School

And that’s why I chose to renew my lease, despite the incompetent management and uneven floorboards. So I’ll be here in Plainsboro for a while. It certainly wasn’t my favorite choice but it makes sense for now.

After work tomorrow, I’m heading to a New York Philharmonic concert with Stacey at the PNC Bank Arts Center to listed to some good brass music and possibly volunteer depending on what’s needed.

The rest of the week should be pretty normal and boring. It will be my final week of “Strategy Formulation,” the penultimate required course for my master’s degree. Do I feel like I’m ready to manage all aspects of a business? I guess… though experience will fill in some holes. I gain much more knowledge from my classmates than I do from the instructors, which I suppose should be expected.

My final day of earning this degree is August 22. I have a wedding to go to on August 26. It should be a busy month.

I suppose it’s time for an update. I find it hard to believe that people still visit this site looking for updated content. Perhaps they’re just looking for my links to other places. Or maybe they are actually interested in what goes on in my life.

In the slight chance that it is the latter, here are some updates.

I think I’m the only person in this country who watches the Olympics. I haven’t watched much, but I did catch some great moments. There’s something about young people performing at the ultimate level that really interests me. There is so much emotion whether it’s athletics, music, or anything else at the highest level of performance. It beats watching overpaid athletes who are more interested in posturing and getting the multimillion-dollar salary than performing.

I’m finally doing something about getting into better shape. It’s not much, but I’m being consistent with it and I have plans to get even more exercise. I’m eating better and cooking more. I haven’t had a microwaveable dinner in a long time, but I still have junk once in a while, like Tuna Helper.

I should be done with my master’s degree in September, and I can’t wait. All I can say right now is that the experience has not been good and I’m happy I have to pay for only a small portion of the tuition. I just hope even that small expense ends up being worth my time. I don’t know what that means… maybe a better job, maybe a feeling that I’ve actually learned something worthwhile other than how to be a mid-level manager in a corporation. At least the class I’m taking now deals a little with something interesting: behavioral psychology.

Most of my remaining classes will be self-directed or one-on-one, so perhaps my experiences will change. The administration is absolutely horrible. I’m assigned a new financial counselor about once a month, and the outgoing one doesn’t bring the new one up to speed. My invoices are incorrect every class, which makes it a pain dealing with the new counselor and getting things done quickly so I can get reimbursed by my company. They can’t determine my full schedule because the version of my program is outdated — that’s what I get for taking a year off while I was teaching.

We have facilitators, not professors. There’s nothing to profess — the individuals who lead the class (although they tend to have great credentials) just facilitate discussion as far as I can tell. In general, for a program where writing is such a key ingredient, you would think the facilitors would have much better writing skills. I don’t think “noun-verb agreement” is a “foreign concept.”

Don’t get me started on trying to determine exactly how some of my classmates graduated high school, let alone got accepted into a graduate program. The learning experience should not be like this.

Let’s see, what else. My lease is up in June and I need to decide where I’m going. I can’t bear to live another year here, so it’s time to get out.

That’s it for now.