Marketing Communications

The exam is this afternoon (1-3). As is obvious by the fact that I’m currently blogging and not frantically revising, the content should be fairly predictable and (hopefully) straight-forward. Famous last words of course, so I may well stagger out of the Sports Hall at 3pm with my brain leaking out of my ears wishing I’d taken it all a little more seriously. Time will tell.

The aftermath…

of a particularly intensive revision session.

Strategic Management exam

By 4 o’clock this afternoon it was all over, and not before time. I’d expected that it was going to be hard work, but then I’d also figured that I’d done a bundle of work in the last few weeks and was pretty much up to speed on the core topics, with a reasonable coverage of the rest. So although I didn’t feel like it was going to be a walk in the park, I didn’t expect to crawl out of the exam room a gibbering wreck.

Boy, was I wrong.

Actually, to be fair to examiner and examinee, the two-from-six essay section could have been a lot worse. In an ideal world the questions would have been exactly what I was looking for, but in the circumstances they weren’t too far off. So because I did one of the essay question first and then got to the multichoice, I thought that I was going OK - at least at first.

Multi-guess would have been nearer the mark. The sample paper - and the online version from the Hill and Jones website - were way off the mark in terms of the standard of questions. I reckon that I guessed - as in didn’t have a bloody clue - on about 25%. Another 25% I was down to a choice of two or three options, another quarter I’m reasonably sure that the answer was the right one, and the rest should be correct. But my brains were about leaking from my ears by the time the section was finished, and it didn’t leave me in a particularly good mood for completing the second and final essay. The detail in the questions was unbelievable - never mind read Hill and Jones, I think you would have needed to memorise the bloody thing in order to be in with a shout.

Which is all a bit of a pain, really. The exam is marked with each of the sections having equal weighting on the average - so if I’ve done as well as I figure on the written questions and screwed up the MCQ, that will drag the mark down substantially. This is one that I would really have liked to get a high mark on - not least because I’m one 70+ mark away from a distinction, but also just because of the sheer volume of work that I’ve out in over the last few weeks.

The Brotherton organ

The large round thing in the middle that I was talking blogging about.

Blogging from the Brotherton…

…as a bit of light relief from strategic intent.

This is a room that was definitely designed by someone who had seen the reading room at the British Library - round, booklined, pillared and with the maddest art deco chandlier that’s completely wasted on the room because noone ever looks up at it. The whole room is a strange combination of green marble and a parqeut floor that’s been polished fanatically by men in brown coats for the last sixty years. And the architecture provides the echo - dropping a pencil the other side of the room causes everyone to stop and look up, which means that there’s very little talking going on - just a background hum of rustling papers and scraping chairs. (And my keyboard rattling.)

In the middle there’s a huge round desk about fifteen feet in diameter where the catalogue computers live - from the ground floor it’s quite hard to work out what it is, but from above you suddenly realise there’s a grating across the top - presumably it’s some kind of a ventilation system, but it also looks to me as if it’s where the mad organist rises up from. Either that or a huge library version of the control panel of the Tardis.

There’s also a smell about the place - it’s a strange mixture of old paper and floor polish, enhanced by the way that the air is so dry. It’s a quintesentially “library” smell - somehow as soon as you get a lungful you know that you’re in a world of dry academic literacy. It’s completely different from the other library on campus - that’s a seventies monstrosity built almost entirely out of grey concrete and formica, enhanced by 30 years-worth of discarded chewing gum embedded into the carpet.

Because of the way the shelving is distributed, whenever I’m in here I’m usually downstairs in the west building - to reach it you have to go to the front of the library, through the main dome section, out through a corridor into the west building, through the shelving area , down three flights of stairs and into the bowels of the building. The first time I saw the place I half-expected to find plans for a bypass stored in a filing cabinet with a sign saying “Beware of the leopard”. Walking down there is like stepping into a sensory deprivation tank - there’s very little outside light filtering down, so you’re completely cut off from the outside world. You can imagine small, grey wrinkled creatures that scuttle from shelf to shelf lining up the spines.

Tipping point

The tipping point, and how it works with blogs.

First mover advantage in the blogosphere…

Got the Boots project

Which means I get to spend the summer (or at least part of it) in sunny Nottingham. Infinitely better than the alternative, which was spending a summer working on a desk project in Leeds.

ID cards

Had a mad dash up to the uni library earlier on today in order to get the DVDs back before I started racking up the ursurious fines that get levied if you’re so much as a nanosecond late. Which meant that I had to dig out my student card, which for those not in the know about the bizarre rituals that pass for administration at Leeds Uni, is approximately the size of a small football field. Well, I exaggerate slightly - but it’s obviously been scientifically designed to be too big to fit in any wallet that holds ordinary credit cards, with the results that it sticks out of my wallet at both ends and gets bashed and crumpled and cracked around the corners. Not to mention the holes that it’s wearing in my pockets. Compare and contrast with Leeds Met, who have a dinky little credit-card sized number with a digital photo and signature embossed on the back. Having said that, I should of course be thankful that Leeds have got as far as the concept of lamination - I’m sure we’d still be carrying hand-illuminated parchment scrolls around if the administration powers-that-be had their way…

Moblogging (almost)

Mobile in the sense of “not sat in front of my laptop”. Currently waiting for 52 pages of pure strategic thought to print. On a colour printer, so I may be here for some time…

Workspace