All posts by jonathanngiammarco

Academics, Austin, Jonathan

Halfway Done

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students studying
A scene not unlike the finals study ambiance in Reliant (courtesy Nigel Pepper)

Sigh…  Well, I was hoping to end the semester with a triumphant performance on my last final exam, but after Saturday evening’s Intermediate Accounting nightmare, I’m going to have to settle for the mild satisfaction of making it through the semester (half of the program) in once piece.

Exam week has been a real trial. For ten straight days, I and a crack team of five other MPA students put ourselves through daily 14-hour study marathons, lasting from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.  The days began blurry-eyed at sunrise, the six of us stumbling half-awake into the Reliant Productivity Center to take over one of the five large group study rooms.  During final week, you have to grab these rooms early.   There are so few of them, and demand is high.  It was common for us to find students asleep on the ground underneath the tables when we arrived.

Once you take over a study room in Reliant, you really cannot leave. Other students sit and watch these rooms all day, and if you leave one empty for a second, another study group will pounce and take your room over. Therefore, we didn’t leave. We ate meals, took bathroom breaks and ran errands on shifts so that we could hold onto our room.

Why was it important for us to get a study room?  They are the best places to carry out group study. My team of friends decided early on that the best way to prepare for finals was to study together.  We worked problems for different classes together and tested each other on our understanding of the material. We did this by explaining to each other the key accounting concepts and problems we encountered during the semester.  Integrated-MPA superstar, Amanda, introduced the concept of “racing” to our study sessions, and accounting races became a key component of Cost Accounting and Intermediate Accounting exam preparation.  What we would do is select out the hardest homework problems of the semester and race each other to see who could finish the problems correctly the fastest.  The races came pretty close to simulating exam-style intensity and time pressure, and also helped us stay interested and focused in when our daily study hours passed into the double digits.

While the study rooms were key to allowing us to work effectively in a group, they weren’t exactly nice places to be.  The Reliant  rooms  are cramped little hermetically sealed boxes with no windows and oppressive florescent lights.  It was easy to feel on edge with so many people crammed into one room for an extended period of time, but the privacy and sound insulation made the rooms worth using.

Now, exams are over and I will not have to worry about the classes, the Reliant Center, or study rooms for five whole weeks.

What have I been doing with my new-found free time?  Why, tonight I was able to catch up with some new friends and benefit from the diversity of  the traditional MPA student body when my classmate Daniel, a professional chef,  stopped by my apartment and treated me and some fellow students to a beautiful homemade ganache. Yum!  Over the next few days, I have a lot of catching up to do.  Though I have been at UT for almost seven months, I feel like I have yet to really explore Austin.  Over the next few days, I hope to step out and take a look at Lake Travis and Barton Springs.  I have been dying to try out the food trucks downtown, and I finally have a chance do so.

Next Thursday, I’m going to travel north to frozen Pittsburgh to meet my wife, who is finishing up her own academic program, and help her pack up and move on down with me to Texas.  The holidays will be in full swing by then.  The spring semester creeps in a little after mid-January.  You’ll be hearing more from me then.

Happy Holidays!

Academics, Jonathan, Student Life

The Final Push

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Fall classes drew to a close yesterday, and the final countdown to exams had begun in earnest.  The atmosphere has clearly changed in McCombs.  As of last Tuesday, I had become accustomed to walking into the Reliant Productivity Center (a large 24-hour study room in the business school) between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. and having the entire place to myself.  No longer.  Today, the place was jammed at the crack of dawn.  It is now 10:00 a.m., I’ve just checked, and there is not a single seat available.  Quite frankly, the loud sighs and frantic page-turning are a bit too intense for me, so I have decided to spend my day in the more civilized math library instead. 

Though there is a full week between now and my first two exams, I doubt there is really enough time to adaquately prepare.  Intermediate accounting alone requires a week of preparation.  I am probably a day or two away from feeling comfortable with my other classes, but, then again, if the second cost accounting midterm exam was any indication, the final will be a marathon.  I will need to make sure that I have fully programmed the class material into my head if  I expect to finish the exam on time.

With so much riding on time management, I have to make sure that I don’t get sidetracked with distractions this week.  Here is what I have to take care of now so that cram week gets off without a hitch.

Buy Food:  I plan to swing by MT Supermarket (best asian market in Austin) for my  final restocking this afternoon.  I’ll need two or three bunches of green vegetables, some fruit, and tofu to get me through the next 7 days.  I’m just about out of food, and if I have to run out to the market a day or two before the exam, I’ll probably start to get frantic.

Laundry:  This, I’m doing tonight.  A full load of laundry should get me through the week.   Once again, I can’t be sweating these small details before the exam.  Oh wait, I don’t have any coins…

Run to the Bank:  I need a roll of quarters for laundry.

