Senior Survival Skills

Ideally, all your monthly debt, including your mortgage, should amount to no more than how much your gross income? What is a W-4? Two people save money in a tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account that earns 8% annually. Person A invests $3,000 a year from age 20 to 29, but then never saves another penny. Person B starts investing $3,000 a year at age 30 and saves that same amount annually for the rest of his life. Who has more money in the account at age 65?

These are questions I didn’t think much about as a college student, but were raised at an event put on for Rockhurst seniors who are close to getting that first real job.

Interestingly, this event—“Senior Survival Skills”—was hosted by Rockhurst business students. More specifically, it was planned and run by Delta Sigma Pi and the Dean’s Student Advisory Board. With the help of moderator Professor Turner White, the students were able to bring in three senior managers from EMBARQ, Creative Planning, Inc., and Northwestern Mutual to talk about such things as health insurance, retirement plans, budgeting, and taxes; things new workers must make decisions about upon entering the workforce.

In case you were wondering, the answers to the questions leading this post: 36%, the form you fill out to tell your employer how much tax to withhold from your paycheck, and Person A. Unfortunately I am more like person B -- so I drive inexpensive cars.

Espanõl

A few years ago my teenage daughter was spending Wednesday nights at church teaching in the ESL class -- made up primarily of Spanish speaking adults wanting to learn English. I encouraged her with the one Spanish word I knew: Espanol. She grew to enjoy the experience (which she did for over two years) because of how nice and sincerely grateful the people were. And I was proud that she willingly made that choice at the expense of time with her friends.

Yesterday, I was able to attend a capstone presentation by one of my students, Allison Rank. She is a business major also majoring in Spanish. The picture included here is Allison with some of the children she has spent time with on her three visits to Mexico. I should probably tell you more about these boys pictured and the experience (life changing, perhaps) Allison had because it was part of her presentation. The problem for me was that she presented it completely in Spanish!

This is the first Spanish capstone I have attended and I enjoyed it immensely (authentic food provided). I better understand why we have business majors who also major in foreign language. For Allison it started with her visit to Mexico while she was a student here at Rockhurst. I suspect that she learned most of her Spanish while in Mexico. It further makes me aware of the opportunities Rockhurst students have across departments here on campus.

The one thing I could understand from her presentation is that Carlos Slim, a Mexican businessman, has a personal net worth of $59 Billion. Certainly, nothing slim about that!

Phoenix, Arizona

I am writing from the Phoenix airport, having spent the week here. At right is a picture of where I stayed -- the Hotel San Carlos. As you might imagine, this hotel has a long history -- built from what started as Phoenix's first school in 1874. By the way Arizona is the 48th state, getting statehood not until 1912.

Having stayed in this old hotel got me thinking about the commercial appeal of going retro. This hotel called itself a boutique hotel (like, for example, the Raphael in the Plaza), but it was mostly a very old buidling with some of the charm (and inconvenience) of an old style hotel experience. Included were paper thin walls, small rooms, and unregulated water temperatures for the shower. Still, it had more charm than the what the Hyatt (where our event was held) down the street that cost twice as much and had much better amenities.

While the hotel was old and historic, Retro is big business. Converse and adidas sell retro shoes going back to the 60's and 70's -- I can remember wearing the classic cavass Converse shoes when I was kid, which only shows my age. I saw today a retro car made by Nissan in the 1990s --a very old Italian model called the Figaro. Of course many styles are retro. Perhaps that completes my theme here as retro is the regeneration of extinct or dead things, which describes the Phoenix, the city I write from.

Keeping Up

It is officially the "grind" part of the semester -- and not just for students. At this point, faculty are in full teacher mode of preparing courses, grading papers, meeting with students, preparing tests, etc. and also serving on committees (my afternoon was spent doing meetings).

