We start this week on Tuesday, having had Monday off in honor of President’s Day, though mine was more in honor of Dayquil and my bed. I do manage to get a solid 5 hours or so of Finance studying in, but the rest of the day is wasted on trying to rest before the impending storm of this week.
Luckily, Tuesday is a late start so I sleep in before dragging myself to Supply Chain Management. I had contemplated calling in sick, but I didn’t want to tarnish my perfect attendance record and I have always been someone who felt guilty for missing class. As it turns out, I’m glad I went because we had a guest speaker from the company Kiva Systems. The President and Chief Operating Officer gave us an in-depth run-down of the Kiva system which is a revolutionary robotics warehouse technology. Instead of employees searching isles of a warehouse for products to ship, Kiva robots bring entire shelf units to stationary employee for them to pack specified products. The software behind the system is amazing and the ease of set up for each unit is nothing short of extraordinary.
After class I get straight to studying for the Finance exam tomorrow. Feeling exhausted from my few hours on campus I find it exceedingly difficult to concentrate. What should be simple Finance concepts completely escape me. I force myself to bed at about 11:30 pm, frustrated and utterly under-prepared for tomorrow.
I wake up early on Wednesday and shoot out an e-mail to my Operations professor saying that I will not be able to make it into class this morning. I feel horribly ill and I need to preserve all of my energy for Finance. While I feel so guilty, something had to give. After spending the next couple of hours studying I grab a large coffee and sit down to my doom. I get ‘owned’ by the exam and all I want to do is sleep but, alas, tomorrow is the Statistics exam and my Strategy project due date. I head right to the library with my Strategy team to hash out our strategic plan for Husky Injection Molding (fascinating, I know) before making my way to Richards Hall for the Statistics review session. Again, the session probably would have been helpful if I had time to do some practice problems, but as it was, I sat there, uncomprehending, for two hours. After that my group finalizes our Strategy paper and we e-mail that off. I make it home by about 6:30 pm, still having not studied Statistics at all. Yikes. I’m up until about midnight, setting my alarm for 5:00 am tomorrow in order to get a couple extra hours of book time in.
Thursday morning I’m just glad to have Statistics first so that I can get the test over with. Our professor had promised us it would be very similar to the practice test he handed out (which I dutifully completed). But, in true teacher form, it was far more difficult than the practice exam. I honestly leave class feeling like I just might fail out of most of my classes this semester (a bit dramatic, I know, but I am sick and disheartened).
Our poor Strategy professor somehow manages to keep our attention for the duration of the 2 and half hour class (it being our last before Spring Break) and I give him props for that. We must have looked like some sort of sedated zombie mass staring back at him, eyes glossed over.
After we are dismissed I am jealous of all my classmates who can officially start celebrating Spring Break (yes, we have it in the middle of winter). I head to work to catch up on some hours before commencing crazy errand running. Nick flies into Boston Saturday morning and my entire apartment is in disarray. I have no food, piles of laundry and textbooks and papers piled in every corner.
After grabbing some groceries, I head home to spend what would turn out to be 3 hours in a chat session with a Turbo Tax representative as I maneuver my two state tax returns, my capital gains claims, education credits, etc. Yuck! At least that’s done so I can actually file my FAFSA (which, keep in mind, is due March 1). I’m cutting it close but have had little time during the past week to do anything but the bare minimum amount of work.
I’m forced to skip out on the Supply Chain Expo happening today due to time constraints, but I’ll let you know if I hear anything about it from classmates. From the look of everyone today though, I think most people made a beeline home to go to sleep and begin their week off.
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| Printing The Boston Globe |
Friday morning I wake up early and go an adventure to The Boston Globe headquarters for a tour of their operations facilities. As part of my Operations course we had to select a company and complete a 5-part report on all the aspects of their operations. My group and I have an appointment with the Superintendent of pressroom operations and the Director of the delivery department. I’m bummed I couldn’t do this another time when I could actually relax and enjoy it. The Boston Globe is such a huge newspaper and the journalism major in me would have loved to explore it more.
We end up spending about three hours on site going through everything from sourcing for newsprint, to creating the plates for printing, to the mail room and delivery trucks. It’s quite an impressive operation I must say.
You may be wondering why I wasn’t in Career Management this morning. Our Career Management class is technically done for the year. They will hold periodic optional seminars if we wish to attend through the end of the semester, but for all intents and purposes, we have three day weekends from here on out.
After our Boston Globe tour I rush back to campus to meet with my Strategy/Statistics group to work on our industry project. Unfortunately, by the time I make it to Dodge Hall, they have already been there for nearly an hour and have finished the meeting. I feel horrible, but there is little I can do. I get my assignment from the group and head home, stopping on the way to run a few more errands.
The rest of the day is spent doing laundry, cleaning like a fiend and tying up some loose ends before Nick’s arrival. I force myself to bed early as I’ll be getting up at around 4:00 am to meet Nick at the airport after his red-eye to Boston.
Well all, I know this is a shorter post than normal, but I’ll be back after Spring Break with a run-down of my vacation adventures. I’m hoping to hop around some other New England states like Vermont and New Hampshire and will let you all know how that goes.
In the meantime, have a good week and good luck with all of your final grad school preparations.
* The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Northeastern University, its staff or affiliates.
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