We Volunteered for This! Late Stage MBA-Josh Moritz

My friend Tim Manners teased me a couple of weeks ago that I was not keeping up with my blog. So on this first day of the Jewish year 5770 I am going to resolve to keep this going no matter the guilt, the time or the school work. It has been all about the school work. As my study group mate Dan O'Neil quipped, we volunteered for this, and I have to tell you between family, work and trying to understand Activity Based accounting, operations research, data analysis, it is challenging: I can read and think, but I might as well be painting the roof of Sistine Chapel blind folded.



Even strategy stuff which I thought I had down cold, I feel like I am getting whipped around the head with a bag of nickels (a metaphor from the strategy professor describing some other challeging issue that I thought was pretty straight forward but was not). Just hope the nickels end up in my pocket someday.



The beauty of study groups is that there is always someone around who understands it better than me, and they make great tutors. I help out where I can, stronger in marketing. Perhaps the best part of the MBA education is group socialization. Maybe we get it right, maybe we don't, but we are learning how to figure it out as collaborators rather than an the lone knight or knightess. As a result, of I had done the MBA 20 years ago, perhaps I would have followed a more corporate path since I might have learned earlier better how to work with groups of people, to understand group politics and coming up with group solutions. This could have happened at Columbia, NYU, but I am doing it at Babson, so there probably is a unique flavor to this learning environment, which I enjoy. Well, maybe except for that data analysis assignment on page 803.

But forget the whinning. A number of my classmates are fasting for Ramadan during this semester. If friends and colleagues can follow religious tenants during this semester, go to work and school, I can figure out data analysis.