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.