Entering Frustration Station!

Now entering Frustration Station!  Next stop Angryville, Lividopoly, and Waste of Time Square!

This is me tonight – frustrated beyond belief.  See, I’m in grad school.  And not just your regular old hard and taxing grad school.  Nope, I’m in an Executive MBA program.  It sounds exclusive and fancy but what it really means is accelerated like the bullet train I rode in Spain (dude, actually in the rain too!) for people working full time so it meets every Friday and Saturday.  For 16 months.  That’s right, I’ve had no weekends for exactly a year (it will be 365 days since out cohort began on Sunday – go us).

And we’re almost over – only one and a half classes left and a final project and we’re done, diplomas in hand.  We’ve gone through the ringer, been left out to dry, stressed and worked more than humanly possible.  We’re ready to put this crazy experiment behind us.

My class this weekend?  Yeah, it’s not going so well.  Now don’t get me wrong, I know with a month a class, not all of them can be aces.  The teacher in Accounting was a joke and that was mildly annoying but, really, I fear accounting anyway.  I was interested in the Strategy class on a purely academic level but the only thing I can remember there is the word “positioning” – I might even know what it means even though I got a B+ because he didn’t like our discussion about e-books.  That was kind of a letdown.

But my main reason for doing the eMBA program was to learn how to market me the writer, to learn how to sell myself and my product, to discover the “brand” of me.  What better class to do that in than Product and Brand Management?  So when this class turned out to be a joke – teacher going off on tangents, spending 45 minutes of a 4 hour class learning our names, having us watch a movie and YouTube videos for over an HOUR today that had nothing really relevant to teach us – I got angry.  And I’ve stayed angry.

My time is more valuable than filler.  I don’t want to watch videos all day unless we’re going to apply what’s in them to Learning.  Believe me, I can find much better things to do with my time than sit in a conference room all day trying not to watch the clock move by if you’re not going to TEACH ME anything.

And what’s worse is that I’m not able to learn from any of my classmates either.  The professor interrupted a student when he was saying something I wanted to hear – talked right over him rather rudely I think.  I’ve asked two questions during class and she couldn’t answer either of them.  If you’re assigning us busy work with confusing directions and I ask you to give an example, you should be able to Brand Mantra me in your sleep.  The fact that you teach this everyday and can’t worries me.

I know what areas I need help in – I can’t sell food to someone who’s staving.  But I’m quick and I’m smart and, most importantly, I’m passionate about wanting to learn and excel in this subject.  You have me Waiting and Wishing to learn something – Teach ME!  Give me the tools to manage a product and a brand.  That’s where I want to go and what I want to do.  Explain it to me in a way I can grasp and I’ll run with it.

But there won’t be any running in this class – no soaring or flying or leaps of understanding.  No, in this class there will be jingles and jpegs and, if we’re lucky, random YouTube videos that don’t accidentally stumble across inappropriate things.  And, if we’re really Really lucky, there won’t be any snoring or sleeping either.  The inappropriate laughter – that’s not going away, we need to find some way to pass the time.  So Inappropriate laughter it is – and blitzed students if my suggestion of a drinking game every time she gets off topic sticks.  Of course then we would be snoring by lunch time.