And the Rest are Communists

After spending the weekend with an old friend who had recently left Portland to pursue her masters in New York City, I came down with a bad case of grad school jealousy. As she told me about her inspiring peers and professors, her fabulous classes, and her campus job offering tuition remission, my resolve to suffer my way through business school for the next two years started to ebb away. What if, in my compulsion to martyr myself on behalf of the nonprofit industry, I had sold myself incredibly short? What if there was a program out there with people who were passionate about the same things as I am who I could learn from and study alongside? Panicked, I desperately began searching the internet for news of a program that was well ranked and offered courses in nonprofit finance and management.

One of the first schools to pop up was Brandeis. I had thought about attending Brandeis for a brief time when I was considering undergraduate colleges, but had been turned off by its dismal location and seemingly East Coast attitude. Now here I was, looking at its MBA in Nonprofit Management, reading its claim to "create agents of social change" and trying to imagine driving across the country with two screaming cats in tow. Some part of me reminds myself not to base my entire future on the fear of moving my cats, while another part of me begs not to have to leave Portland myself.

My scheming is cut short by the fact that I have to go to class. When I arrive at my social responsibility class, I look around, noticing that my peers' faces are finally beginning to crystallize and I am able to put names to 4 or 5 of them. I scrutinize them, thinking, "Who would be in my classes at Brandeis? At Yale? Would there be people like you?" I reflect on the little I know of these people so far. At least one of them works for a nonprofit. The girl who seemed so callous on the first night, asking why people didn't move out of nursing homes if the care was so bad, asks tonight "What is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?' A small part of me sneers at her naivety, though after our professor explains, I realize I didn't really know either.

Another student who I had written off the first night begins to talk about her experience on a basketball team, quitting because of the negative team energy and because she was getting shoved into lockers. My heart softens towards her. Another student brings up the Madoff scandal and says that the reason it made her so mad was because he ripped off so many non profits. My professor admits that it made him mad because it ripped off Sandy Koufax, his childhood hero. I share a smile with a boy wearing a Dodgers sweatshirt, as I remember my own brother and father idolizing Sandy Koufax as well.

In class tonight, we are discussing the "Parable of the Sadhu," an ethics case so elementary that I hardly want to engage in the discussion. We have read about how a team of privileged American mountaineers found a dying holy man atop a mountain they are climbing in Nepal, and we are supposed to discuss what we would have done in their place. Would we have stopped climbing to rescue the man, in effect losing a climbing opportunity of a lifetime? Or would we have forged ahead, doing the bare minimum of caring for him before returning to our quest, as did the men in the story.

Identifying as an ethical person, for me the answer is clear. I roll my eyes as my peers iterate various obvious perspectives, and it is some time before I finally ask myself if the answer is so obvious. The issue really in question is about "diffusion of responsibility." Who will act when there is no clear leader appointed? Who will take responsibility when others could just as easily step up? What if the example was not about rock climbing, but about something I cared about and had worked hard for? Would I stop in my tracks, undoing months of hard work, to help with something that wasn't my problem? When put that way, I realize the answer is less clear.

I remember when I first started working at In Other Words we had just received a grant from a prominent local foundation and all the people who had worked hard for months outlining the project and drafting the proposal had just left. The work of carrying out the project and measuring its success fell to no one. As a new manager, I knew that something had to be done about it, but already overwhelmed with a huge amount of work and knowing little about grants, I did nothing. No one else did anything about it. The grant period ended and we had no project, no evaluation, and no report. We had effectively destroyed our relationship with the local foundation. My inaction had hurt the organization I cared so much about, and even though it was not "my responsibility," I could have taken care of it.

"What fixes the problem of diffusion of responsibility?" my professor prompts us. "Clearly outlining roles and responsibilities," one student offers. Communication. Training. Education. Business school, I wonder? Isn't that why I am here? After all of the situations I could have handled better, but lacked the skills or knowledge needed, I finally checked myself into graduate school with the intention of learning what I could to become a better leader. I reflect on my crisis of only a few hours ago, and think that maybe where I'm at right now is exactly where I need to be. I have already learned from the students who I so quickly rejected and in the class that I deigned to be a part of. Earlier in the week, to demonstrate a probability problem, my statistics professor had used the proportion of democrats to other political parties in Portland. "All the rest are communists anyway," he quipped. That's right, I realize, even in business school, this is still Portland and under it all, we at least share that.

I am Stringer Bell

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.

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:

1. We are already supposed to know all this stuff
2. Everyone else knows it already
3. And I have no clue what any of it means?

Looking around me at my peers, I have an overwhelming desire to go back in time and complete my B.A. in something practical, something that would help me right now. Something like finance. Or marketing. Several of the students in my program seem to have graduated with Bachelors in related topics such as these, and are now entirely comfortable with the business terminology we are assumed to understand. For a minute I am lost in wistfulness, realizing how far along I would be if I had majored in accounting, how easy it would be to get a job, and how easy business school would be now.

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.

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.

They actually let me in

At least they knew what they were getting into when the University of Portland accepted me into their program. Excerpted from my letter of intent:

"After spending the last three years of my life running a small non-profit organization, and struggling every day to keep it afloat, I realized that it did not have to be this way. Looking around me at our sister organizations and meeting up with fellow over-worked staff people, overcommitted board members, and under-appreciated volunteers, I finally came to the understanding that the non-profit sector, in its gradual emergence over the last hundred years, has come to possess many flaws. Included in these flaws (though not limited to) are the sector’s relative identity crisis compared to the long-institutionalized private and public sectors, the lack of management skills possessed by many executive employees, and the overall dysfunction of a structure that emerged out of scarce resources and a desire to promote social change. When I left my job as Manager/Co-Director of In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources, it was with the firm desire to refine my management skills and to gain a proficient understanding of finance, accounting, and marketing; skill sets that are lacking in so many of the organizations I have worked with.

Like many others, I came to non-profit work out of a desire to spend my working time and energy making a positive impact on the world through direct service, advocacy, and/or by providing resources to the underserved. After several years in the sector trying on multiple hats (manager, board member, volunteer) I realized that the role I enjoy as well as what I am best suited for is management, which enables me to support those who provide direct service by making sure that the organization is well run and fiscally sound. As many non-profits are essentially businesses that provide a service instead of a product, it is critical to the future health of the sector that we learn to run our organizations well and efficiently, this being the impetus that has led me to business school."

Starting Out

This is my first blog. I have always been a little slow when it comes to new technological gadgets (still no ipod) and blogging has been no different. I probably haven't even read your blog (jmo and mom aside), so if you are reading this, I appreciate your interest and understanding.

I decided to start a blog to chronicle my path, stories, and experiences in business school. What better way, I thought, of assuaging my impending sense of madness, then by publishing my thoughts on the world wide web?

My decision to attend business school has been met with surprise, disbelief, excitement, and anxiety by both myself and my community. Those who know me well know that this will be, at best a challenge, and at worst a nightmare. As a radical leaning, anti-capitalistic, queer feminist, I imagine that I will soon be in very foreign waters. I decided to apply to business school in an attempt to gain practical managerial and financial skills that seem to be desperately lacking in my beloved, Portland-based nonprofit community. The fact that I decided to pursue this route at no other than Portland's private Catholic University only adds to my sense of forthcoming alienation.

I intend to use this forum to chronicle my experiences in class discussions and lectures, lessons learned, conversations had, and general opinions of the world based on my increasing proximity to our nation's prestigious Private Sector. Please check in as often as you like and feel free to leave comments or start a discussion.

-Rebecca