FinalsFinalsFinalsRidingFinalsFinalsFinals.

This week and even the week prior has been quite hectic with finals, both tests and projects, taking up most of my time. Thankfully I've been able to get a few days on the mountain to keep me sane, but the majority of my time has most definitely been finals. I thought I'd blog today about how all my classes finished up and what you can expect if you plan on taking these courses here in the future.

Accelerated Boot Fitting:
Some of you may have read my blog about the lab you have to do over one weekend in this class, but the rest of it isn't too much different. The beginning of the course is mostly lecture and the midterm was actually harder than the final, at least I thought. The final mostly consisted of things from the lab such as steps to doing a toe punch or heel grind, but there were a couple questions from the midterm as well. At one point during the class, we got to spend the class time at Surefoot, hearing from proffesional boot-fitters who do it for a living talk about and demonstrate how to use today's technologies to custom fit a boot liner. Overall it was a really cool class full of some great information, especially if you are looking to get a job at shop because they love to see boot-fitting experience on a resume.

Business Statistics:
Business Statistics was a pretty tough course. We learned many techniques on how to analyze sets of numbers and make sense of survey results and things of that nature. To be perfecctly honest, I'm still a little hazy on some of the real world applications of some of these techniques, but as our professor Fred Hampel told us, there are many more statistics courses after this one that students can take to make perfect sense of it all. This final was online just like the other tests of the course, as well as it was not cumulative, so that definitely made the work load easier when studying for it.

Accounting Principles 1:
This course was rough. The main lesson I got out of it was that I'm going to hire an accountant. The course is very well taught, and the professor, Pat Turner, is always willing to help students understand the material both in and out of class, but the work itself I still found to be quite difficult. I never realized before this class that so much went into keeping track of how much money you spend and how much you make. I do think that this class will help a lot in the future when I'm starting a business, but I still plan on hiring an accountant as soon as I can afford it. This test was in class but also not cumulative, so again, that greatly helped the studying time (even though I still spent about 6 hours going over the 2 chapters the final was on).

Entrepreneurial Operations:
This class probably had the biggest work load for me this semester, but definitely the biggest reward for my future career goals. The final in the class was a complete busines plan which we had been working on in sections throughout the semester, followed by a presentation to local retired entrepreneurs who now do consulting for up-and-coming entrepreneurs, so needless to say they had some good feedback. My business plan ended being 35 pages which included marketing strategies, financial projections, and a really long appendix full of graphics for boards and new technologies I want to use on the boards. I think it came out really well and the presentation went good, so hopefully I come out of the class alright. Randy Rudasics was a really good teacher and I would for sure recommend any of his management classes to incoming students.

Retail and Sales:
This is my last class before break and I am currently in the library killing time before I have to take it. This was a really fun class taught by Tim Widmer (who also taught Boot Fitting) and provides you with some really good techniques for being a professional salesperson such as a sales rep for a ski or snowboard company. The final was two parts in a way, the first being the group sale where Tim splits the class up and each group gets a booth a school sale where we try to market to people in town to get them to come to the sale, then try to sell them a snowboard from the previous years of the Product Design classes. I was lucky enough to get Able which was the group I was in for Product Design, but we only had one board for $300 while the others were $150, so we didn't quite sell it. The final test tonight is a written test which hopefully isn't to much harder than the midterm.

So that was a brief glimpse at my semester. Hopefully I made these courses sound halfway interesting and some of you end up taking them here in the Boat. But now I have to go dominate this Retail and Sales test and then it's back to Minnesota. Thanks to everyone for reading this semester, and I'll for sure be blogging again next semester, maybe even a couple times over winter break, so keep checking in. Peace.

No Shave November, Year 2.

Every year, there is a month where men everywhere partake in an event that tests the grizzly skills of the olden days when people were rocking rich, full beards. I am talking of course, about No Shave November.

Unfortunately for me, I am severely lacking in the facial hair growing abilities. There were, however, many people who came out the end of November with some gnarly beards. The RA's even put on a contest to see who could grow the best beard. The stipulations were that you had to be completely shaven to the bottom of your ear by the first of November. After the month long contest, one the RA's Mitch ended up winning. Afterward he ended up shaving his beard into some Sabertooth looking hair from X-Men.

The following pictures are of my disgusting, awful attempt at growing a beard and mustache. I kind of really wish I would have shaved before Thanksgiving like I did last so I didn't look like this while meeting a bunch of new people, but I thought I should try to stick it out this. And as I'm sure you can tell by these pictures, I regret it:


Hopefully this inspired some of you to make an attempt at this great time of the year, but if you're facial hair resembles mine at any way, I wouldn't recommend it. Peace.

8th Street Steakhouse.

This morning was another morning spent on the mountain. While riding, I ran into my friend Matt, the one I went with to San Diego, who told me of a ridiculous deal that went down tonight at the 8th Street Steakhouse. According to Matt, the deal was steak for $2.99, so naturally, we had to check this out.

After an afternoon spent between The Office and working on my final business plan for my Entrepreneurial Operations, Tyler came and picked up Bacon and I and headed down to 8th St. We probably should have seen this coming, but it was packed. We put our names in and were told it was a 40 minute wait. Thankfully for us, tonight was the last night for free coffee or tea at the Steaming Bean just a couple blocks from the Steakhouse. On the way, we stopped in Urbane, a super sick clothing store here in town. Unfortunately, it's a really expensive store, so none of picked up anything.

So after getting our tea and hanging out with a few other CMCers, we rolled back to the Steakhouse and got our table and soon found out the deal was even better than we thought. I waitress informed us that not only was there a $2.99 steak deal, but we could get the all-you-can-eat salad bar for an extra $1.99, so needless to say, we all got salad and steak. They also had some shrimp and fish you could get for $2.99 as well.

The best part about 8th Street Steakhouse is the fact that you cook your own steak. When you get your table, they give you your ticket that you take to the meat counter to pick out your meal. You can also order some sides at the meat counter like delicious garlic potatoes or sweet potato fries. From there, you head across the restaurant to the grill and throw your meat on. At the grill they have a ton of seasoning including garlic, seasoning salt, regular salt and pepper, and lemon pepper, along with Worshtershire (or however you spell it) and teriyaki sauce. There's also bread for Texas Toast by the grill so you can have a delicious snack/appetizer while grilling.

So we grubbed out as much as we could, going back for seconds on the salad and Texas toast, and ended up only having to pay about $5.50. I'm not sure if this is a reoccurring event or not, but you can be sure we'll be back if it happens again. Peace.