Graduation!!!

I made it, I finally made it to the end. This past Friday I officially graduated from UMass with my MBA. Since I now have my Masters Degree, I would now like to be addressed as Master Sullivan!

Friday was a long, hot day. The commencement ceremony seemed to be quite unorganized, especially considering the only instructions that we graduates received was to show up between 12:30 and 1:00, west of the Mullins Center (the basketball arena where commencement was held). Below is a time line of the day...

12:15 - we showed up... yes we are overachievers and arrived early. We took a few pictures (see below), and promptly at 12:30 I headed over to the check-in area.

12:30 - checked in and received an instruction sheet which informed me where to line up because we would enter the arena "promptly" at 1:15 (which I though was curious because the processional was scheduled to start at 1:45, and commencement at 2:00. Meanwhile I hang out with classmates in the blistering heat glad that we are not the undergrads whose ceremony is outdoors and wondering whose brilliant idea it was to wear black robes...

1:15 - we promptly line up in the designated area as instructed on the sheet...

1:35 - wondering when this is really going to happen. We continue taking pictures with each other and stuff.

1:45 - suddenly the usher peoples are frantically trying to get us to line up. We are the last of the masters students to enter the arena. The commencement band has stopped playing, guess they ran out of sheet music and didn't/couldn't start over, we "march" into the room to no music...

2:00 - We are in and seated, and the thing actually starts relatively on time... hurray!

2:25 - I have read through the program like 15 times, I know all the doctoral theses titles by heart. When is this going to be done with. They are just barely starting to call up the masters students and I am at the end, and then after that they have to "hood" the doctoral students...

2:50 - We are getting closer to us. I, like the rest of my classmates, start cruising the Internet on our phones. One friend is answering emails for his job (he is one of five that has one, and already started).

~3:10 - my turn to walk, yeah! I don't remember anything about it, just concentrating on not tripping and falling.

3:11 - Whew! I made it all the way across the stage upright!

3:12 - Sudden realization that I still have to sit through all the doctoral students too!

3:20 - The first 6 doctoral student took forever, I am getting really hungry. The hooding ceremony seems to be a difficult thing to master, some of those students are having a hard time handing the hood to the "hooder" and then ducking to let the "hooder" put the hood on them. Fortunately, the hooder gets more proficient (i.e. sloppy) with each passing student.

3:45 - Finally we are done. The professors and doctoral students leave first in the recessional. The band plays a nice song for them.

3:50 - Now it is our turn to "march" out, then suddenly the band stops and the usher lady says just take off, nothing orderly or anything, we are all free to leave however we want. Curious. Then I realize, they never played Pomp and Circumstance, I feel somewhat cheated. Bummer.

3:55 - I am out and done, now to find the fam...

Okay, now since you were patient here are a selection of pictures from the day...

Hurry up and wait. Waiting behind the scenes with classmates, Emre, Andrew, and Greg.

This building was my second home for the past two years.

With the Minute Man!

Okay, one more...

So my last post was a video of people dancing in Belgium, it was a marketing promotion for a television show there. A friend sent me a link to this video of a marketing promotion done by T-Mobile in Liverpool's train station. Enjoy...

So the past several days I have been working heavily on my practicum project, the MBA equivalent of a masters thesis, and my project has proven to be quite... challenging. I won't bore you with the details, but it has been nice to have diversions such as these videos to occasionally break up the monotony and frustration I have been encountering while working on my project. Thankfully, it will all be done soon, though I still don't have a job...

Back to School

After nearly six full weeks of Christmas break, I finally started school back up on Tuesday. I have officially begun my final semester! However, as soon as school started back up, Mother Nature had a response in the form of a rather good sized snow storm that hit us with about six inches of snow, then topped it off with an afternoon, evening and night of freezing rain. The snow, I don't mind, but the freezing rain is wretched. It made me very happy to have a garage to park the car in so that the doors were not frozen shut this morning. 

Due to the snow storm, UMass campus was closed yesterday, and this morning. Classes will not resume until 11 a.m. Suzy and I have a friend who is tracking the school closures / delays on her blog. The current score is 3 school closures and 3 delays, while Church has had 1 cancelled and 2 delayed and shortened schedules. Yesterday, we decided to keep Suzy home from work as well to keep me company and so she did not have to drive through the storm. 

Suzy is only 10 days away from her due date. Once we get through the end of this week, we will both be ready for our little girl to arrive -- hopefully sooner rather than later. Suzy is getting larger, at least to me, even though most people comment on how small she looks. We will post a picture as soon as I can talk her into letting me take one.

A Good Week

This week has been a very good one for me. A few of the things I wrote about in the previous post but I will expound on them some more.

