I Love My Job

I love my job. I mostly do, anyway. The people are great, most of the time. The job itself is great, most of the time. I’m just happy today so here’s how I love my job. Let’s start with I’m in Marketing, which I found I love very recently. I’m also studying Marketing, which I will love if my grade in a particular class changes to an A. The Marketing class I’m taking this semester is great but the teacher’s so so. Let’s just say she’s very tough. First female professor I’ve ever had in grad school but she’s so so tough. Really, unnecessarily tough. Her syllabus is like 6 pages (both sides, so it’s really 12) thick, full of rules (by now, I’m sure students at this level know without a question that plagiarism is against the rules). She maintains that an 89.9 is a B. Whatever. That should be an A. There is no extra credit in this class. So, if you do all the homework, do everything you’re supposed to do, don’t miss 1 day of class, and get 89.9, she won’t round it to a 90 to give you an A. Then, the school’s going towards the A-, A+, A, system (sorry, don’t know the term for it) and professors can at their discretion use this system or not. None of my other professors have instituted it. She has. Lastly, we have no breaks for two and a half hours. Check this out, we stayed the whole time the first day of class. Who does that? The whole two and a half hour period. One of my current professors, who I really like says that he thinks that anyone who makes you stay the whole time on the first day has psychological issues. He said that before I ever took this lady and I laughed not knowing what I was about to get into.

How did this post change from me loving my job to not liking my prof (she’s a great person, I’m sure, but her teaching style’s not). Anyhoo, just to continue, her mid-term was HARD. As in H-A-R-D. At the end of the exam, she had several copies of answers to the exam so not only do you deal with taking a tough exam, you know how badly you did before you leave the exam hall. Gee, thanks. One other thing that irks me is how she calls people out. Not the regular calling out of people to answer questions but calling them out in a way that is a little unnerving. So, we post some of our homework (which we have every week – grad school- not high school, remember?) online. Sometimes, she’ll randomly pull people’s homework on the huge screen in front of the class and ask people to explain what they did. How about, I did my homework 2 hours before class so it should be between you and me? Man, it is an uncomfortable class when she does that. One, the subject matter is new and open to the individual’s interpretation. This homework is not based on what you did in the previous class but what you’s about to do in the next class. Second, I just don’t plain like it (unless of course I know that I did a great job, which I can’t because it’s not a 1+1=2 kind of scenario. Everybody does things differently).

Let me just say that at the beginning of the semester, something in my mind told me NOT to take this class. Not her, because I had no idea who she was, but the class itself. My intuition told me that this area of marketing would be HARD and that’s true; that I may not have time for all the work it requires. Something definitely said “Don’t do it” but I did anyways. I am taking this class because I think it’s a great choice career-wise. It is also very interesting and has loads of practical applications in my line of work. I work very closely with our MR partners. However, it is a lot of work, requires Statistics which I couldn’t remember what that was when I signed up for the class. I hope at the end of the semester, I won’t say to myself, “I should have listened to myself and taken an ‘Easy A’ but meaningless class”.

Okay, now that I’ve said all that, I don’t remember why I started a post about loving my job. In not so many words, these are the reasons why I love my job: our core values as a company, the people, the tough women I work for, the work itself (projects that are enlightening, the opportunity to work with so many people from diverse backgrounds – we’re having a conference call with SA next week and yours truly is putting that together), the fact that what I do is now meaningful (meaning that a few years ago, it wasn’t as meaningful), the flexibility, the amount of time off (if only I used it more and for more exciting stuff than oral surgery). Because it is not all gravy all of the time, one of the things I don’t quite like is the fact that we have TONS of meetings. Every day, including over lunch. Fridays included! Haba, isn’t Friday a chill day for most? There is probably more to my love list but that enthusiastically happy feeling that I had when I started has almost left me after talking about my professor’s style of teaching. Very high school, in my opinion. My tank just went from full to flashing red talking about her. I’ll get it back soon once I start working on an awesome project that Bob started me off with yesterday.