Go see Little Miss Sunshine. Just do it. I did, and now I'm giggling madly because I heard a little bit of "Super Freak". Damn iTunes shuffle feature.

Today was our first day of classes in both Decision Models and Managerial Economics. This is the term I've looked forward to since first reading the program's curriculum.

We started the day with Managerial Economics. This class is going to be all about game theory, and there will be some higher level math used. This has me slightly worried, since I skipped the optional math class and it's been a long time since Calculus in high school, but hopefully it won't take me long to knock the rust off. Our prof is a nice guy, with a good, if slightly ham-fisted, sense of humor.

Decision Models was my favorite class in undergrad, so I'm hoping this will be as much fun as it was at UW - my wife speaks really highly of the professor here, and his first class did not disappoint. To illustrate expected value and the value of perfect information, we played betting games, which I've done in class before, but this time, the money was real. That made the exercise a lot more interesting.

After class, someone organized a trip to P.F. Chang's, which is where 30 or so of us went for dinner. After dinner, drinks and poker at Danny's Den. Then, to the room, update the ol' slashdot journal, and goodnight!

We'll do it all over again tomorrow.

Towards the end of last week, our grades finally trickled in, and despite a disappointing performance on my last managerial effectiveness assignment, I still eked out the pair of "SP" grades I was hoping for. So, for the next term, at least, I'll be able to say that I'm carrying a 4.0 average at Duke.

The end of the term also means the beginning of a new term, which means new textbooks and pre-reading. This term, we're tackling Microeconomics and Decision Models, both of which were among my favorite subjects in undergrad. I actually took UW's Microeconomics class for MBA students as an undergrad, so I'm pretty familiar with game theory. I don't expect this to be just a simple review, however, and the pre-reading seems to indicate that we'll be digging a lot deeper in this class than we did at UW. Decision Models, however, looks to cover mostly the same gound as UW's undergrad decision sciences courses.

In addition to coursework, there will be some interesting side activities at our upcoming residency. We're going to attend two Duke football games and do some tailgating. I'm pretty excited about that, even though Duke's football team is pretty bad, and is playing two of the ACC's upper tier teams in Georgia Tech and Florida State. We're also holding an informal meeting of our entrepreneurs board, during which we'll discuss a classmate's business idea, and how early-stage ventures attract customers. I've been tapped to lead the discussion, and hope that it leads to future meetings, and hopefully some future business success!

At the end of the weekend is Fest-of-F's, a "spouses weekend" event where the families of our class join us in attending a football game, downing a few beers, and generally enhancing the sense of community around the program. My wife will be coming up for this, and it should be interesting to see her in the spouse role, when she was the student last year!

Speaking of the wife, she is about to wrap up Term 6 in her program - only 2 terms left! Pretty soon, she'll be making the transition to her post-MBA career, and we'll see how this $85,000 investment pays off. When all is said and done, we'll have $100K+ of student loans in the family, and will be making roughly an extra mortgage payment per month, so we need to see a serious return on this investment.

Barring any major collapse on my last two assignments, as of yesterday, I'm officially 1/8th of the way to an MBA from Duke University. We wrapped up Managerial Effectiveness with an individual paper and presentation, and capped Financial Accounting with a six-hour exam. As a natural procrastinator, this meant I had a very busy weekend. Still, I think I did well, and hope to earn a pair of SP grades this term. SP is Fuqua's rough equivalent of an A grade.

For those interested, Fuqua's grading scheme breaks down like this. "SP" stands for Superior Pass and is a 4.0 GPA. "HP" stands for "High Pass" and earns a 3.5 GPA. "P" is "Pass", 3.0 GPA. Any of these grades are acceptable. In fact, some people in the program have a saying: 16P = MBA. Below P, however, is where you can get yourself into trouble. To remain in the program, you have to maintain a 3.0 GPA or better."LP" stands for "Low Pass" and is a 2.5 GPA. "F" is "Fail", and represents a 0.0 GPA. Get one "F", and you are "held back" a year to repeat the course with the next cohort. Get two "F" grades, and you flunk out. Hopefully, it doesn't come to that for anyone in my group.

