As of tonight, I am officially in business school. Though my accounting and statistics classes from earlier in the week will be equally challenging and thought-provoking, at those meetings I still felt relatively normal. Tonight, I am Stringer Bell. For those not familiar with The Wire’s infamous character, this high end drug lord attends college economics classes by night, and by day explains the principle of elasticity in the marketplace to youth who sell his drugs. Like Stringer, I am a mole—gleaning knowledge from a foreign world to translate into a language spoken by my community. Oh, the distance.
The class I am in tonight is “Social Responsibility of Corporations,” and is one of a required two course series that teach “values management.” To start off the class, my teacher prompts us, “What is the purpose of a corporation?” After scribbling quietly in our notebooks for a few minutes, we watch a televised interview with a prominent businessman, and then our discussion begins. We return repeatedly to a few themes: serving stakeholders, producing profits, and corporate accountability. In light of the current economy, one student remarks, “Who wants to be accountable now, anyway?”
We talk about accountability. Is the corporation accountable, or its leaders? Why should the corporation be responsible for fixing social problems? What if it created those problems? My professor quips, “People who do the right thing are saints. The rest of us… are more or less human.” Our chat continues. In our discussion of poor management practices of a string of for-profit nursing homes, one student queries, ‘If the service is so bad, why don’t they just move?”
The insensitivity and ignorance in the room make my head spin. Did my professor actually just refer to every person in his examples with male pronouns? Does that really still happen? I lazily try to imagine the best intervention. Do I innocently ask him if all people participating in business are men? Do I make all of my remarks about women? Talk to him after class? Email him my complaints? What about all the students who don’t seem to mind the damage wreaked on our society and planet by reckless corporations? What do I do about that? I decide to wait. Survey my surroundings, assess the stakes, and identify any potential allies.
When class is over I check my phone and see that I have been invited to a concert. I weigh the pros and cons of going out after such a late class, though something propels me to go. Within twenty minutes I am at the Alberta Street Pub, seated between friends, surrounded by my community, and watching, listening, and singing along to the songs of Coyote Grace, a beloved queer band. Not knowing exactly what had driven me here tonight, I breath in the smells and sounds of this familiar place, and realize that this is what will keep me sane.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
On Statistics and Business
Last night I had my first statistics class--ever. Growing up in a house with two professional statisticians, the words "statistical reasoning," "probability," and "measurement" were not entirely foreign to my ears, though until last night I had no idea how little I actually knew about what statistics is. Practical, actually, and perhaps even immediately useful. As we talked about "descriptive statistics" and "inferential statistics," playing around with pivot charts that neatly arranged and measured an entire data set into a smart little chart, I realized that this tool may be exactly what I need to solve an ongoing problem of sorting and displaying data on crisis calls at my part time job.
To demonstrate these topics, my professor, a sprightly grey-haired man who is clearly overwhelmed with his excitement of sharing his knowledge of statistics with us, projects a data set on the screen for us to analyze together. The data in question describes the performance of hundreds of mutual funds over a period of five years. We look first at the data in tabular form, then as a class we are walked through the steps of turning this data set into a histogram, with only a few swift moves in Microsoft Excel.
On the computer screen in front of me, I am confronted with an image that is supposedly "describing" the data to me. The "y-axis" clearly represents the frequency (how often a certain value occurred) but the "x-axis" puzzles me. It is labeled something like "maximum class values" and shows numbers ranging from -5 to 5. Hating to be left in the dark for a moment, I raise my hand and ask the professor to explain the meaning of the x-axis. He launches into a discussion of "bins" and grouping entries so that that not every item is displayed, but instead a group of close values, spaced at regular intervals. I realize quickly that it is not the statistical concept that is throwing me, but instead the content of the business example. What in the hell does the "performance of mutual funds" mean anyway?
Judging from the data at hand, it seems that the business world has come up with some sort of point system for describing the "performance" of these funds. From my brief foray into the business world to date, I have already gleaned that "mutual funds" refers to a kind of investment where a person invests their money into a group of stocks instead of just one, and then someone manages those investments, making sure to move them if a certain stock starts losing money. This is supposedly a safer way to play the stock market. But what are these performance points based on? And more importantly, why does it seem that:
As I walk out of the classroom and head home for the night, my head is still spinning around the endless number of things that could have been. I think back to my undergraduate career--pursuing a bachelor's in Women's Studies at small, Quaker, Earlham College. It was at Earlham, in those classes, that I truly began to question the ways of the world, and envision alternate systems that could be in place. It was at Earlham, that I stayed up with peers, talking late into the night about creating a world that would be just and fair and honest. In these discussions we referenced the feminist activists and academics we studied, along with radical scholars and critical thinkers we learned about in sociology, philosophy, and our other liberal arts classes.
Those visions and criticisms that I developed at Earlham College, in my Women's Studies classes and in the radical community I was a part of, are what started me on my path of working to make a better world. Along this path I found my way to Portland, to In Other Words, and now, finally to business school, always challenging myself to stay true to my vision of working towards something better. Remembering all this, I decide that I am okay with where I am at, and wonder, who in the world I would be, if I had taken any other path.
To demonstrate these topics, my professor, a sprightly grey-haired man who is clearly overwhelmed with his excitement of sharing his knowledge of statistics with us, projects a data set on the screen for us to analyze together. The data in question describes the performance of hundreds of mutual funds over a period of five years. We look first at the data in tabular form, then as a class we are walked through the steps of turning this data set into a histogram, with only a few swift moves in Microsoft Excel.
