Whenever people find out I’m in UCI’s MBA program, the question I inevitably get is “How do you do handle the math?”
For years I was scared of numbers. They didn’t interest me and I didn’t understand them. I picked communications as my undergrad major partly because it required virtually no math.
So as I began my quantitative prep for the GMAT, it had been a long 15 years since my last math class. At first the process was brutal. I struggled with a lot of frustration and wrong answers. Then, one day I was showing my big GMAT prep book to my very smart neighbor Suzanne, who was in ninth grade at the time. She flipped it open and began solving problems. As I watched her, I remember being amazed that she didn’t know to be afraid of math – she just dove in as if it were a challenging puzzle.
After that, I changed my outlook. I practiced and learned algebra, geometry and data sufficiency for months on end. I took the GMAT, and while my quantitative scores didn’t break any world records, they were decent enough. I started class at UCI with a new confidence, but there was one hurdle left— a required statistics class. I had never taken stats before, and in my mind it was just a bunch of indecipherable charts and graphs that would mean nothing to me. I was convinced that it would be the most dreadful, hardest class I’d ever taken.
And boy was I wrong! Professor Eppel was a brilliant instructor. Not only did he have a passion for teaching and showing us how to use stats in everyday life (on Excel even!) he made the class valuable and fun. Of course I relied on my team to help me through some things (especially Josh, who every week made sure I understood the concepts in the individual homework assignments). I remember being so happy when I got my midterm exam grade back: a 94%! My final score in the class was an 89%, good for a B+. Yes, I was very close to an A- but that B+ grade still makes me proud almost two years later.
Today at work, I have no problems with extracting numbers from financial documents and putting them into my written marketing communications pieces. I’ve even been known to bust out a few Excel charts from the functions I learned in Professor Eppel’s class. Thanks to my experiences at UCI, I have confidence to work with numbers and use them to my advantage.So when people ask that question, “How do you handle the math?” I simply smile and say “Just fine.”