the most useful toolkit for my career goal.  But the decision was one that never sat well with me.

As I had previously alluded to, it took an act of God to get my university registration through the red tape, so by the time I was able to register for classes, already late into July, I found most classes full.  I was luckily able to register in two business gen. ed. courses but was also forced to take one Finance-only course.  In my first day of classes, my Finance 302 professor told me a story of his days as an undergrad and how he chose a marketing course as a last-semester business school elective only to find that his “numbers based” mind could note cope in the “creative based” marketing course.

While everyone else (all Finance majors) were laughing, I was horrified.  While I am proficient with numbers, I hate them.  I am a deeply creative person, from writing to web design to creative problem solving.  His unsolicited insight into his past prophesied an opposite like story for my future as a Finance major.  I knew right then that Finance was not my major… I don’t love numbers and I am very creative!

I left that class, found the student lounge, and logged into the student services web site.  While downloading the course requirements for Marketing, Management, and Supply Chain Management, I found a new Business Management in Entrepreneurship degree.  It was tailor-made for me.  It turns out that during my one-year break from school, WP Carey school added the new major.  Three weeks later, I was transferred into the program with no looking back.

So anyway, here I am, a quarter way through my first semester at ASU.  My major is changed and my grades gave me a sharp dose of reality that university requires a different kind of student than junior college.  With  mixed results heading into midterms I face some real challenges to my future as a scholarship-funded student.  Where do I go from here?

Back to School Tomorrow

In FIN 302: Financial Analysis it will be full speed ahead.  My comfort with numbers and my intuitive understanding of ratios will guide me to a curve-setting grade.  My instructor is brilliant, an excellent lecturer, and uses slideshows, tests, and quizzes he wrote himself.  He is a fair grader and a great teacher.  My plan is keep it up and relax at the end of the semester with a strong grade.

In MGT 302: International Business I will need some adjustments in study habits. Now that I am in a management sub-major it is critical that I turn this grade around.  I am allowed to drop one test so I figure if I can excel in the other three tests, I’ll be able to put the D behind me.  I have met up with a small student study group that I plan to study with for the future tests, and given the additional attention I intend to dedicate to course, I am sure I can turn this around.

FIN 332 Financial Institutions I am not as sure about.  The teacher is frustrating me because he is modifying the university approved syllabus and literally ignoring the book because he feels that the news on the economy is rewriting the book.  I agree that the changes in the economy will result in a drastically rewritten book in the next edition, I don’t think this loose-cannon approach to teaching is a better alternative.  If his tests get easier because they are primarily current events based, I will be able to turn it around, but if he continues to dabble around reading Wall St Journal articles and then test me on book content, I will drop this class and face no consequence, as the class doesn’t count in my new major.

So, here we go, onto the rest of the semester.