Six weeks into the fall quarter at San Ramon. Some notes from the field.
My undergraduate transcript reads: plant biology, plant physiology, soil science, organic chemistry, enology. No accounting, no statistics, no economics, nothing with the word business in it. So I walked into a graduate financial accounting course in September having never once been taught what a debit is, surrounded by people I assumed had all seen this before. The first two weeks I took notes like a court reporter and said very little.
The vocabulary was the hard part, and the vocabulary was the only hard part. Debits, credits, accruals, the accounting equation — these were new words for things I had spent a decade standing next to. I have built forecasts that wouldn't tie to the ledger and burned days finding out why. It turns out there is a whole formal system that explains exactly why, and the class hands it to you in order, starting from the first principle. Learning the grammar of statements I'd been reading by intuition for a decade is satisfying in a way I didn't expect from a required course.
The statistics side, a course called Data Analysis for Managers, runs the same pattern in reverse. Years of Excel modeling gave me the instincts; the course is supplying the grounding underneath them, and occasionally correcting an instinct that was confidently wrong.
The quarter system at this pace is no joke. Ten weeks means the midterm shows up around week four, before you feel finished being introduced. There is no coasting stretch, and nobody in the cohort pretends otherwise.
The part I didn't price into the decision is the cohort. Everyone arrives from a workday — engineers, finance people, healthcare people — and the case discussions carry that weight. When a case turns on why a plant misses its schedule or what a stockout actually costs, I'm the operations person in the room, and a decade of supply chain and production work turns out to count for something here. Other nights someone else holds the floor on a domain I've only read about. Study groups get scheduled in the gaps around everyone's jobs, which is its own logistics exercise, and that shared constraint does more for the group than any icebreaker could.
The nerves lasted about three weeks. Week six finds me comfortable, current on the reading, and no longer the quietest person at the table. That's a status report, not a verdict; the quarter has four more weeks and a final exam left to say otherwise.
— Lo