On the computer screen in front of me, I am confronted with an image that is supposedly "describing" the data to me. The "y-axis" clearly represents the frequency (how often a certain value occurred) but the "x-axis" puzzles me. It is labeled something like "maximum class values" and shows numbers ranging from -5 to 5. Hating to be left in the dark for a moment, I raise my hand and ask the professor to explain the meaning of the x-axis. He launches into a discussion of "bins" and grouping entries so that that not every item is displayed, but instead a group of close values, spaced at regular intervals. I realize quickly that it is not the statistical concept that is throwing me, but instead the content of the business example. What in the hell does the "performance of mutual funds" mean anyway?
Judging from the data at hand, it seems that the business world has come up with some sort of point system for describing the "performance" of these funds. From my brief foray into the business world to date, I have already gleaned that "mutual funds" refers to a kind of investment where a person invests their money into a group of stocks instead of just one, and then someone manages those investments, making sure to move them if a certain stock starts losing money. This is supposedly a safer way to play the stock market. But what are these performance points based on? And more importantly, why does it seem that:
- We are already supposed to know all this stuff
- Everyone else knows it already
- And I have no clue what any of it means?
As I walk out of the classroom and head home for the night, my head is still spinning around the endless number of things that could have been. I think back to my undergraduate career--pursuing a bachelor's in Women's Studies at small, Quaker, Earlham College. It was at Earlham, in those classes, that I truly began to question the ways of the world, and envision alternate systems that could be in place. It was at Earlham, that I stayed up with peers, talking late into the night about creating a world that would be just and fair and honest. In these discussions we referenced the feminist activists and academics we studied, along with radical scholars and critical thinkers we learned about in sociology, philosophy, and our other liberal arts classes.
Those visions and criticisms that I developed at Earlham College, in my Women's Studies classes and in the radical community I was a part of, are what started me on my path of working to make a better world. Along this path I found my way to Portland, to In Other Words, and now, finally to business school, always challenging myself to stay true to my vision of working towards something better. Remembering all this, I decide that I am okay with where I am at, and wonder, who in the world I would be, if I had taken any other path.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Notes from my first day of school
My first class was Accounting. I have to admit, I was rather excited for this class, as I have been studying nonprofit finance and accounting practices for some time now, both for my nonprofit management classes at PSU and also for my part time job as a bookkeeper with a nonprofit crisis line. Walking into the room I scanned for faces, bodies, or attire that might look slightly like mine. Nothing. A sea of white, male faces, mostly late 20s to early 40s in age. I notice one girl sitting in the row in front of me whose athletic attire and casual ponytail make me think she might be gay. A few minutes later we learn that she is an undergrad, and in the wrong class. She leaves.
The professor, a lively 40s something woman with curly hair, walks in and begins to introduce the class. She explains that, judging from the information we all emailed to her about ourselves, within our class there is a huge range of background experience, previous knowledge, and interest areas. This will be a difficult class to teach, she tells us, and promises to do her best keeping us all interested and up to speed. She says nothing about nonprofits being one of the interest areas she will cater to (even after my email to her, telling her about my interest and experience in the nonprofit sector).
She launches into the subject matter. "What is a balance sheet? A cash flow statement?", she quizzes us. Asking us to yell out any other names of financial statements we know, I add "A Statement of Activities." A Statement of Activities, I learned in my nonprofit classes at PSU as well as from my independent study of nonprofit accounting, is what the nonprofit sector most commonly calls its first and foremost financial statement: the profit and loss statement. "Um, I don't know about that one," my professor states. My heart sinks.
After reconciling myself to the fact that I am about to learn a lot about stocks and bonds and shareholders equity, and very little about anything nonprofit related, I join my small group for an in class activity. We are supposed to read a short word problem, solving it by setting up a rudimentary balance sheet with our pencils and paper. After explaining why depreciation is a contra asset account and not a liability, I lead my small team through the steps of our assignment. Business school or not, it seems, somethings never change.
The professor, a lively 40s something woman with curly hair, walks in and begins to introduce the class. She explains that, judging from the information we all emailed to her about ourselves, within our class there is a huge range of background experience, previous knowledge, and interest areas. This will be a difficult class to teach, she tells us, and promises to do her best keeping us all interested and up to speed. She says nothing about nonprofits being one of the interest areas she will cater to (even after my email to her, telling her about my interest and experience in the nonprofit sector).
She launches into the subject matter. "What is a balance sheet? A cash flow statement?", she quizzes us. Asking us to yell out any other names of financial statements we know, I add "A Statement of Activities." A Statement of Activities, I learned in my nonprofit classes at PSU as well as from my independent study of nonprofit accounting, is what the nonprofit sector most commonly calls its first and foremost financial statement: the profit and loss statement. "Um, I don't know about that one," my professor states. My heart sinks.
After reconciling myself to the fact that I am about to learn a lot about stocks and bonds and shareholders equity, and very little about anything nonprofit related, I join my small group for an in class activity. We are supposed to read a short word problem, solving it by setting up a rudimentary balance sheet with our pencils and paper. After explaining why depreciation is a contra asset account and not a liability, I lead my small team through the steps of our assignment. Business school or not, it seems, somethings never change.
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