Winter in Michigan

First of all: Winters in Michigan are totally overrated. It took until now for us to get 'real snow'. But to make sure you do not get this the wrong way. I am fine with it not being colder (we typically have between 5 and -5 degrees; and no this is not Fahrenheit) and not snowing more. :-)

So what have I done since Christmas?
Before I get into that I have to thank Lufthansa for upgrading me to Business Class on my last flight to Germany. This is a way of travel I could get used to.

Surely my biggest accomplishment in 2010 so far was me bowling a 166. Since I have no hope to ever improve on this I (moved to tears obviously) immediately declared my retirement from bowling.
As you can image that left me in a void and it took me several weeks to find new goals in my life.

Fortunately my university provided me with one: Learning Chinese!
Mid of March I will fly to China for 5 weeks with 5 classmates to work on a consulting project to improve the productivity of a Chinese car supplier. I am already super excited and can't wait to go there. The fun part will be that, according to our sponsor, nobody there speaks English. That makes my two Chinese speaking team members my new best friends and leads to the necessity for me to at least learn the very very basics of Chinese.
But most impressively: We receive emails from the CEO of this Nasdaq-listed company, apologizing for not always being reachable and if needed we could talk to his fellow board members. Well sure, it is probably more appropriate if I talk to his assistant (if not his janitor), but if he insists... :-)

But there is not only good news. The bad news: I do not graduate this year. So why is this bad? Because the commencement speech for this years class will be given by Barack Obama. Well I still have some time to convince my friends in the graduating class to give me one of their tickets.
This will be some event. He will be speaking in our football stadium.

Another disappointment has been my first NBA game. I went to a Detroit Pistons game against Miami. I expected Detroit to be mediocre at best, but they were horrible, scoring only 65 points. I do not know a ton about Basketball, but I understood that this is a really low score - later I leanred their second lowest ever. As always timing is everything - we surely picked the ideal game. ;-) But as I learned, there is always a trade off. So in that case we got incredibly good tickets way below face value since the team is that bad.

Ah yes, I also study. I currently have classes in Operations, Managerial Accounting and Financial Valuation.
The most impacting class is probably Operations. I now see the whole world through the lense of queues, wait times and inventory. If I am at an airport I wonder what their utilization is at the security check and was tempted to explain to them that with the kind of demand variability they face they needed more excess capacity. Yes, scary indeed.
But an even worst example comes from our prom. We had a huge party at a hotel close to Detroit (no it was not really near Ann Arbor and do not ask why we needed to drive 45 min there). However while there was enough inventory, the bars lacked the necessary capacity to convert that inventory into alcohol in our blood. But fortunately we had enough time to buffer for that. It was a great time and I had a lot of fun with all of my classmates!


Time continues to fly and next week I have already the next set off exams. Then the term is over and we are off to spring break (that reminds me that I should finally figure out what to do that week).
Sadly I only have a couple of classes left with my section this week. Then we will be taking electives from September and I will no longer be in the same group I so much enjoyed having classes with.