My own Tour de Fuqua...

What started out as sunshine and hope this spring is turning into a winter of discontent (and disconnect) . I feel like one of those sprinters in the Tour de France every year who take early wins in the flat stages of the race and then just try to hang on through the steep mountain stages in the middle of the race, waiting for their moment of glory to come around in the final stages, and win that final sprint in Paris. I am climbing the steep hills of Term 3, just trying not to get dropped off the back of the pack. In two weeks we have finals, and I will reach the summits of the Col de Bareket (managerial accounting), Mt. Brav (finance) and L'Alpe de Albanesi (macroeconomics). After that, I will be able to cruise into the Villages of term 4, past the halfway point to graduation and the glorious finish on the tree lined streets of the Champs Elysees. My early victories in Managerial Effectiveness and Statistics are far behind me, and I am doing all I can to keep moving forward in this term's classes. The discipline of early preparation and good study habits still elude me, and it has shown in my performance thus far. The regimens of finance and economics do not come easily or intuitively, but just like riding a bike, I suppose that if you do it frequently and long enough, it becomes easier. I hate to just get by - there are so many tasty morsels of business insight that our professors provide to us each weekend, I only wish there were enough time to digest it all.

Career Conundrum

One of the benefits of sending a quarter of my paycheck to Fuqua B-school every month is the opportunity to use their Career Management Center (CMC) once in a while. Dr. Peter Romanella, a creative guy with as diverse a CV as you will ever see in a career counselor (appropriate, perhaps), serves as director of Career Services for Executive MBA students at Fuqua. Once we got the paperwork signed certifying that I was "self-supported" (WEMBA students have access to CMC services inversely proportional to the amount of support they get from their sponsoring companies, with self-supported students getting the most and company-sponsored individuals getting the least), Peter went to work, providing me with a three page email of weblinked resources to review. At his suggestion, I recently took the Career Leader Survey that is made available for all Fuqua students and serves to match one's values, interests and abilities with various business-oriented careers (http://www.careerleader.com). What I learned surprised and inspired me. Apparently, I have a high match for Advertising Account Management, Marketing Management or Public Relations. I guess I am a closet creative spirit bouncing around in a scientist's body...it kinda makes sense then that I find myself on the non-conventional career path I have taken thus far. I guess the next logical question to ask is "where do I go from here?" Certainly further exploration and information gathering is warranted, perhaps seeking opportunities within and outside of work to try out some marketing and/or PR things...anyone needing some marketing work from an entrepreneurial Ph.D. Microbiologist halfway through his MBA at Duke? Yeah, I'm going to have to work on my personal positioning statement a bit.