On Tuesday I had an interview with the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. I felt that the interview went really quite well. They told me that they would get back to me by next Monday. Well they got back sooner. On Wednesday afternoon they called to offer me a position as their summer marketing intern. I got off the phone with them with the biggest grin on my face. It felt so good to have an offer and know that I did not have to stress about that anymore. I called them this morning and officially accepted the offer, so we will be summering on the beautiful Gulf Coast of Florida. I start June 12 and finish up the first of August. But we may stay a bit longer and play around.

As I mentioned in the previous post I am on a team that has entered a business plan into two different business plan competitions (our company name is Pyrolitix Biofuels). The first is the Ignite Clean Energy Competition, which we found out we made it through to the semi-finals on Tuesday. The second is the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which we found out tonight that we are among the 50 of 232 that made it through to the semi-finals. I am very excited about this opportunity. I have already learned a lot and I am sure will learn a lot more in the next two months. The semi-final presentations for both competitions are in April, and the finals, should we make it, are in May.

Today, so Heavenly Father makes sure we don't get too happy in the blessings he is giving us, our car broke on Suzy as she drove to work. One of the idler pulleys for the belt disintegrated and so the power-steering went out and the cooling system as well. A similar thing had happened to me a few year ago. Fortunately Suzy was able to guide the car into a parking lot just off the freeway and walk the last mile or so to work. It just so happened that the parking lot she pulled into was right next to a Chevy car dealership (we drive a Chevy). I rode the bus over after class and took the car in. They were great and we were able to get the car back this evening. So even in the trial Heavenly Father showed His hand and made sure that we were taken care of.

The most ironic thing was that this morning before Suzy called with the bad news, I was thinking to myself, "things are going so good...too good, what kind of wrench is going to be thrown into life to test our faith." I am glad that in the end this wrench wasn't that bad.

I also feel guilty and have to admit that I wrote the last post during a class.

It's March!

We were excited that it was already March, with hopes that soon the crazy New England winter would soon be over. The sun even teased us on Saturday with sunshine and warmth. But we were sad to learn at Church on Sunday that March is perhaps the snowiest/wettest month of the year, and with that information our hopes came back down to earth. 

This week has been good. Yesterday I had an interview for a summer internship with the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in Sarasota, Florida. The interview went really well, and the internship is near the top of our list. First of which because the internship is paid, but mostly because it is in Sarasota! And that sounds perfectly wonderful right now. 

In other good news...I have been working with a team in a business plan competition, well two actually, one at MIT and the other based in Boston. My Bishop is a chemical engineering professor here at UMass, and has come up with some new clean energy technology. So one of the 2nd year students, one of my Bishop's PhD students and I have put together a business plan based on the technology and entered it into these two clean energy business competitions. We found out yesterday that we made the semi-finals in one, and we will find out tomorrow about the other one. I am pretty excited about the competition, it has been really interesting as I have worked on it, and we like our chances to win the whole thing.

Suzy is doing well. She is pretty busy working, and in her callings in the Relief Society and finding time for Seminary, too. Unfortunately, we have no pictures because we have been stuck inside all the time because of the bad weather. So someday we will venture outside and do something and take pictures so that our posts will be more interesting.

Busy Schedules

As I lay in bed last night, I began doing a few calculations in my head regarding my time, or lack thereof. Now life in general almost always seems busy, but since school has started things seem to have gotten worse, I feel like there is no time left for anything.

So as I lay in bed I did these quick calculations:

# of hours Monday thru Friday = 120

# of hours consumed by my classes = 20 hours a week (19 credit hours!)

# of hours supposed to be consumed by homework = 20 hours a week

# of hours for sleep (I really like 8 hours) = 40 hours a week

# of hours for my assistantship = 10 hours a week

# of hours spent on the bus or driving to work = 5-6 hours

# of hours for my internship at Historic Deerfield = 8 hours a week

When you add all those together I am left with about 15 or so hours a week for eating, exercising, scripture study, getting ready for work and for bed, and spending time with my wife. After doing these calculations I realized that the reason I felt like I had no time was because I really have no time. While I did not take the weekend into consideration, I did not count any Church activities, callings or home-teaching either.

So as for this week, surprise... we have been busy. On Monday we had the missionaries over for dinner. It is such a nice treat to have them over and the Spirit they bring, I missed that while living in Utah. On Tuesday we got to go vote in the Massachusetts primary, and it was fun because we know that our votes counted and made a difference. I went to the statewide breakdown for the primary and because we live in such a small town we could actually see that our votes where important.

We were both excited about the new addition to the First Presidency, President Uchtdorf will do wonderful things for the Church, as will President Monson.

Snow Day!

