Carmen's Story, Part 3: Sometimes I Studied... Sometimes
Hello Yarn Lovers,
Welcome to the third instalment of the series this week.
I am imagine that there are a lot towns across America similar in size and make-up to Eugene, OR. We had a population of just over 100,000 while I was growing up, so not a tiny village but not a big city. There were just over a dozen elementary, eight middle and four high schools. My graduating class had just over 350 students in it, not the biggest in the area but big enough.
I went to Gilham elementary school, a Jaguar was our mascot. I had some properly amazing teachers here, Mr. Leach the world's best P.E. teacher and Ms. Dear who taught 5th grade and was a terrifying woman with a reputation to boot but was actually really lovely, in fact we are now Facebook friends. I remember enjoying this time mostly. I got told off a bit for talking too much and being too loud but otherwise I was a very good little student. I didn't LOVE school but I didn't hate it either, I found everything easy enough. Except reading, I wasn't a huge fan of reading until much later, I'm a really slow reader and that didn't align with constant book report writing.
I wasn't the greatest student ever but I got quite good grades throughout school. I was in the upper level classes for most everything and I enjoyed every subject except history, I was horrible with dates and facts. I was and still am a world class procrastinator and didn't like to study much at all. This drove my Mom absolutely nuts of course, sorry Mom.
Next up was Cal Young middle school and then on to Sheldon High School to become a member of the Fighting Irish. My high school had a couple of different programs available and I enrolled in the International High School which is based on International Baccalaureate standards. It was a smaller program and we had maybe 60 kids in the program, about a third of which were part of a Spanish immersion program. It was a great program for the most part, lots of project based work and more similar to the type of work and studying I'd do at college later. It was sometimes a slightly quirky program but it was full of teachers who really, really cared, except the one that threw markers at us when he decided we weren't paying enough attention, he wasn't so great.
I had an amazing group of friends - well actually many amazing groups of friends, I was the kid that was friends with nearly everyone. Except the super popular cool kids, I didn't hang with them much. I was an athlete so I hung with the jocks, I participated in most theater productions until high school, I took art classes and was the year book photo editor junior and senior year. I enjoyed all the things and all the people.
My plan was to become a journalist. As much as I didn't like reading very much, I really liked to write and I think I liked the idea of being able to tell people's stories. I also loved the idea of getting to the truth of something, to the core of story. Barbara Walters was my hero at the time. Of the universities that recruited me for volleyball one did have a journalism program and the other didn't. But I chose the University of California Irvine because who wouldn't want to go to Southern California and live near the beach? I ended up studying English, that was the closest they had to journalism.
I had absolutely no clue what I was getting myself into with college. Neither of my parents had gone and we were all flying blind a bit. I remember I was supposed to register for the first semester classes and I was in the process of driving down to Irvine with my cousin who was visiting form Germany. We were staying in a hotel for the night and I had to get on the phone to register. I had this paper catalogue of courses and codes and I just randomly picked some classes I thought sounded good. A few weeks later I had a meeting with a guidance counsellor on campus who was quite confused by my choices as apparently I had signed-up for some upper level courses I shouldn't have been able to and also, why wasn't I following what I had been told during the orientation weekend. "What orientation weekend?" was my question. It was a rocky start to say the least.
It's remarkable I graduated really, again I wasn't a bad student but I was a massive procrastinator. One long weekend my friend and I drove up to San Francisco as that's where home was for her. It's about six hours if you don't hit traffic through L.A. and there is always traffic through L.A. We had planned to head back on Sunday evening because I had a 9am class on Monday where a paper was due. Said paper was on Troilus and Creyside and I had sort of read the book and had intended to write the paper over the weekend. Well, we got a bit sidetracked and didn't leave San Francisco until 1 or 2 am. I hadn't written a word yet. We drove straight to campus and I ran to the computer lab and wrote a 5 page essay in less than an hour and turned it in. It was the best grade I received that semester. I will never learn. Never.
There was many a college party too and yes, we had those classic red plastic cups you see in the movies. There were kegs and I was a margarita making specialist. We all lived by the beach during the year as vacation homes were rented to students from Sept-June and we took advantage of our proximity to the water. It was a charmed place to get to live and go to school, that's for sure.
I moved to Germany at the end of 2004 (I'll talk about that more later) and one of the things about working in Germany is that they want a certificate for everything. And I had thought about graduate school before but it wasn't until I was well and truly working and feeling like I wasn't quite getting where I wanted that I started looking into business schools. I found a program in Frankfurt at Goethe Business School that was a partnership with Duke University in the states. I knew I wanted a US style program, one based on projects and team work not writing a thesis of some sort.
I didn't get accepted the first year I applied but I did the second year. It was an executive MBA program, meaning that everyone in the program was working full time, so this was the side activity. My class had 34 students in it, I was the second youngest and we ranged in age from 28 - 52. Plenty of consultant types as you would expect and 11 women in the program. While it was an international bunch most of us lived in Germany. We had residencies in Shanghai, Hyderabad, Frankfurt and Raleigh, North Carolina. I thoroughly enjoyed the program. I mean it was tough, it was an incredible amount of work on top of a full time job and it was competitive and there was a character or two who liked to act like they knew more than anyone else but that always seem to be the case doesn't it?
It was an 18 month program packed with courses on everything from accounting, mergers & acquisitions, emerging markets, negotiation to entrepreneurship and leadership. We had a final group project in which we presented a full business plan to a panel of investors and our teams were formed based on our business pitches. I ended up with a wonderful team that bought into my idea. This was probably my favorite part of the program and is something that gave me a lot of confidence moving forward.
Let me tell you, at least a dozen times each year I wish there had been a 'basic graphic design' or 'html programming' class as part of the program. Either of those would have been a lot more useful to me than Mergers & Acquisitions. I graduated in 2011 - e-commerce was a thing but it was still fairly nascent in Germany, there was no Instagram, heck iPads had just come on the market, no one was online in the same way then that they are now. So yeah, the marketing class would look a lot different now too.
I don't think I've quite made back the money the program cost me but it gave me the tools to open A Yarn Story and for that I am very grateful.
Carmen's Story
Part 1: Let's Start at the Beginning
Part 2: You're Tall - You Should Play Sports