It’s been 5 months since I came to Surrey but certainly not alone – I came with a 3 and 6 year old. This is not ‘the usual’ with students but there are a few cases where older students come with their families for lack of proper care arrangements back home or some other personal reasons. I came to study an MBA (some people have asked me what this means). It means a Masters in Business Administration and this is what it looks like…
I wasn’t quite sure I was looking forward to this huge stack of books to read which excludes other articles and resources recommended by individual lecturers coupled with lectures running from 9am -5pm every day (with a few days off). Having to joggle taking care of my kids – school runs, homework, cooking and personal Studies has required a ‘HUGE’ amount of Self discipline which I would talk about some other time.
However, the Journey has had all sides – the good, the in between and the bad.
The good times for me have been the one week of personal study called ‘assessment week’. I enjoy self reflecting and revising what has been taught in class. I also enjoy the flexibility of time to plan the day. However, this might be different for other students who might decide to use the time to travel or hang out with friends which defeats the purpose. This doesn’t mean you should not have time for that but there’s the need to balance these activities and focus on your main objective of being a Student – Studies.
The in-betweens have been group works in class and presentations which is a major part of the MBA. Working with different kinds of people with different perspectives can be…’Arrrgh’… (I’m sure you get it) but we have to do this anyway. In a Digital Platform class quite recently, we were told to get into groups to design a helicopter (helicopter? using Lego?) but ‘Yes’ we had to and we came up with these….
Another course on problem solving (Problem Solving and Innovative Thinking) required generating 300 nugget ideas to come up with a fully formed solution to a problem we had identified. We were told to think like 7 year olds in order to bring out the creativity in us. This was what it looked like…
And you want to know the bad? Cool…Can you imagine anticipating a change in weather after months of cold and rain and being clad in Jumpers, thermal vests, socks and Bumper jackets? Well, this faithful day, I woke up expectant of a ‘fairly okay’ weather but this is what I get… Frost in Feb!
This is the view from my classroom window as at 10:15am on the 26th of February
Well this is just a summary of my journey so far. There are a couple of lessons I would like to share in my subsequent posts. Please look out for it and get others to read. Until then…