Some random observations on CCMBA after one term:

• This is less work than I thought. At least, it was in the first term. I'm not saying I'm not working hard, but I am spending considerably less time than I expected working on assignments. All said, I'm averaging 5-10 hours per week, while I was expecting 15-20 hours worth of work. I would imagine that having just recently finished an undergraduate degree in business gives me a level of familiarity with the material that helps a lot.
• Centra is a great way to conduct classes If you're not familiar with Centra, it's a lot like WebEx, just customized to the classroom environment. Professors can lecture, while students virtually "raise their hands" and contribute to the class discussion. It's a lot more orderly than a conference bridge, and the added advantage is that the classroom sessions are recorded for later playback. Unfortunately, there is no Macintosh client. It works surprisingly well under Virtual PC, however.
• There are two kinds of people in an Executive MBA program. By this, I mean that there are clear differences between people who choose to attend business school in the Executive MBA format. Some people are in the Executive MBA because they love their jobs, have a great career path ahead of them with their current employer, and just need an MBA to help them along the ladder. Then there are the people who probably should have signed up for a full-time program, but for one reason or another felt that they couldn't give up their full-time job for two years, even though they plan to change careers at the end of the program. The first category of folks (which I fall into) finds endless frustration with the second category, because they are exasperatingly single-minded. All discussions with program administration invariably turn to career services, and the discussions about career services invariably turn into arguments between the administration staff and the would-be career changers, who just don't understand why they're not entitled to the exact same career services as daytime students, regardless of the fact that the program's career services are clearly laid out before applying. Some of my best friends in the program are those looking to change careers, but every once in a while, I want to shake them violently and ask why they just didn't go to a full time program.
• It's amazing how social people can be at a distance. As a long time BBS and USENET user, I shouldn't be surprised by this, but our program's message boards are incredibly lively. I'm learning a lot from the discussions on our entrepreneurial board, and the "student lounge" is a lot of fun. We've organized a 20-team fantasty football league, and we're generally having a great time, even though we rarely see each other in person. Of course, when we do get together in person, we have a great time! Speaking of which...
• I'm ready for the next residency. As great as our distance education technology is, I'm ready to see my classmates face-to-face again. One of the most enjoyable parts of the program has been our class discussions during the residency portions. This term, we're doing Microeconomics and Decision Models, and I'm raring to go.

So far, I've been really happy with the Cross Continent program. I think that it's going to do a lot for my career long-term, and my boss commented the other day that he's already seeing positive changes in my way of thinking that he credits to my classes. It's a long way from flunking out of NC State to a Fuqua MBA, but the journey seems to be worth it so far, and I'm anxious to see how far I can go!

So, I haven't done the best job updating my journal lately - I've been busy!

We're going into week 5 of 6 of the distance portion of term 1, and things are super-busy. The team project for managerial effectiveness was due last week, and I felt our team's effort was outstanding. When the grade gets here, we'll know for sure.

Some thoughts on the first term:

Communication over distance is difficult to decipher. I've apparently been rude to one of my teammates, but I'm not sure what I said to offend. This is affecting the team dynamic, so I know I need to get it fixed, but I have no idea how.

Accounting is much easier the second time around. In undergrad, accounting was my least favorite class. In the CCMBA program, I have pleasantly surprised myself so far. Our second team project and final are coming up over the next two weeks, so we'll see if I can keep it up.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the CCMBA program is stocked with brilliant people. Our message board discussions are engaging and informative. Usually, I read message boards for the flamewars, but there is a lot of signal and very little noise on the Fuqua NNTP server.

Finally, I'm looking forward to the next residency. We're going to two Duke football games, and it should be a blast. We'll work hard, but we're also going to play hard, and this time around, I'll be at the Thomas Center, not the Washington Duke Inn! I can actually get drunk at Danny's Den, instead of worrying about driving back to the hotel! Sweet!

Yesterday was my first day in the office in two weeks. To say work's piled up for me would be an understatement. Still, I'm looking forward to digging in and applying some of what I learned in my first residency at Duke in a "real world" environment.

First, though, I have to return all those voice mails!

