My last first day of school!

Yesterday was (hopefully) my last first day of school!

I'm taking two classes this semester and I will graduate with my MBA in December. I've been slow-playing my MBA so it will have taken me three and a half years by the time I'm done. I am so ready to be done with classes. I was ready to be done with classes when I finished my undergrad, but I knew I would eventually get my MBA. Now that I'm almost done with it I'm very much looking forward to having no more classes.

I always told people that your undergraduate major isn't that important because an undergraduate degree really just means that you know how to think (with some more technical exceptions like nursing). A graduate degree really teaches you more in depth about your subject matter.

With my MBA I feel that that is only partially true. I certainly do know more about business and various aspects therein (accounting, finance, management, economics, etc.), but the end result of my MBA doesn't seem to be a lot of technical knowledge.

I feel that my undergrad taught me how to think, but my MBA has taught me how to analyze.

What I mean by that is that in my Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree I learned the various aspects of a business that must be considered and how to go about making decisions based on those areas. In my MBA I have learned what parameters to use when analyzing aspects of a business and how to integrate those parameters into decision making.

The class I just had last night is Business Policy, which is a capstone class in the program. The subject matter is how analysis leads into decision making which is implemented through policies. In a word, strategy. I am generally interested in strategy (as evidenced by my fascination with board games), and I definitely do find this class interesting. I view this class as taking the various parts of running a business that I have learned in other classes and putting it into a comprehensive whole.

One of the things I'm very thankful for in the class is that I will not be writing a paper. I will be doing a presentation to the class, so that will be a decent amount of work, but I really dislike writing papers. The presentation will be better because the topic will be assigned and most of the information will be given to me, I just have to analyze it and present it in an organized way. This is so much better for me because I am not an ideas person. I am the kind of person who will take someone else's idea and implement it.

We'll see in my other class (which starts on Monday) whether I'll have a paper to write at all. I may very well be done with papers for life! Unless of course I start another masters, which I'm certainly not ruling out. At the moment though I am very much looking forward to being done with my MBA. I feel like I really will have accomplished something.