Ryan Jacobs . Org

People keep asking me if I like business school. It’s a big question.

The San Diego weather provided a harsh backdrop to last week. I made my way over to the library at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography during a particularly heavy day of rain, the day before our economics final. It was my one day to concentrate fully on econ, since I had spent most of my time to that point on accounting, the subject I felt least comfortable with.

While I sat in the library taking a break between practice problems, I remembered back to my undergraduate days, when I went through a year-long music history sequence…without taking notes. I earned A’s, but my professor was surprised and commented that no one had ever done that well in her class without writing anything down. My response was basically to say that if I can’t learn it by going to class and listening, then it may not be worth remembering. Yes, of course there are caveats to this: one, what I think is worth remembering is sometimes very different from what the professor thinks is worth remembering. Two, reading and homework assist with memory and clarification and are an essential part of most courses. Three, my particular background might have led to a somewhat exceptional auditory learning style. But none of these caveats contradict the idea that the really important pieces of information, the pieces you’ll remember when you’re 10 years out of business school and running your first 100+ employee company, are the ones that you learned just by being exposed to them that first time. It’s the initial spark that matters. That’s why I go to those 8:00 classes. That’s where it all starts.

As I watched San Diego’s monsoon season come and go, I started to do something I haven’t done in a long time: I actually started to enjoy finals week. After a full quarter, I’ve begun to appreciate the immediate and future value of the concepts we’re learning and the language that surrounds them. Studying for the econ test actually highlighted for me exactly how much I remember about perfect competition and deadweight loss and elasticity of demand. It was definitely an unlikely time to fully appreciate the opportunity to go to business school, but then again the SIO library is a reflective sort of place. Plus they let you bring in your tea or cookie or whatever from the café right outside, which definitely helps with the general appreciation of things.