math math math math

Business school is kicking my ass. The workload is unreal; the amount of required reading is obscene. I never feel like I am on top of things or ahead of things because there's always something I *could* be doing - reading my textbooks, working on sample problems, prep-ing for presentations, getting started on papers, etc. It's like a never-ending avalanche. I have no life. I get up ungodly early to exercise (without which I would lose my mind) and then either go to school and have classes, tutoring sessions, study sessions, homework time followed by home, dinner and more homework time. Or I have days "off" where I go to yoga (also without which I would lose my mind) and then spend the rest of the day sequestered in the library studying. There is also a series of required lectures, workshops and trainings designed to give us the "competitive edge" in getting a job after graduation. I don't feel like I have time to do anything fun, much less run a quick errand or read the newspaper. I average about 6 hours of sleep a night and never have time or the interest to eat. I feel like I am constantly teetering on the edge of something. An abyss? A breakdown? Tears? Vomiting?

And then there are my classes . . . Actually my classes are ok, except for the workload (see above). Two classes in particular are really killing me. I knew accounting would be challenging and it is. It is particularly challenging because I don't have the greatest teacher. She's very nice but very unfocused in her lectures. She starts lecturing on something, gets sidetracked and goes on about something that happened in the news 20 years ago and then gets back to the lecture in a different place where she left off. In class she shows us a lot of addition/subtraction things but I don't understand the overall concepts of accounting. The classes are 2h 40min and boring, tedious, long and confusing. Accounting is a popular topic among my classmates and it's not because we're pumped about financial ratios, we mostly talk about how strange our teacher is and how awful the class is. There is a midterm in two weeks which terrifies me. I suspect my saving grace will be that she generous and subjective with her grading and on Monday she explained how she's going to curve our final grade.

My ultimate nemesis is Operations & Data Management. Don't ask me what the class is about because I have no idea. I only understand about 20% of what's going on. There is an unbelievable amount of work!! Two individual papers, 4 group papers, 1 Excel assignment (all about discrete numbers, whatever those are), and 5 homeworks. Attendance and participation are a big part of the grade. We also have ALEKS. ALEKS is a self-paced mathematics program. It is hell in a laptop. I have spent about 20 hours on it so far. There are 77 modules all together and after taking the assessment test I placed out of only the first 17 modules. It's a particularly evil program because it only allows you access to work on a few modules at a time and you have to get a certain number of questions right (ranging from 3 - 5) in a row before it lets you move on and open other modules. The explanations are written in "math-ese" so I do a lot of Googling. I am actually paying a Standford grad $40/hour to help me get through the damn thing and it's worth every penny. Each week we meet to work through the modules and I feel vindicated when he says that it's an awful program or that it's not explained well. I am almost done - 10 more modules left, I think - and then I get 20% of my grade just for having completed it.

The content of the course is math, math, math. And not math as in addition and subtraction but math as in random variables, standard deviations, and a bunch of other higher math, probability and statistics things that I don't really get. I hired a tutor that a classmate recommended and the first time we met we spent two hours getting through 5 homework problems. The problems were relatively easy in that once he explained the formulas I could just plug in. I did the second 5 problems on my own and when the tutor double checked them he thought they were all correct. I got the homework back today and I got 100%. I can't tell you how foolish I felt for grinning like an idiot fore getting all of the problems right but I was super psyched. The tutor also spend a solid 45 minutes explaining the content of the chapter, trying to help me understand enough so I could complete one of the individual cases. Over and over he explained it and over and over I just didn't get it. I felt so stupid. Finally when our time was up he said "I don't know what to tell you. Talk to your professor, read the book, find a study group, look online." I told him my professor said to do the same thing he was suggesting and it wasn't helping (um, that's why I hired the tutor) and the tutor accused me of being passive aggressive and stormed out of the cafe where we had been studying. As soon as I left the cafe I burst into tears and to add insult to injury got back to my car to find a $25 parking ticket from the City of Boston.

Fast forward a week. We went over the same material in class again on Monday and I guess a tiny bit of what the tutor explained sunk in because I was actually able to follow along to my professor's speed session on using Excel to figure out optimal quantity ordering. And a day later when I sat down to figure out the rest of the data I actually sort of got what I was supposed to do. I didn't understand the concepts but I knew what to do. My classmate told me how to approach the second part of the number crunching and yesterday I actually finished all of the data part (well, the minimum data part - there's another (optional) piece that we can do but I only get parts of it and don't understand the overall concept and can't seem to recreate enough of what we did in class to do it on my own) and wrote the associated paper for the assignment!

It's hard to explain how relieved and happy and nervous I am. I really have no idea what's going on in class. These are higher math things that I've never heard of, much less used or learned before and I hope to hell that I won't have to use them in the workplace at some point. The pace is brisk and there are a lot of assignments. Even the group assignments are hard because everyone is expected to pull their weight and I don't want to be the idiot of my group and hold the others back or cause them to get a bad grade. If you don't get the concepts in class right away you are kind of screwed as there is no time for leisurely thinking about everything. Lecture, assignment, case, next topic, in rapid order. And I've come to learn that my brain simply doesn't do well with numbers. There is a block that I just can't get around. And it is very very frustrating! This class is the one class that has made me think many times that I don't belong in business school and should drop out. I can't tell you how many times I've cried, sobbed actually, about this class. The class meets on Monday and every Monday morning on the subway I can feel the tears of dread start forming. I finished the number crunching and paper for this case but I have no idea if what I did is right and if it's wrong I don't understand enough of what's going on to fix it and we have another case paper due next Friday so there's no time to dwell.

Despite all of this pain and suffering, I want to do well. Scratch that. With all this pain and suffering I had better get an A!! Academically it's the most challenging class I have ever had. And faced with a challenge like this I want to kick it in the butt and do well, if only to prove to myself that I can do it. I seem to be on track to doing fairly well despite not really understanding the majority of the class content but I keep questioning if all of this is worth it. Or more specifically, is killing myself to do well in *this* class worth not doing as well in my other classes? Is it worth the headaches? The constant nausea? The chronic stress? The feelings of inadequacy and stupidity? I hate to say it, but if I get an A it's worth it.