Camino Real

The first part of the class this morning was devoted to reviewing the homework from yesterday. I did a perfect balance sheet, making the assets equal liabilities plus shareholders’ equity. The class started at 8:30 am with today’s focus on management accounting, running till 1:30 in the afternoon. Yesterday’s class was on financial accounting, and more sessions on HR, marketing, finance, and so forth are in stock for the future. So, now I got numbers in millions, various mysterious abbreviations, like EBIT, EBITDA, FAT, ROE……, as well as numerous ratios and equations trafficking through my mind.

What I am currently taking has nothing to do with literature. Instead, it is a two-week “Mini MBA” course offered by Purdue’s Krannert business school. Even though it costs as high as 1,750 dollars as any typical MBA program is, the tuition can be exempted since each department can nominate and sponsor one participant to join this executive program. This wonderful opportunity is offered by my boss who, I guess, really wants to train me to equip myself with various tools. So here I am now, engaging myself with something totally beyond my research field. To be honest, I got hesitated a little from time to time, but we will see how far I can go, and see if I can complete the course by the end of next week. Also, because I have not been sitting in a classroom with such a big class (roughly 60 students) since undergraduate, the classroom atmosphere and its demands is what I need to get accustomed to.

It seems to be a stereotypical thinking that people from the Liberal Arts should be bad at numbers. The professor even alluded to a class he taught before with students from the English Department who gazed quizzically at all the numbers on the board with a total loss. The calculation is not too difficult for me, since Mathematics, in addition to English, has been my favorite subject since junior high. I am managing all right, although my fingers are a little raw from lack of practicing. Hope I can change the professor’s stereotype somehow in someway.

To see this business from a literary perspective……Well, I will say the lectures are effective and the contents are worthy of learning, but the metaphors are all too clichéd without much creativity. Money is compared to eggs, and the impossible is described as flapping your arms and flying to the moon over and over again.

I am not being critical, but just got bored by the language.