Right before I moved to Seattle, Adam asked me what I would do to deal with the cold, dreary days (and nights) in the Pacific Northwest. Well, the last week has been extraordinarily cold - in the high 20s, low 30s - which is unusual for Seattle. It hasn't been raining as much, but the cold is tough. Also, the days are really short. On days when I'm on campus from 8am-5:30pm, I don't see the sun at all.
So I got to go back to my answer to him from a couple of years ago. I said I would have a warm house to come home to from a coffee shop, soup simmering on the stove and a happy attitude toward life because everything is well in the world. I got to live that today. It was nice.
I will be even happier in 8 days when I'm on a plane to Belize.
The last couple of days, Adam and I got to do fun things around town.
On Wednesday, I went to the Aveda Training Salon for a haircut which took a long time, but was cheap and worth it. I also saw a classmate at Caffe Vita on the Hill, had a pulled pork sandwich at Paseo in Fremont and drinks at Six Arms. Adam and I had dinner at the Hunter's Club at the Sorrento Hotel which was lovely and they had great drinks!
Yesterday, we tried a new Greek place, Alladin Gyro-Cery before we went to catch a modern ballet, Complexions at Meany Hall on campus. It was a mix of modern music, more classical sounding music and U2 music.
This week we had a small break in the stream of crazy assignments, classes, projects and tests. Most of my classmates are out of town on Road Shows to the Bay Area as well as to the Net Impact Conference in Cornell.
In order to make the most of our "time off," my classmate Allison and I made our own Seattle "study tour" and met with four very different "marketers" in the area.
We began our meetings with a Sr. Manager of Media Management ServicesatGetty Imagesand learned about her role with the company, the team she manages and the products she markets. Her role seemed to be very specific and a mix of a technical and a marketing role with a larger emphasis on the tech stuff. I have loved Getty Images since my political days since that's where we bought most of our stock photography, so it was interesting to see the office, the space and the environment that company functions in. It is also a company that went from being public to private, which gave a new perspective too. Getty Image's business strategy is existence by acquisition. It is not clear to me how the company will continue growing especially with the decline of the newspaper business that uses stock photography very heavily.
Our second meeting was with an online media buyer for Nordstrom. Having only met TV buyers before, it was fun to learn about various ways to buy and pay for online advertisement. For example, a common strategy is to pick up left over advertisement that websites like AOL, MSN, etc. were not able to sell and be "filler" for those sites and in return, you only pay for the advertisement that results in a sale. I am pretty sure that I don't want to be a media buyer, but it was another type of marketing that was interesting to learn about.
Our other two meetings were with Microsoft Marketers. First one was with a research guru who does what I would call opposition research for MSFT. I always knew that major companies put in serious resources into tracking the industry progress but I've never meant a non-political opposition research person, so that was very interesting. We also talked a lot about the culture at MSFT, the intensity of the hours, being surrounded by very smart people and being forward looking as a company.
The last meeting was with a traditional "marketer" who works on the Sharepoint Microsoft team. The people who work for her are MBAs with marketing concentrations who work on creating awareness for the product and support the field that is trying to sell the product. It was great to see what this role looks like at MSFT and it did appeal to me and what I want to do.
Both MSFT people talked about the company being driven by engineers and referencing the famous Steve Ballmer "developer" clip:
So two full days, four very different marketers and a world of possibilities that I am trying to narrow down into fields of interest to me. The problem is that so many things seem so interesting and intriguing right now and I wish I could try a little bit of everything.
Today is the official half way point of the quarter. I have taken 2 midterms, several quizzes, have submitted way too much homework and have a take home midterm in accounting coming up this week that will surely give me a whole new perspective on how much I don't know.
I am also finally making friends in the program. I am definitely seeing progress from saying hello in the class to friendship. I was just offered a spot on the Study Tour to Kenya for spring break. I think that will be an awesome opportunity, after I finish calming down my parents about my trip.
This weekend, Adam and I hosted a Halloween party and a pub crawl in Capitol Hill. I think the duties divided up in that I came up with the food to serve, Adam came up with dessert and titles of the food that we super creative. We also borrowed decorations from a friend that really made the place look good. It was then fun to walk around Cap Hill and see all the activities on Halloween out there. It was no West Hollywood, but pretty cool nonetheless.
Adam was a disco king and I was Pippi Long Stocking. Unfortunately you can't see the striped knee highs in this picture, but they are rainbow colored if that helps.
Yesterday my wonderful boyfriend treated me to a massage which was very needed and we went to change my tires at Costco because apparently I was a day away from spinning out due to worn out tires. I guess my car didn't get the memo that I was busy.
Life is good. It feels stressful but I'm pretty sure it's self-imposed and unnecessary stress. At the end of the day, school is about learning and not worrying about grades. I am lucky in that I have a very strong support network formed by Adam, my good friends and family. I don't think anyone is necessarily having an easy time depending on what their situation is or issues they are dealing with, but I know that everyone makes it out better than they started.
As it turns out, this coming week is going to be a little nutty. I have a Statistics midterm on Tuesday, a huge Marketing deliverable on Wednesday (where my group gets to market a toothbrush, apparently it's harder then it sounds) and then there is the regular workload like finance homework and quiz, finance case study, 2 accounting cases and more statistics homework...
So while this is all very overwhelming, this morning I was supposed to go to a volunteer project which got cancelled due to heavy rain (apparently it rains in Seattle). So I took these 2 hours that I got back to catch up on life and it felt good!
