College Daze

It was very warm on Thursday (high in the mid 80’s) with a chance for occasional showers in the afternoon.

I knew I wouldn’t get any supper, so I ate lunch at the nearby Chinese restaurant (they give you big portions for relatively little money). I had pork subgum and some great fried rice, along with an excellent egg roll and wonton soup. After eating, I drove around the streets of downtown Farmington, with the windows down, looking at the old houses and churches.

My original idea was to stay at work until 5:30 PM and then drive to my class, which starts at 6:00. But, today was a management meeting, so everybody was offsite; which meant that we all had to leave at 5:00 so they could lock up and set the alarm.

So, I got to school 40 minutes early. At first, I read in the car with the windows down, but it quickly became too warm. So, I went inside and sat on a padded bench, reading and waiting for the time to pass.

Finally people started trickling in. We all signed in, got our book and a folded stiff piece of paper (what do you call those? I think I used to know...) to write our names on, so the instructor can learn them. We had 23 people in class. We each had to introduce ourselves, say what we did for a living and if we wanted to just learn Project Management skills, or actually take the test for PMP certification. Most planned on taking the test, although some have to get the lesser cert of CAPM (it requires far fewer hours of actual Project Management experience)

After a very interesting lecture, we were instructed to mingle and find three other classmates who had similar work backgrounds to form teams of four for the rest of the course.

I have in my team an older woman who works for GE as an IT PM, a gentlemen who just got his masters in computer science, but his background is in Manufacturing and so he can’t get work and a young woman who works in a data center as an Administrator, but wants to be a PM.

We exchanged email addresses, etc. Later on we were again instructed to form into our teams and pick a project to work on throughout the course. And, it wasn’t supposed to be a small project (like building a patio deck) but something big and long term.

Well, the lady from GE only works on small projects and the other two didn’t have any ideas, so they suggested using one that that I had already done and do it over, using the PMI methodology. So, we are going to add in the IT infrastructure to the upstairs build-out of Building 73 (again).

All in all, I was impressed with the instructor and my fellow classmate and, quite frankly, surprised at how much I actually already knew! Thanks, again, Jake for letting me know about this class.

The class ran late, so I didn’t get home until about 10:15 PM. I was hungry, but too tired to make anything so I ate three kosher dill spears. (Note to self: Hard boil some eggs for a little more protein-based snack on Thursdays.)

I was tired, but wired and so made the mistake of turning on the hockey game. It was played on the west coast and so it didn’t get over until after midnight. We lost (again by one damn point) and thus ended the season. But, the Red Wings made an amazing turnaround in the series (they were down 3-0, if you remember, but caught back up to 3-3) and they played good in the final game. So, while it was disappointing, we could still be proud!