Torn between relief and regret!

To say that the last few weeks of my life have been pretty packed, could qualify to be the understatement of the year! Not only did I have quizzes, finals, and, homework due but I was also in charge of a project that had just completed development and needed to be turned over our client for acceptance testing. Due to this, not only did I have to work longer than normal hours at the office but, I was also in a constant dilemma  about when I could  eke out time to study for my exams.

Just to make things more interesting, I found out the day before the weekend of my first exam that I needed to work through the weekend to ensure that our project was defect (at least show-stopper) free. I have to admit that I didn't see much of my bedroom over the past one week. Little wonder that I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I submitted my last final for this quarter today!

Although it may seem that I am whinging here, I would be lying if didn't tell you that I have thoroughly enjoyed being a full time employee and a full time MBA student over the past two months. Despite getting about 4 hours of sleep on average (with a standard error of 3 hours) over the past 40 days (you can figure out the std deviation and confidence intervals for this from the information I have provided), I have to say that opting to set my nose to the grindstone intentionally has been brilliant experience so far.

I took two courses this quarter - Analytical Tools and Financial Accounting. I couldn't claim my academics have been stellar but, I have learned a lot of practical lessons from my classes.  These classes have given me a ton of new ideas to use at my job! For example, I am planning to evaluate how well we are estimating time and effort on our projects currently by converting old project plans into activity-on diagrams (more details later) and modeling our effort estimates on the normal/triangular/binomial distribution. At the same time, I am really looking forward to consuming bid data for past projects to see if I can discern a pattern wrt our wins and losses. This should allow me to gather some metrics on the kind of projects we bid for (our cilents' sizes and the industries that they are in). Once the legwork for collecting the data is done, I hope to create a regression model so that can be extended to forecast the likelihood of winning/losing future projects based on current data.

Given that just a couple of classes have made such a difference to the way I perceive work now, I can't wait to get started with my classes next quarter (although I am thrilled that I don't have any exams/homework due for the next few weeks).

This is my first post on this blog. Although I started this when I got in, I just have not made the effort to post anything on here. Regardless, better late than never! In the next few posts coming up shortly I intend to go back to how and when I decided to apply for this course and what I did to get in to the MBA@UNC.