This week has been excruciatingly long and stressful, but which week hasn’t been?
Work
I have to get out of the office. One of the most frustrating parts of being a software engineer is inheriting a module and having to make enhancements to it. The problem is that, like the dungeons from the Prince of Persia, there are numerous trap doors and dead ends waiting to get you. You think you got it right, but it comes back from testing as FAILED. And it’s always FAILED in capital letters. The testers like to make sure that you know you FAILED by screaming at you in the SPR. Worse yet is when the feature FAILS during a demo and you look through the code to find out that it FAILED because it went through a code path you didn’t even know it could go through. And then the boss gives you a disapproving look to top it off.
On the bright side, I’ll be traveling next week and will be gone till the end of the month. This will be short but needed respite from sitting in front of the monitor and hacking away at code. Of course, in the back of my head, I know that I have a bunch of crap to do once I get back, plus who knows what else is going to be broken while I’m gone. Hopefully I won’t find my replacement sitting in my cube when I get back.
School
I started with my Smith essays. There are three essays, two required, one optional. The first essay is the standard goals essay. The second is a choice between writing about what I would do if I didn’t have to work or what company I would want to lead. The optional third essay gives me the chance to explain why I’m worthy and that the school doesn’t need to worry about me dragging the rest of the class down.
I’ve gone through about twenty different iterations of the first paragraph for the first essay. The difficult part is finding the write structure. I know the story I want to tell, but I haven’t found a good way of telling it. I’ve tried outlining, brainstorming, writing different parts of the essay. Nothing has worked yet, but at least I know that once I have the structure figured out, it can be applied to the other four goals essay, modified of course. I’m looking forward to writing the second and third essay. I really appreciate the schools that have essays that allow us to be a little more creative. The third essay hopefully will be applicable to all five schools.
On the GMAT end, I’m hooking up with a MGmat tutor on Saturday to go over a game plan for the next test. That’s right, I bit the bullet and I’m getting a tutor. I really didn’t want to but Tiff highly suggested that I do because I need to see the test in a new way. The first meeting is going to be an hour and we’ll see where we go from there. Usually the third movie of a movie series is the best, unless you’re talking about Godfather. Here’s to a better performance than Sofia Coppalla in Godfather 3.