As I have mentioned earlier, my MBA coursework has been grabbing all the attention that would otherwise be reserved for blogging. In a sense, the weekly Blackboard discussion boards that we do for our classes is a form of blogging, just not readable by the general public. I probably could re-post some of my thoughts from the Ethics discussion, but it is like listening to one side of a phone conversation -you miss the whole back and forth that defines the dialogue.
This term is somewhat different in that we are having a dialogue not only with our fellow classmates from work, but also with classmates we haven't met from the main campus. It was interesting to imagine what these other students were like based on their writing styles and thought processes. However, on Saturday the two classes came together for an ethics panel in Riverside, sponsored by the University. Although we were not introduced to the others, I observed some familiar names on the name tags. There, just two tables over, were a collection of a half-dozen twenty-something males - bright and shiny MBA students.
I shouldn't have been surprised that the MBA students from the main campus were youngsters, fresh off their undergraduate programs, but I wonder if they were surprised that most of their off site counterparts were more than twice their ages. Perhaps they even felt an air of superiority over their elder classmates. I remember the cockiness of my own youth -the feeling that I and my companions had the world by the tail. We just knew that we were that much smarter than "older ones" who either had never learned what we just did or who had forgotten it many years before. Yet with age comes experience and with experience,wisdom. It is a wisdom gained not by textbooks but by living life. That life has caused me to stop form time to time and reflect upon how I got here. Hopefully, my young classmates will begin to do so as well.
