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Just the beginning….did I really sign up for this?

Thursday, March 15th, 2007 | General

Today, was just the beginning of the break away process from what I’ve come to know as my job and the people whom I learned to love working with. I had to say goodbye to my II Steering Committee. This is a committee of volunteers I have led over the last 3 years to help execute numerous events at my the place of where I work or worked. It didn’t seem so hard this week until today. I had to do the hand off of the event planning and leading this team to my colleagues. This was our Volunteer Recognition event to happen April 18th. There is a lot of details involved in the planning and I tried to make sure all of the steering committee members were able to participate and that everyone of them felt valued. Today, they made me feel valued. There were tears and sentimental expressions of how much I had meant to them as a leader. It hit the heart strings. I didn’t let it get too far, cuz with me…once those gates are open they flood like mad and I couldn’t break down… not today.

Attached to this emotional experience was the final receipt of two freshly graded papers from the professor (Yes he got the ax but we’ll continue to have him for the rest of this class) that I felt so sure of and so good about only to receive low B’s. Adorned with comments galore on what I’m doing wrong and how my sentences run on and how poorly I connect my answers to the questions. My self esteem and all that was there was completely diminished.

It doesn’t end there, I had to meet with my special MBA Marketing team in charge of marketing, hypathetically, a voice recognition device. Our team is called, “Rosetta”. In seeing my peers papers I got to see how poorly I scored on my papers compared to them. So I read their papers, I didn’t see how different or how unclear I was in my papers compared to them. I was a bit mortified and ashamed.

Either way, we were brought together to prepare for our “presentation” assignment over the weekend which was to put together a marketing plan. My head was pounding, I couldn’t quite focus, which has been the case most of the week and I didn’t understand the exact kind of presentation the professor wanted. The Rosetta team… well,  I have pretty strong characters in this group so I was content to play secretary. Taking notes and creating even a powerpoint template with a rosetta stone background, which I thought was pretty clever. We didn’t get much done, but we’ll have class time tomorrow to work on it.

The residue of today has only left it’s blackness on my confidence. Self doubt rang through me like the clapper in the liberty bell, and I kept saying to myself..”Really, why am I doing this?” Am I smart enough to be in such a prestigous academic program? Will I be able to graduate at least with a B? Why do I not have such a natural grasp of writing the right way? Why do I struggle with numbers and math? Why have I not done a single thing on my research thesis project yet? What am I so afraid of?

We’ll see what this weekend has in store. We have a 3 and 1/2 hour final on Saturday - 8am to 11:30am which is the creation of another paper on the Dell Case study, I still have to finish reading it too. At least we are in pairs and I am paired with Santo, one of the nicest guys in the group and I can only hope that I muster enough confidence to believe in what he and I can create to answer the questions on Dell that we still have yet to see.

Give me strength.

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