Category Archives: School
Together We Will Live Forever
It has been quite the week so far. On Saturday we had our exit interviews for the MBA program all day where we shared stories about what inspired us to go to graduate school and what we each hope to aspire to some day. Needless to say it was a pretty moving day for everyone and we stayed out late celebrating afterwards. Hard to believe school is all over. Tonight marked the end of another thing and probably the biggest thing outside of school or work I’ve been involved with – nowlikephotographs. Chris and I broadcasted one last time tonight (stream it at nowlikephotographs.com in a few days) and he even let me produce the whole show by picking out my favorite instrumental tracks of all time. Chris has been an amazing friend over the years and I’m glad we were able to incubate this show from an idea to a success. After 7 years on the radio and 4 years of the show it is sad to see it go but the support from listeners and everyone else was amazing over the years and the show will at least live on for some time with Chris. I plan to continue producing the podcast and we’re giving some thought in to expanding nowlikephotographs.com so it is the end of an era but not the end of the show. Tomorrow will be the last day at work in Roseville after 4 1/2 years. And then this weekend – I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am to see everyone this weekend! The agenda is looking SOLID.
Break from the MBA
Well I knew this would come. I’ve finally encountered a scheduling window I couldn’t get through. The last few months have been interesting as nowlikephotographs moved to Wednesday nights, school picked up in its second year and the job at Symantec had a lot more traveling involved. I’ve loved every minute of it so I can’t complain but I knew eventually I would run in to a situation where one of those things couldn’t work around the others. Work is my #1 priority and I can’t even explain how much I’m enjoying it. The new stuff I’m learning, working on, traveling for and everything else has been incredibly rewarding so when it looked like I’d miss too much class with the possible work travel coming up I had to make the decision to drop the finance class that starts tomorrow and take it in the fall. The only bad part of that is it will be doubling up with another course (Global Business). I’m not too worried about keeping the traveling down (for work or fun) so everything should work better this summer/fall to get through both of those classes simultaneously. This break tacks on a nearly 2 month break leading up to the backpack trip across Europe in May so I’m actually very much looking forward to the next few months because of this.
Labor Day Weekend
I needed an excuse to blog since nothing very write-worthy has been going on in my life right now so I’ll talk about a fun weekend I just had. Work has been a little less hectic lately with our new release out the door so Friday when I realized I had stayed late a couple of nights already I decided to duck out a little early with Jim to go play golf. Jim had some family friend who work at a course that got us 9 holes for free. I was playing particularly well (and consistent which is even more rare) so after 9 we decided to play the course again and make 18 out of it. It was an absolutely beautiful day outside, mid 70′s, light breeze and a long weekend ahead to look forward to. It was a perfect way to spend a late Friday afternoon.
The Rest of the Weekend
I just finished up a class at Augsburg so this was the first Saturday in a long time I didn’t have to study and get stuff done at home. I slept in nice and late and then bummed around to get some errands and grocery shopping done. It wasn’t until I was at the Quary (the Target and grocery store by campus is called the Quary) that I realized it was move in weekend for school. There was an ape-ton of people out but it made me glad to be out of undergrad and not dealing with moving every year and all that fun stuff. Continue reading
MBA Softball
Last night I played softball for the first time ever. It’s been years since I’ve swung a bat or fielded a ball and when I did it was a baseball. Our MBA program put together a team across the different cohorts so I met a bunch of people that were farther along in the program than I, hopefully I can get some tips for which classes are going to suck. The one I’m in right now has an insane amount of case study reading and paper writing already which have been nice to know about ahead of time. Our team played 2 games last night and got walloped both times. We improved a lot our second game but Finnegan’s Irish Pub still won by a good amount. I’m guessing they’ve played together before since they seemed way more coordinated than us. I did alright, hitting a double, single and even an RBI. Playing last night also made me appreciate even more how great the summers are in Minneapolis. There was another crazy colored sunset as always last night as we played someone was grilling burgers which smelled fantastic. I was talking to Jim this morning about possibly starting a rec soccer team since the city league sports seem to be a fun thing to do. Anyone in Minneapolis that wants to play soccer this fall let me know.
1/12th of an MBA
I finished my first MBA class last night – accounting. It wasn’t the most interesting class I’ve ever taken but I learned a lot of very different things compared to being in the engineering program. The summer between sophomore and junior year of college, when we played a lot of street hockey across from Arun’s house, I was doing a lot of accounting stuff for Rex’s new business. Little did I know that would help me nail the section on inventory management four years later. So I had at least some accounting background going in. Most of the people in my program seem to have a business background, either in sales or finance. I believe I’m the only straight up engineer. The class has also made me want to get back into tracking my personal finances more. After the accounting stint with Rex I picked up a copy of Microsoft Money so I could watch where all my money was going (tuition and beer at the time). I gave up on tracking it about a year ago once I had settled into a real world job since money wasn’t as tight as it was in college and my bills are fairly regular with a mortgage now. The thing that attracts me is all the online banking that can dynamically download bank statements that are pre-classified by Quicken or MS Money. I used to enter all the transactions manually which was really tedious. If I didn’t have to do anything and could look at expense categories that would be a sweet deal. Continue reading
A Good Gopher Team
After living in Minnesota for a little over 5 years I had never been to a Gopher Hockey game until Saturday night. A friend of mine had an extra season ticket that was free so I went to the Denver Minnesota game at Mariucci. I had gone to football, basketball, and even soccer games while in college but hockey is hard to get in to unless you have season tickets. I couldn’t believe how much more fun it was compared to other Gopher sporting events. It was comparable to the year I had Badger season tickets (in high school). I even apparently made it to a great game since it was high scoring, 2 players got ejected in the first period for fighting, and a defense-men had a had trick – motivating everyone in the arena that was wearing a hat to throw it on to the ice. After Saturday I’m interested in picking up season tickets to something next year. Hockey may be hard to get but I was thinking Timberwolves, or the Rampage (soccer). If anyone (read Mark) wants to go in with me, let me know. I might just pick up a pair and coax people to go to a couple of games to split the season up.
Graduation Photos
I put together an album from Graduation in the photo section. You can see it here. Finally have some good pictures with my Oma and Opa and some ones of Bri looking hot!
Graduation
I can’t believe college is almost over. I’m having family up to visit on Friday afternoon/evening for commencement. If anyone is interested in sitting through a long ceremony it starts at 7pm in Northrop. After that though you should come over to our apartment! Food/drinks are on me.