The Week After

Before I forget to mention it, for about half the time I was in Belgium, I wondered what the hell I was doing, and how I was accepted given the quality of my cohort.  I don't really know what almost any of the food on any of the menus is, I don't drink, and I don't have the money in the bank I think most of the rest of the cohort does, so it's an interesting experience.  I don't think I'll be unable to catch up and prioritize/budget to make things work out, but it feels incredibly uphill, and I know I spent one entire day while I was there contemplating if I'd really, really, really made the wrong decision.

Unfortunately for depression, I've already dropped an insane amount of money, so trudging on is what's going to happen.  I'm sure more of this will come, but glad I hard committed all that funding before I went out, or there's a high likelihood I'd have been intimiated enough to reconsider:"Well, it can always be done later", except there is no later, kind of scenario.

I've been back in South Carolina for a week now and am finally feeling a bit recharged.  Going from work -> travel -> class -> travel -> work without a break ended up being a bit more exhausting than I was expecting (but good exhausting!).

The final days of my first trip to Antwerp were basically filled with methodology instruction and really forcing us to think about the PhD in the proper perspective.  There was a lot of "If you do this, it will lead to failure" and "As executives, you think you can do X to get more out of a day, but don't do that, it'll fail".  Overall, the message of "It's a marathon, not a sprint" was pretty resounding, and hit deeper than just a few words through all three professors giving examples showcasing why it's more than words.

It took me about 30 minutes before I was confident I had the correct train home, I ended up just following a German lady who didn't seem to know English (but had baggage).  I went for the "Hold out your arms and make airplane sounds" as a last resort and she nodded worriedly, as makes sense when you have a weird American playing airplane, but I did make it to the airport.  They don't check tickets until the train starts, so that was a bit strange.

When I got back I tried to half-heartedly read the text book, but a lot of what we have in the opening chapters was better illustrated by the on-site, so I'm tabling the textbook for now.

For reference, my books are:
Business Research Methods, Fourth Edition, Alan Bryman and Emma Bell
Management and Organization Theory, Jeffrey A. Miles

The second book actually looks very solid, so I'm planning to give that thing a read this week and hopefully get through 5 or so articles.  I figure if I've got 5 articles worth of reading + some of the book I'm in a good spot to get value out of my coaching session on Friday.

The plan from there is to download a bunch of articles for my flight to San Francisco on Sunday and hopefully get some research done while I'm traveling.

I've also added tags so that I'll be able to easily search for reviews on literature that I'll need to reference later, so hopefully that works out well.  Time will tell!