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A study in shirking (and contrasts)

by Jamie Snashall on May 6, 2008 in Features

As the semester draws to a conclusion, it’s probably about time that I answer the clamour of voices from home (well, ok, maybe one or two) who have asked me how you the workload for a Master’s degree that’s done and dusted in just a year. Let me defer to a number of people, all of whom are better qualified than I to answer.

One colleague of mine, a long-serving military man, has the following credo:

It’s only a lot of reading if you do it all.

On that topic, this recent article from the Citizen is well worth reading.

Or former five star general and US President Dwight Eisenhower, who attended the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1920s. A biography by Geoffrey Perret records Ike’s view of his course:

Everyone who stayed with the course, in fact, graduated. It was like being at Harvard – people dropped out, but nobody flunked out.

And then there’s this personal favorite, stated by a professor in class just a couple of weeks ago:

I read the abstract [of the article] and if I don’t like it, I don’t keep reading.

If only I’d known that last September …

Or you could always do what another colleague did earlier this year when she found herself in a class with me by mistake. Rather than switching to the one she meant to, she stayed and later said that she enjoyed the ‘accidental’ class!

When you cross the river from KSG or HKS - or whatever we’re called - to HBS (Hyatt, sorry, I mean ‘Harvard Business School’), it’s like trading up from backpacking and living at a youth hostel to staying at the Peninsula Hong Kong, where the cheapest room is approx $US 500 a night.

Where we HKS proles attend seminars just to get a free lunch, HBS students have a magnificently appointed cafeteria (more like a restaurant), an excellent library and classrooms and, from what I’ve seen, generally top-notch facilities. When I visited a colleague of mine there, he said: “I find the lounge by the fireplace quite agreeable” and so we retired to the genteel hush of the lounge for discussions. As I left the campus, a student was practicing his golf swing on the lawn …

Written by Jamie Snashall · Filed Under Features 

Jamie Snashall grew up in Tasmania – that little island to the south of Australia – which made him something of a befuddled foreigner in his own country. The English novelist LP Hartley once said "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," and many Aussies would think that that perfectly describes Tasmania, a former British penal colony for the nineteenth century convicts who were too bad for Sydney. Banished at the age of 13, he ended up in the nation’s capital, Canberra, where he became a political junkie, worked as a very civil servant for some years before jumping into the political arena as media and policy adviser to Julia Gillard, who has recently become Australia’s first female deputy Prime Minister. His weaknesses are U2, Star Wars, Thai food and red wine, preferably all mixed up together. In his spare time, he is trying to finish a TV sitcom about a college student and civil servant who are roommates. When not writing this blog and working on his sitcom, he is allegedly enrolled in the Mid Career MPA program.

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