Lately I’ve been somewhat doubting my choice of degree and career. The basic thrust of my thinking has been “Given unlimited resources and time I’d spend my days tinkering with electronics, obscure software and the odd mechanical device. That said, what the hell am I doing in a business degree?” And it’s kind of been bothering me. When I forgo doing my lecture readings in favour of mucking about with a homebrew Wii sensor bar, shouldn’t I take notice of that?

What I’ve come to realise in the last couple of days, however, is that while I like doing those things, I’m not going to get paid millions of dollars to do them. Sure, I could pursue an electrical engineering degree, but there’s a couple of problems with that:

1) There’s a lot of mathematics involved. This is something I could probably overcome, however it would be hard, and would probably limit me.

2) I’d be limited to a technical role for a long time, if not forever, while working for someone else. Engineers can make great money, however they can’t make CEO money. It’s also a lot harder for a pure engineer to be self employed. They either start an engineering firm, for which you need to be a great manager and not a great engineer, or they invent something brilliant that the whole world can’t live without, then license it to a corporation and make a trillion dollars. That’s kind of a risky life strategy.

So where that leaves me is: “There are other career paths that might interest me more, but business and marketing do still interest me, and they don’t limit my future earning potential.” Which basically translates to: “I’m a complete mercenary who is sacrificing life happiness for money” or “C.R.E.A.M. suckah”. Now I’m not entirely unhappy with that. I have no compunction in saying that money is a major motivator in everything I do. Money buys things, and I really like things. Nevertheless, it still niggled at me a bit. There was still margin for error there. Was I really making the right call?

Today it all crystallised for me. What’s the core reason I love tinkering? I like doing things that people haven’t thought of before. I recognise areas for possible improvement that other people don’t see, and I visualise ways to fill them. I think I’m pretty good at that. For example, right now I’m part way through creating a visual basic solution that will let me quickly visualise a bunch of specific data at work.

Where I’m going with this is, what’s the core goal of a marketer? To take in a bunch of factors (customer feedback, market conditions, technological landscape etc) and divine from that a product offering that no-one else has thought of but fills a need.

So; a satisfying reaffirmation of my existing life path, or a fabulous exercise in rationalisation and justification? I’m pretty certain it’s the former, and I’m happy with where it’s left me.

That said, I still need to stop tinkering and get down to some damned study. Exams are in a week and a bit. Argh!

It’s been a while since I had a chance to post, things have just been crazy lately.

So, when I left off I’d just gotten into uni. I found out about it on the 17th and then had to go enrol on the 22nd, pretty damned fast. The UTS enrolment process is excellent, however, and was nothing like the crap I’ve heard you have to go through at Sydney. All told I was in and out within about 45 minutes.

The subjects are basically set for the first year of my degree. There was only one elective and it was a no-brainer. A Business Strategy subject against some accounting/banking/finance crap. What did annoy me a bit is that while most spots on the timetable were open, there were a couple of good times that I missed out on. This is because even though I attended the first available enrolment session for non school leavers, all the school leavers had already been through and chosen their subjects. To me, it seems obvious that non school leavers are going to have more commitments around work, kids, etc than people just out of year 12. Anyway, not a big deal. There’s only one class that’s a real problem and I’ll have a crack at talking to the tutor to get into the better timeslot. Overall my first semester timetable is pretty good, 2 full days off. The only problem is that Monday is a pretty full day, meaning no time for work.

Which brings me to work. Unfortunately there’s really no other part time work within the business so at this point it looks like I’m sticking with my current role on a part time basis. I feel like I’ve wussed out a bit, but there are very few jobs out there that offer the level of flexibility that mine does while paying this kind of money. So for the time being it’s the lesser of two evils. Hopefully the fact that I’m in the office 50% less often will mean I hate it 50% less, which will mean it’s bearable. I hope.

Enrolment on Monday began a week of craziness. Clare and I had social crap on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. We’re normally not nearly that cool so it was kind of a shock to the system.

Monday night was Raw Comedy at the Comedy Club with Luke and Bonny. Was a great night overall but some of the comics were just goddamned woeful. Anyway, at $10 for a concession I highly recommend it as a night out.

Tuesday was pub trivia, nothing exciting. Wednesday we caught up with Maccy and his new girlfriend, Bec. (I tried Beck but it just looked like the musician. I’m sticking with Bec. Hopefully I don’t offend anyone) We hadn’t met Bec before so luckily she was lovely and a great night was had by all. Tapas, paella and sangria for the win.

