1/6th done! My second term at UC Davis’ Bay Area Working Professional MBA program

The winter 2009 quarter brought our working group closer together (read: cliquing is on in full force) and further separated us from “The Others” enrolled in the same courses but on the alternate schedule. The Others are just like the mysterious group that live on the island in the TV show Lost. Very suspect. We try not to make eye contact when we meet at lunch or dinner.

The core courses are offered in two schedules, so for this quarter you can either take econ first followed by stats, or stats first followed by econ. Of course one of the two courses is going to be considered the harder course, and most people want to take that course earlier in the day. It makes sense, who wants to go to stats from 6-9PM on Friday nights? Wouldn’t you rather take some easy econ course when you’re tired and tuning out?

So all the nerdy students who are thinking ahead pick the harder course first, and of course it fills up fast. The slackers who forget to register, the broke folk stuck waiting for student aid, and those of us who don’t like keeners end up in the non-optimal schedule. Which is fine, because there are less people in the non-optimal schedule. Plus those people are cooler. That’s why we call the others “The Others”. Ingroup/outgroup sociology in action!

Christian V spent this second quarter with The Others. He was part of the original crew who met way back during our Orientation session. Jillian, Bobby and I stayed true with the rest of the cool kids we’ve made friends with. Christian didn’t want to commit to us so early. He wanted to see other people. He wanted to explore what b-skool has to offer. He wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side. Needless to say, he was pretty miserable for the whole term and is coming back to the dream team for our third quarter. We’re not sure if we trust him now. He might be a spy.

Speaking of our third quarter, the Spring 2009 quarter is the last of our core classes. After this we’ll be able to choose our own breadth and elective courses. It’s sad because inevitably our group is going to split up and take different courses on different nights, but it’s exciting as well because we all get to choose our own adventure. I think our clique, Jillian, Bobby, Erika, Brad, Pat, Dan, Jon, me, and maybe Christian, will stick together. We’re going to Las Vegas together in May; Christian “has plans”. More on that later.

So in our second quarter we had Microeconomics and Statistics.

Next quarter, our last core quarter, is Marketing with Jenni Smith and Corporate Finance with Brad Barber. Plus a trip (my first) to Las Vegas in May.