Although we have agenda items that go through tomorrow, today is effectively the last day of residency for the first term of the CCMBA program. Basically, this means we're halfway through the first term at this point, having compressed six weeks worth of assignments and reading into two weeks. Basically, one class in residency is the equivalent of a week in the distance portion, but this term, they staggered the classes across two weeks to give us a more "gentle" introduction and work in some non-graded team building training.

Being halfway through the term means one thing, if you can think all the way back to those hazy college days, and that's MIDTERMS. For Managerial Effectiveness, our midterm was an individual case writeup on BMW - three pages and a Powerpoint, not bad at all. But today is the event that's struck fear in the hearts of the entire program ever since we saw it looming on the agenda way back on July 23rd. Today is the day for the Financial Accounting midterm, a grueling three-hour exam that is our first real test in the program. For many of us, it will be the first test we've taken since the GMAT, and the first in-class exam we've taken in five years or more. Having completed my undergrad degree only recently, I'm a little better off than many of my classmates, because I've been exposed to a lot of this stuff within the past two years.

Still, I've felt the pressure as the exam has approached, and like my peers, I've spent a lot of time in our teamrooms working on statements of cash flow, scanning balance sheets and income statements, and basically getting myself worked up over what is ultimately only the first of many tests I'll take in this program. Someone once said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The CCMBA class of 2007 finishes its first step this morning. Only 999.99 more miles to go!

Today, we completed our first team assignment to submit tomorrow. I was amazed at how smoothly my team worked together. Of course, where the rubber meets the road is when we are in distance. If we still work well during the distance education portion of the course, then we're golden.

I'm also surprised at the hours we're keeping in residency. I think I need to start working out just to avoid the "afternoon fade" where I want to fall asleep towards the end of the afternoon session.

I'm also really ready to get back to the office and start seeing how to apply some of this learning. Bet my boss is going to be really tired of my suggestions by the time this program ends!

Seems like it's been a lifetime since my last journal entry.

We spent Tuesday offsite at Triangle Training Center, doing teambuilding exercises in 101 degree heat. I flirted with heat exhaustion, and think I took away a lot less from the experience than I wanted to because of it. My teammates were very supportive, which I really appreciate from people I am just starting to get to know.

Classwork has started in earnest. We're working on a team charter, a list of the commitments that the team makes to one another for the learning process. Our team charter emphasizes achievement and respect for ideas, I'd characterize our team as being more agressive overall than I am individually. I'm looking to this team to help me develop good habits that will carry me through the program and out into my post-MBA life.

Tomorrow (actually, today, since it's after midnight as I write this), we work more on the team charter, begin writing our first team assignment, and I hope to get some spare time to work on accounting, which I need to catch up on.

More from Duke later!

Today is the second day of my first residency at Fuqua, and after 30 hours or so as a graduate student, here's what I'm thinking now.

This is going to be a lot of work.

Literally every minute is scheduled for us between 8:00AM and 8:00PM every day for the next two weeks. We're going to cram in roughly half a semester's worth of class meetings, assignments, and yes, even exams, for two classes into two weeks. I'm skipping part of dinner to write this journal entry. Of course, we've got it easy this term. Next term we have to do it all in one week.

The people here are really talented.

The mix of people that makes up our class is absolutely astounding. We have CPAs, logistics and distribution experts, professors, marketers, more engineers than you can shake a stick at, and of course, a ton of IT types like myself.

I can't shut my mouth.

My family and co-workers probably could have told you that, but the Myers-Brigg tests we took helped explain some of that. I'm an ENFP, and apparently one thing that people find frustrating about dealing with ENFPs is that we talk way more than we listen. Of course, speaking quickly has its rewards sometimes. I won an autographed picture of Coach K by answering a trivia question during orientation.

Sometimes, getting the short end of the stick turns out better than you expected.

My team got "bumped" from the Thomas Center, the main facility here at Fuqua due to a lack of space. However, we were bumped to the Washington Duke Inn, a four-star resort hotel on the edge of Duke's campus. Not a bad place to spend 13 nights, if you can't be at the Thomas Center with everyone else.

I'll write more on the CCMBA program and my experiences as the week progresses. Needless to say, I'm working hard, but I'm having a blast at the same time.