WGL #30 – The final term begins

The last term begins. Not that I’m counting, but 20 more class sessions (plus a final) to go! All about my initial take for this term after the break, for those who ain’t inclined to listen to me ramble in the audio version.

Having just gotten back from Japan, I was all set to make an enthusiastic, tired, and happy post about my experiences there. Then, as we all know, events took their own turn and it seems like now is not the time to talk about drinking pancakes in a can, not being able to read the onegiri labels, or seeing a robot play a trumpet. That’ll all come, especially as our class finds the right way to share photos and video (often, at a picture-taking moment, I’d see twenty other cameras and phones raise up and would think, “I don’t really need to take a picture, do I?” Which is odd, since it’s not like there’s much cost to taking a picture too). So long story short, yes, of course I’ll talk about Japan, but later, when some of the current tragedy is a lot less vivid. This 8.9-magnitude earthquake, and the series of events that could even lead to a nuclear meltdown, are terrible beyond imagining.

So let’s turn our thoughts back home, admittedly in a bit of a downhearted state. The final term is now underway, with four new classes to think about. Every weekend will now start with Strategic Management, a class I initially rolled my eyes at when it was announced that one of the texts would be Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It’s every posturing chest-beating businessman’s masculine fantasy, straight out of Wall Street and Liar’s Poker – business as warfare or possible as baseball, proving my sword or cannon or battleship is bigger than yours, and all that. But surprisingly, it got turned on its head by our prof, who’s a Taoist and sees The Art of War in a very different light – war as a metaphor for approaching all of life, the importance of constantly assessing and understanding the situation and the actors, and then of using that knowledge wisely. Amusingly, many of my classmates were then heavily into rolling their eyes even as I got more interested and earnest. As always, the standard disclaimer stands – I tend to like all my classes at the start of the term, but may not be enthusiastic later on – but I’m more bullish now than I was before.

Then in the afternoon is R&D Management – looking at the art of deploying resources and making a company’s research support and tie into its overall strategy, rather than the old school approach of just throwing money into the R&D department and waiting for ideas to come out. This class is certainly the heaviest on reading, with the professor making no bones of the fact that he was providing not only the fifty articles in the bulk pack (plus the four books), but also implying that we might be inclined to read the hundreds of other articles referenced by those first ones. It was a good class, and interesting, but punctuated way too often by him asking the class if we knew about a specific person or organization or business concept or scientific idea… anything… the question would hang in the air as he’d look around and, at least from where I was sitting, not a lot of nods or hands. Maybe that felt like we were all dumb, but maybe he had a good nose for realizing he had just referenced something obscure, and that’s why he never stopped to ask us if we knew something that we could all nod to. I’m fearful of the workload for this class; I gotta get on top of the reading early, but I’m very interested in the process.

On Saturday morning, I go back to the same classroom for Enterprise Software Development. I’ve kind of avoided taking all the computer programming track classes, because the first one, which I took the first class term, was frankly awful and that same professor teaches almost all of the classes… except this one. As a more classically trained geek… that is to say, I learned programming at my father’s knee, literally, and then figured out everything else mostly just by finding challenges and then muddling my way at them… I’m always painfully aware that someday, if I become a coder in any larger organization, I’ll be a much less good programmer than I am today, just because I’ll suddenly have to abide by the rules that let people work together effectively – practices designed to make less-good coders more effective and organizations less completely dependent on one person (the apocryphal story is that IBM’s early operating system programming was crippled when one genius programmer, who could generate literally millions of lines of code that worked beautifully but only made sense to him, simply disappeared one day). So learning the language and a bit about those tools will help me at least change how I program to make it more compatible with those sorts of standards. Just in case. I expect this to be an easy class since it’s buttressing existing skills… a far cry from trying to start from scratch learning wireless networking technologies last term, or biotechnology the term before.

Finally, our last class each weekend is computational finance – a class for which we all get MATLAB to install on our laptops. Ask somebody who’s been in the class before, and you invariably get the same answer – one of the best classes they’ve taken in the program, but hard as hell, they say. Of course, they seem in general to overstate the difficulty of quantitative classes (and no, mom, it’s not just me saying that, but also my classmates; it may just be that we have a more math-capable group this year). It actually looks a lot like a great culmination to the program – an intersection of our earlier classes in finance, decision models, and statistics. The first class session was a bit slow, with a very interesting 30-45 minutes in the middle but the rest bogged down a bit… not with difficulty but with painstaking algebraic rigor. The prof began at one end of the chalkboard, filled it column by column, then got back to the beginning and started again, and spoke in a medium-quiet monotone the whole time. IT’S A MATH CLASS.

So… tired after the long weekend, confused by daylight savings, and way behind today on chores and errands that I have time to run for the first time in a long time (I’m about to drive a car for the first time in several weeks). I’ll shamelessly point out that I also plan to find a relief organization to donate to for the Japan disaster and I encourage others to do so. Anyway, that’s it for What Greg Learned and I’ll be back (at the latest) in a few weeks with more! Thanks!

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