Friday was, naturally, Australia day which entailed the now-traditional Cove Australia Day barbie which was bloody fantastic. Good times, good beers, good sausages, good friends and a swimming pool = excellent. Alex Z came along which was great since it was his birthday and we see each other entirely too infrequently. We had a great drunken chat in the swimming pool and made plans to go bushwalking on Sunday which unfortunately never eventuated, but have been rescheduled to this weekend.

The only downside of the evening was that Luke completely and utterly defiled my kitchen while trying to make cocktails. At one point he was using a coffee plunger as a strainer which entailed sticky cocktail juice being projected into every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Needless to say a couple hours of Saturday was spent cleaning up.

Saturday night was Michael Joseph’s farewell dinner at Genghis Khan in the city. I’m normally a big fan of The Khan, however I’ve never been to the city branch of it. Unfortunately it falls prey to the one thing that aggravates me most about restaurants. Too many tables and not enough staff. At one point we waited 45 minutes in the queue to get our food cooked because there was a packed restaurant at peak time with only one freaking chef actually cooking. There were two others working that night. One of them was ferrying bowls out to the buffet station and the other one appeared to be off having a smoke for most of the time. Note to all chefs working in busy restaurants. You have more important things to be doing than carting crockery around the place. That is what waiters are for. Consider yourselves notified.

We then moved on to James Squire bar which is an undiscovered gem for me. Not overcrowded, fairly laid back atmosphere and excellent, excellent beers. Obviously a bit pricier than your run-of-the-mill local pub, but not at all unreasonable for the quality of beer on offer and lower than the average in that neck of the woods.

Sunday I did very little since plans fell through. I did, however spend almost 4 fucking hours cooking bolognaise sauce. Our neighbours had a surplus of tomatoes during the week and were kind enough to bring us a bag. Lovely plump organically grown sauce tomatoes that smelled lush. Little did I know that it was actually a sentence to 4 hours of kitchen drudgery. 2 kilos of mince, 2 bulbs of garlic and a bunch of onions later, I have realised two things. 1) The PSP is an excellent thing to kill time in between stirring sauces. 2) I need a bigger saucepan for this kind of crap. I’m not writing up a recipe since it’s just bolognaise. Meat, garlic, onions, tomatoes, herbs, seasoning. Job done.

The upshot is that the sauce tasted great and I didn’t have to clean up any of the mess I made. That’s what Clares are for. Bonus.

Flogged the crap out of myself at the gym on Monday night as a punishment for being such a lazy prick lately. I’m still feeling the effects now.

And that brings us up to the present day. I’m looking up and there’s a whole hunka’ words. If you’ve read all this way you deserve a lollipop.

I have been offered a place in the Bachelor of Business course at UTS - Kuringai campus. It was the fourth down my preference list, but that’s still pretty damned good for someone that did what I did in my HSC year.

I figure the whole application must have ridden on my STAT score (98.9th percentile, awww yeah). So it’s not exactly surprising that I missed out on Sydney since they don’t even consider STAT. I had thought Macquarie was my best bet but they’re clearly a pack of arseholes. UTS - K’gai all the way.

I’m mainly pleased that I got straight into a business course rather than doing arts for 12 months then transferring internally. Some of the units I did in arts would have counted but this is going to mean a lot less wasted time. I may still look at transferring to Sydney next year or maybe to the UTS Ultimo campus, but I’m going to give K’gai a shot.

The other advantage of K’gai is that Clare’s sister got offered a palce there in the Primary Education course. So, I’ve already got a friend on campus. I’m one of the cool kids!

All that remains now is to figure out what the hell I’m doing for work. I’ve got to have a serious chat with my boss about finding me a part time role. I’ve been telling him it’s on the cards for the last 6 months, but now it’s really crunch time. I’d like to stay here to keep my industry experience current and keep my foot in the door, but I’ll go elsewhere if I have to. Whatever happens, I really don’t want to keep doing this role. Even on a part time basis.

Things I have learnt today:

1. I still hate my job
2. Chilli jam is completely awesome

I’ve also been learning php which is great. It’s something I’ve meant to do for ages since until yesterday my programming knowledge has consisted entirely of half forgotten and mostly stolen bits of mIRC scripting, excel’s version of VB and html. I’m by no means proficient in php yet but I’m getting my head around it, which is more than I’ve been able to say for anything else I’ve ever tried to learn (especially javascript, that was a bitch. I even bought a freaking book for that. Bought!).

Hopefully I’ll be able to put my newfound skills to use in getting a better job with Optus. I know exactly the one I’m aiming at, too, the only issue is that it’s filled right now. However, it’s filled by someone from Adelaide. Thus, it’s filled by a mentally retarded person. This gives me hope.