Pas Mal

Bagels can be quite peculiar things.  You can bake little bits of granola and raisins and flour and mush them all up into a round, hearty bread that lasts one for about eight or nine hours.

It is always a great way to start the day, walking briskly in the wind with friends to the local Collegetown Bagels.  A bit of light conversation and a nice film of jalepeno jam, and everything was good to go.  Today was also the first day that I had coffee, which I found to be a temporary miracle cure.

Today in class, we had a very lengthy discussion over yield management, otherwise known as trying to make incremental income as much as possible.  This lead to a strange tangent about restaurants and how different they are to yield manage in relation to hotels.  It had a lot of complicated terminology, but in general, it was a simple concept to understand.

On the flipside of that (if you understand this reference, you are fantastic), we went through Microsoft Excel. Strangely enough, it turned out to be the easiest lesson of the programs we have gone through so far.  It is extremely ironic, because I don't remember Excel as much as the others.  We went over all of the basics, as well as more complicated formulas and how to use PivotTables, an interesting feature that allows me to look up any data within the spreadsheet and create graphs that minimize the constraint of doing it normally.

The lesson went by extremely fast and I realized it was nearly impossible to take notes and do the exercise at the same time.  But that was not too surprising, after all, it is an entire semester course condensed within three weeks.  So I simply followed along and did the exercises as he was going through them -- I am more of a kinetic learner anyway.

After class, our group met up with Janna Bugliosi, the Assistant Director of Summer College at Cornell.  She asked us a variety of questions to get to know us -- it was rather nice really.  She discussed improvements to the system that we could suggest, about what our plans were for the rest of the summer, and what we will do with our skills once we return home.  She is a very nice person and I hope we can see her again before we leave.

For the past few hours, I explored a bit around Collegetown, which gave me a little more time to deliberate the situation.  Walking through Cascadilla Hall, the oldest building on campus, was quite exhilarating.  Cornell has a mysterious aura that is not present in these dorms, but rather, in the older buildings across campus, that almost gives one chills.  That was one of my suggestions for Janna: make sure each student has time to explore the campus on their own.

But back to the deliberation, I noticed how glad I was to be here right now and how much effort and funds were invested in us by the program.  I would go deeper into that thought, but with a report due on Friday, things will go by as fast as they can.  But this means that I have to make the most of the time I have left, which means getting back to work.

I don't think I want to leave here anytime soon.