Here are all the things that made me way too happy (all considering):
Reading the Seattle Times (apparently Wal-Mart and Amazon are now competing for online business against each other
Cleaning the kitchen and the bathrooms
Reading the Election Pamphlet
Adding 5 new food blogs (thanks Kristina) to my RSS feed, because I need more distractions
Catching up on my RSS feeds
So yes - my unexciting Saturday morning surprisingly made me feel more whole and put together then I've been in a long time.
"Name one thing in your life that hasn't changed in the last three months," was what a friend of mine told me today when he took me home. He also added that in a world of lots of changes, it is normal to focus in on something/anything and make it worse. So I'm not sure what is normal or not normal right now and how long it will take me to feel like the ground has stopped shaking, but in the mean time, I want to talk about some things that have changed that are somewhat amusing.
I do homework. A lot. I know everyone says that grades in the MBA program don't matter and that your average GPA is 3.5 and no one gets anything below 3.2, etc. I get that. However, I have never seen a balance sheet until a month ago. I have never calculated how credit cards determine how much money you owe them and never knew how quickly that ads up. And I have never tried to figure out how much money I need to save in order to send a kid to college in 15 years. I mean, some problems were just not on my radar. As a result - I do homework. None of these things are intuitive or easy for me. I don't plan on giving up my life for net present values of college tuition or anything, but I do feel that I need to get a solid foundation in the first quarter so my life may just have to be on hold.
I drink beer. This is not a good consequence of business school. But alas, everyone is doing it and I'm on the bandwagon. Beer pitchers are cheap and it's an easy way to make people happy from long study days.
I actually get tired of talking throughout the day. When I come home, I actually want to sit in peace and quiet. This is a big step for me considering "I have a lot to say."
Calendar is my friend. My calendar is booked out by the hour, on some days, by the half an hour. If you are not on my calendar, I am not quite sure you exist.
Keeping outside perspective. I am determined to continue going to Monday dinner and hanging out with my non business school friends sometimes.
I spend time in the library. If you know me, you know this is odd.
My first day of school was in Moscow on September 1, 1990. September 1st was the national first day of school for the whole country and it was a festive event. I was dressed up in my best clothes and my whole family came to see me off to my first class on my first day. To this day I remember the gift that I received which was a little address book with a traditional Russian art cover on the front.
Today was my first day of business school. One would hope, it is my last first day of an academic institution. It was a very different feeling, but some things were still the same: I woke up early (like I have before every other first day of school), I was dressed up (though this is an anomaly), I rode the bus (actually similar to my first day of school).
The difference was that as I walked through campus, I felt older than 90% of the people I saw.
So life is good. Exciting. New. I am overwhelmed and behind on work, but I think you are supposed to feel that way.
Per my sister's request, here is a blog about my bus experience in Seattle.
Since moving to Capitol Hill, I have been pretty intent on avoiding to drive and taking the bus instead. I am lucky because we live in an area that has buses that run in every direction. Since I got my bus pass through school, I probably drive once or twice a week. It helps that my garage is ridiculously hard to get in and out of so my incentive is increased to take the bus.
Here are the best parts about taking the bus:
-It guarantees at least 20 minutes of walking a day (total)
-I am able to read, listen to music, eat breakfast, etc. without being distracted by driving
-It inadvertently slows down life and makes me appreciate the change in the season, the various dogs and their owners on the streets, and the different faces I see on the bus.
-I am not the DD and I don't have to worry about driving myself anywhere after happy hour or any other drinking function
-I am really enjoying the fact that I am NOT driving. I feel like I have spent so much of my life behind a wheel and in traffic that it's lovely to just take the bus. I wish I could say I feel some great moral superiority about not driving and reducing my carbon footprint, but I don't really. I just selfishly like not being behind a wheel and have someone else do all the work.
The worst parts about taking the bus:
-I hate it when the bus is early
-I haven't really hit the rainy part of the season yet so it will be interesting to experience bus riding/walking in the rain.
-Along the same line of reasoning, I haven't had to walk too much in the dark yet to and from bus stops. So hopefully that will be ok as well.
I want to blog. I have so many things, experiences and observations I want to share but there is simply no time.
I am deep in orientation and I am exhausted every day. From 8am-7pm I go between workshops, lectures, break out sessions, happy hours, etc. I know it doesn't sound rough but it's very time consuming. I never realized how much down time you actually have at work and I had a very busy job!
So I don't know when I'll get to blogging, but I really want to talk about my new study group, my class, our wonderful apartment and my boyfriend who is a rock, my continued to be hard transition with all the changes in my life (student life, living with a boyfriend life, not being able to read the news or get anything accomplished or so it seems life). I'm not AT ALL complaining, I'm loving the changes, but they are also hard on me. So I am embracing this feeling of having the ground be taken away from under my feet and clearly being suspended and held up in the air by unseen strings.
Hopefully I won't fall. Clearly the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done this, have managed just fine.
I am a big tea drinker. I have been drinking tea for as long as I can remember. I like it black, with no sugar and not very strong, so I tend to take the bag out pretty fast after I put it.
I own many tea cups, a pretty flowery tea set, a tea box, a tea bag squeezer thing, etc. What I have not been a fun of until recently has been herbal tea or even accented black tea.
However, not too long ago I discovered Mango Black Tea as courtesy of a client who sent me a holiday gift. And recently, I have actually been drinking hot herbal tea and letting it steep. I actually find it quite comforting and relaxing, which has never been the purpose of the black tea for me, since it's just part of the daily routine for me. I am also pretty excited that there are several tea places near the place where we will, so I look forward to trying those.
I never thought this would change about me, but I am glad I am expanding my taste palette.