Plane Tickets:  Check.  I took care of these a few days ago.  I am all set to fly to Pittsburgh a few days after the exam.  My wife will be moving down to Austin with me in early December (she’s finishing up school in Steel Town a week after my fall semster is done).  I can’t wait to see her, and she can’t wait so say goodbye to snowy 26-degree winter days.

Alcohol:  None until school’s over!

Academics, Jonathan

Teamwork!

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Group projects are a significant part of this program.  Just about every accounting class at UT assigns group work, though the format, weight, and intensity of the projects vary greatly from class to class. In some classes, you’ll have one or two projects that barely carry any weight. In others, the projects will become a significant part of your grade. My Cost Accounting class, for example, has a total of three cases, one big one and two little ones, that in total comprise 20% of the course grade.  These cases are generally problem-solving based (“determine why company A is losing money”), and they can be pretty involved. The big project of the semester requires a five-page write-up and a 15-minute group presentation accompanied by PowerPoint slides and in business casual dress. The smaller cases are just two-page executive summaries.

In Intermediate Accounting, the cases tend to be more analysis based (“how would this item be classified on the balance sheet in light of FASB codification and industry practice”).  The write-ups in Intermediate are short, just three double-spaced pages, but the stakes are much higher. The three projects make up 18% of the course grade, and for me, this is a critical 18%.

Grading tends to run from liberal (a completion grade) to competitive. In Intermediate Accounting, the grading is relative to the rest of the class. Groups are essentially pitted against each other. This means that receiving an A on a group project depends in large part upon how well or how poorly the other groups perform. This is the Texas MPA program after all, and you can imagine that with a dozen talented and motivated groups to contend with, the competition is stiff and the intensity is high. Continue reading Teamwork! →

Jonathan, Student Life

A Tuesday Evening Dialogue on Sweatshops and Consumerism

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Every morning I receive a long e-mail from UT’s Office of Public Affairs with a list of campus events being held the following day.  As you can imagine, at a school like UT the list is very, very long.  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, no matter which day of the week, the amount of activity on campus can be overwhelming.  One could easily fill an entire day moving from lecture to lecture, cultural events, art exhibitions, dance classes, and concerts.  When I do my daily e-mail check, I always take a cursory glance at the list, make mental notes about possible free food, and think wistfully to myself that under most circumstances I would certainly attend such and such an event if only I had the time. Well, on Tuesday there was listing that caught my eye, and I finally broke out of my passive stupor and took a small step further into the McCombs/UT community.

The event was called “Sweatshops and Consumerism,” a combination lecture/discussion hosted by Net Impact Undergrad, a socially and environmentally conscious student business organization.  Having spent several years doing anti-sweatshop work, I was pretty eager to gauge UT students’ attitudes toward labor issues and to hear the type of perspective Professors Patricia Wilson and Harry Cleaver, the two main speakers, would bring to the event.  Also, it was nice to give my brain a short break from accounting.

Overall, I found the structure of the event to be interesting.  Both professors spoke about the political and economic factors surrounding sweatshop factories in Mexico, and there were several occasions for the audience to break  into groups and discuss issues and pose questions.  Professor Cleaver placed the sweatshop issue in a classical post-colonial Marxist context, viewing sweatshops as a natural offshoot of our modern political system.  Professor Wilson presented a more holistic understanding of sweatshops in their local contexts, urging a more nuanced understanding of low wage off-shore manufacturing and emphasizing consumer choice as a possible solution to labor rights abuses.  Almost all of the undergraduates in attendance were engaged with the issues, which made me happy.  For a Tuesday evening, attendance at the dialogue was pretty impressive, with several dozen people in the audience, and there was a pretty good mix of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.

The discussion was 90 minutes well spent, and my break from the library didn’t seem to bring my semester crashing down around me.  With luck, I’ll be able to make time to take part in more campus events as the year progresses.

Academics, Jonathan, Student Life

A Rise in the Fall

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Fall recruiting is beginning to ebb, a second round of midterm exams is coming to a close, and Thanksgiving is less than three weeks away. After two and a half months of frantic rushing around and playing a seemingly sisyphean game of catch-up, I am seem to be getting the fall semester under control. With a summer and more than half a semester gone, here are a few big-view observations about my first academic semester in the MPA program.

The fall semester is front-loaded:  In terms of time commitment and importance, the first month is the most significant of the semester, probably the most significant of the program.  Most of the key foundation-laying material in the accounting classes is taught in the first month.  Accordingly, there is a huge chunk of homework doled out in the first few weeks of class.  Students who are enrolled in 2-credit Finance classes will have their first graded quiz within ten days.  The first round of exams, including the first  intermediate exam–it’s a monster–come four weeks into semester.   

At the same time, recruiting is already in full swing by the end of August.  First are the meet-and-greets, where firms hold information sessions about their available positions and offices.  Then there are the actual job application deadlines and first round interviews, which generally fall between September and the first week of October. 

But, by the end of October, all of a sudden life seems a lot more manageable.   Continue reading A Rise in the Fall →