Spring 2016 Semester Review

Grades are in… and I am no longer a student. :D Here is a quick review of the classes I took this semester.

FIN 445 – Adv. Investments
This was hands down the best class of the semester. I had the same professor that I had last semester for the first Investments class, and he is the best professor I’ve had. He has a lot of experience throughout his career that he was really able to integrate into the class. He’s just one of those people that can walk into the room and easily by the smartest person there, but is still very humble about it.

We had about four tests and five projects, so it was a really heavy workload, but unlike most classes, I found all of the projects really beneficial. It was the perfect culmination of all the different concepts, valuation methods, and lessons from all the different finance classes I’ve taken. It was a lot of hard work, and it didn’t help that it was three hours a week on a Wednesday night, but I would have recommended anyone in the business school to take his class. I’m actually a little sad that I won’t be taking him any more. *tear*

Credits: 3
Final Grade: A

MGT 471 – Strategic Management
Sigh. This class was terrible. In a matter of two weeks, we had gone through four different professors. I’m not sure what happened, but the department definitely just scrambled to find someone to teach this class, and he was truly terrible. He had never taught before, was definitely unqualified, completely unorganized, and gave absolutely no clear instructions or feedback. We didn’t even receive a syllabus until a month and a half into the semester.

You know it’s bad when the professor says, “Just think, in a few years this class will just be one bad nightmare.”

To top it all off, a large portion of my grade was a twenty minute group presentation. I had six people in my group, and if I was lucky, two of them would show up on any given day. So I ended up doing almost the whole presentation. Another guy offered to do our recommendations for us, so I let him. The day of the presentation, he didn’t show up and he didn’t do the recommendations, so needless to say, it was the worst presentation I’ve ever given in my undergraduate career and we got ripped apart in our Q&A because I literally just pulled everything out of my butt in about 0.2437 seconds.

The professor never lectured and he would just spend all class talking about himself and what he does on the weekend. There was actually one class where he brought in these chia seed muffins and read us the ingredients on the label. :|

He didn’t even lecture over any of the content that was going to be on the final. But then he told us that he had already told us everything that would be on there, and “we would be fine.” LOL JK.

My favorite part of the semester is definitely when the course and professor evaluations come around, because trust me, I don’t hold my opinions back. :horns:

Credits: 3
Final Grade: A

FIN 350 – Introduction to Insurance and Risk Management
I did not really want to take this class, but I needed another finance elective and it was the only one that really fit my schedule, so I took it. This was a really difficult class because it was largely based on law, so it felt like a law class. There was a lot of contract analysis and a lot of laws and court cases and precedence. Blech.

My professor was really good, though. For such a dry topic, he tried to make it interesting. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, haha. The class also wasn’t super organized, but it was okay since we didn’t have a lot of assignments and such.

We did have a huge report at the end of the semester with vary vague guidelines, which was frustrating. Did he want five pages? Thirty-five pages? I honestly ran out of time with it and could have done more, but I did complete about sixteen pages, so I think it was enough.

Credits: 3
Final Grade: A

CIT 105P – Foundations Of Computing // CIT 106P – Computers Uses & Impact
This class was so easy, it was wonderful compared to my other three. I took these only because my advisors failed to tell me until my last semester before graduating that I needed 8 more credits of general electives. Thankfully, these were online and, since they were so easy, I finished them up in about a month.

These two classes mainly focused on creating word documents, excel spreadsheets, and power points that followed certain guidelines, so it was really a piece of cake. We also had to do some small assignments over the internet, and a couple papers, but nothing that I wasn’t already familiar with.

Credits: 8
Final Grade: A

Conclusion
Overall, not a horrible semester considering I was taking 17 credit hours. I managed a 4.0 GPA for the semester, which means my overall GPA is a 3.93! Woot! I definitely learned a lot more in some of my classes than in others, but I’m just so glad to be done.

I’m a bit sad this is my last “semester review” post, at least for now. But who knows what the future may hold? 8)

Making the St. Louis house our home

During graduation weekend, all of our family and friends helped us pack up the trailer and on Monday morning, our little Smith caravan drove the two-hundred-something miles from Kansas City to St. Louis.

My dad drove the truck that pulled the trailer as I was not comfortable driving it, and Andrew is a terrible driver. XD Thankfully everyone made the drive just fine, though it was really rainy and gross out. We were able to back the trailer into the garage and unload all our boxes and furniture, that way we could figure out where we wanted everything later.

We moved in to Andrew’s childhood home. His mother moved out when she remarried, so she is letting us have the house for reduced rent, so we can save and pay off our loans. We won’t be here forever, but I expect we will be living here for the next three or four years – enough time to save up a good amount and to look for a house of our own.

Moving in was a bit hectic. There was a lot of stuff still in the house that we had to go through and a lot of the rooms really needed repainting. The kitchen is a dark green, the master bedroom yellow, one of the guest bedrooms is bright red, and the other is also dark green. That’s a lot of colors. :O That’s a little too much color for me, haha. So we picked out a more neutral color – I don’t remember the specific name of it, but it was a light grey with a little tan in it.

My mom and dad came over to help us paint two of the bedrooms yesterday, and they turned out great! I’ll be excited when we finish touching up the rooms and finish the kitchen because then we can truly unpack everything and clean up. It will be nice to be all settled and unpacked!

Besides unpacking and cleaning and painting, we’ve been relaxing a lot. The move and graduation weekend was all a bit stressful, so I’m giving myself the rest of May to relax. Once June starts though, I’m going to get to work applying for jobs.

Until then, I am going to relax in our new home. :)

© Copyright Rebecca Smith | 2011-2024