Today church was canceled because the roads were too icy and snowy to travel on. We were just recovering from a storm on Thursday where we got almost a foot of snow. Today we got another 5 or 6 inches. It also "snowed" freezing rain which I'm sure isn't helping the roads. Snow out here seems a lot different from Utah. It’s much icier and seems to coat the car with a layer of ice before the powder stuff. Also, the first time it snowed, we noticed that it initially stuck to the roads and not the grass. That seems very bizarre to me. I don't have any pictures, so maybe I'll get Casey to post some later. Casey comments that the snow is up to his knees behind our apartment. Remind me why we moved here?

Relief

Yesterday was a long trying day, but it is finally over, and with it concludes my first round of finals. I cannot express how happy I am to be finished with Accounting (for now) and Economics. Studying for those finals the past four days or so has been long and stressful, but now I am free until Monday when new classes begin.

Suzy and I decided since we have a free 3-day weekend, to go on a little trip. So in a few minutes we are leaving for Portland, Maine. We will be there until Saturday evening. We are very excited, there are some fun things to do up there. But most of all we can just relax and enjoy the New England fall, which by-the-way is absolutely breath-taking. We will post some photos and what we did when we return. Until then we hope that all y'all have a good weekend too.

Add 3 parts Danny DeVito and 1 part Vizzini...

Close your eyes and try to imagine this in your mind (finish reading this before you close your eyes though). Picture a man that looks and acts like Danny DeVito, now add in a little bit of the voice and mannerisms of Vizzini, the lead kidnapper. Now throw in the subject of accounting into the mix and you will get my accounting professor, who is the dopplerganger of Danny DeVito. He has been teaching accounting for 45 years, and has more energy at his age than I could ever dream of. Sitting through his class for 3 hours twice a week is quite the experience. I want to say that it is entertaining, and it certainly is, but it is more than that. We, my classmates and I, sit in the class in wonder and amazement at his energetic lectures.

It was while I was sitting through such a lecture last week when I looked around at my 34 classmates and was astounded at the number of coffee cups sitting before them. About 2/3 of the class cannot function at 9 am without a 12 oz coffee in hand. But more amazing still is that when we have our 15 minute break at 10:30, most run out to the get another cup. I am amazed at the dependence on coffee just to function normally, at 10:30 in the morning.

Now that I am done with that rant. This week has been quite nice. The weather here is perfect, nice warm days with cool nights. Last Sunday Suzy and I took a walk around town and looked at some of the old homes near our apartment. Most of the historic homes in the town have signs on them that tell you the year they were built, it seems that the town experienced a building boom around 1850, but the oldest home was built in 1756, and it is still standing and lived in. We also found this enormous tree, I mean huge...like maybe 8 ft in diameter, there was a plaque in front of it that said that it was standing when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Cool.

Yesterday Suzy and I went with a few of my classmates to help build a home for Habitat for Humanity. Suzy got a crappy job of sanding windows, while the rest of us put up scaffolding and nailed up siding and soffits of the two-story home. I went and helped Suzy for the last 2 1/2 hours or so because she had such a crappy job and had no one to talk to. I cannot say that it was really fun cause it was not, but it was nice to be able to give meaningful service to someone who was in need. The lady that the house is for was there working as well.

The pictures that I am including are of the homes in the area and other images from our walk last Sunday. First the house from 1756, second the huge tree (kinda blurry), and third a cool old farmhouse and it is all one house!

School Starts

I found a new high and am now addicted. On Friday we attended the 3 County Fair in Northampton. It was a typical county fair and we saw all the 4H animals and other crafty projects and jams and stuff that peoples won the Blue Ribbons for. Even met a guy with a pig down and the livestock pavilion that said he was gunna win him the Blue Ribbon :)

But seriously, we saw pig racing which was quite amusing to me. The highlight was, however, the DEMOLITION DERBY!!! This is my new addiction, it was so cool (if you couldn't tell it was my first). There were four heats ranging from 8 to 15 cars. The initial collisions were the best as some cars drove to the end then accelerated rapidly to smash into the others, in reverse (got to protect the engine). Pieces of car and bumpers were flying every which way, and by the end only one or two cars could even turn the tires. It was a blast. If you have not been to such an event, I highly recommend it, especially if you can sit with people with family participating

School began yesterday (Tuesday) but classes have not. I spent the last two days in orientation and team building activities with my classmates, and the real work begins in the morning, wahooo. If you don't here from me for the next few weeks it will be because I am drowning. Our first two semesters in the program are divided into terms, and they push you fast and furiously. It will surely be me doggy paddling my way around just trying to keep my head above the water for a while until I can get a hold of something.

We have done some other fun things this past week, but I choose not to comment on them at this time. That is a task that I will leave to the wonderful wife of mine. I hope all is well for you my friends and family.