But teaching college is still a great job if you can get it -- and not just because you having light summers. One of the fortunate things for me is to be able to work with such great colleagues. Even in this busy time of the year, I have managed to add to my reading list just through informal interactions with these colleagues. Tonight I am reading The Future of Management recommended by management professor Randy Schwering (and independently later by John Meyer). Professor Turner White keeps me well supplied with pertinent readings from the New York Times (a source I am reluctant to browse), New Yorker and other periodicals outside the Wall Street Journal. Myles Gartland earlier this semester added to my reading with Davenport's book on Competing on Analytics. Yesterday, Professor Perry, after a nice discussion whether work is personal, pitched a book simply titled Flow (good luck spelling the author's last name). I had to give it back to him -- I must wait until finals to work off my reading backlog. Today, I had a 10-minute chat with professor Tocco on our favorite history books related to WWII-- some of his like the biography of Truman must also get in line.

College students have lots of reading to do, too . . . I just hope they have half as much fun learning from those things they must read and find ways to read things they choose.

Update from last post: My NaNoWrimo daughters' work to date:
Taylor: 16,000 + words (target 50,000 +)
Rachel: 4,425 words (target 15,000 words)

NaNoWriMo

Our Rockhurst students do a variety of tasks and activities over their four (or so) years. One thing they do a lot of is writing . . . more than they would certainly choose to do on their own. For my job I have to write as well. Today I spent time with my colleage Dr. Tocco working on a case study we are co-authoring. This document is about 7,500 words as we are working on at least or third revision. While I enjoy getting such things completed and published, the work of revising is quite tedious.

This leads me to the month of November, which starts in a couple of hours. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). People from all over the country sign up on the website, pledging to write a 50,000 + word novel -- in 30 days. This is like running a marathon. I know about this not because I am writing a novel (nor do I have any kind of time or talent to do so) but because my oldest daughter is. For the last few weeks she has been very busy preparing for the event by developing character profiles, doing research (her story is historical), and plotting (read her blog to find out about her novel). She has been working with her younger sister on writing and this sister is signed up for the junior NaNaWrimo -- pledged to write 15,000 words.

What's interesting to me is that both these daughter participants are looking forward to this writing journey; both are doing this in addition to their regular school tasks, household chores, etc. It doesn't count for extra credit. I suspect many of the other participants are the same. Yes, these are marathoners . . . may you all finish the race!

The Gould Award

Often--too often, perhaps--student work has an audience of just the teacher. Many of my colleagues, however, look for ways to stretch students with bigger audiences. This past week, my colleage Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick attended the 2007 Robert L. Gould annual meeting to watch a former student accept the award for the top paper for the year. This competition has been going 16 years and involves three schools--Northeastern, University of Denver, and Rockhurst.

This year's winner--the second year in a row from Rockhurst--is Katie Hull. Each fall Dr. Fitzpatrick assigns the comprehensive research report for his Investments class; Katie was a student last fall, writing on the topic of how to make mutual fund fee reporting more transparent. Currently, Katie is in her first year of law school at Vanderbilt University.

Besides receiving a trip to Washington, D.C. to be recognized for the award, she received $1,000 -- something that should come in handy during law school. She majored in Finance/Economics and also got degrees in Spanish and Political Science. And if you notice her holding office years down the road--she has that as a goal--then remember you saw it here first.

Working Part III

Just to finish my thread on why people work . . . last post I made the easy claim that they love the high of performing or doing the work. Duh! But my lovely wife (an expert in most thing involving human nature) asked a better question -- why do so many people choose a vocation they do not love?

One answer could be that there are lots of bad jobs out there, or that there just aren't enough good ones available. True enough, though this can be fixed in many cases by better management (the one thing I can assert over my wife), as too many managers prefer to give people little jobs or they don't do enough to create a winning atmosphere (everyone likes to work for a winner).

My wife or my oldest daughter (both can claim it) had a better answer to the question, saying that too often people just never figure out their calling. College graduates should have the most leverage to follow their calling so that they can do that which they love and do well. My only advice college students: Don't count being a good student a calling. In fact, (and as a teacher I love good students) I often feel students whose primary focus is simply making good grades can handicap themselves from actually pursing their . . . calling.

It is not my idea of even a good job, but my wife's cousin (see earlier post on Allison Briner), sans college degree, is doing something she loves and is good at. And I am very happy for her because of that. My hope for my students at Rockhurst is no different.