“Let’s see whose presenting?... Group 4…Elina Tretiakova and…Erin Byer”

Thank you God for Thursday, 21 October, 2010.

My Financial Accounting teacher, Professor Uribarri told us Monday that part of the class was lecture and the other part modeled what the MBA program would really be like, group case studies. He said he’d split us into groups and we’d have to prepare one final report for three cases. The specific assignment was to translate 20 or so financial transactions and create the T-accounts, income statement and balance sheet. The professor would pick a team at random and he would pick the two people on that team to present their reports in front of the class. We’ve had 9 hours of financial accounting which I can’t say made me the most qualified person when it came to understanding this assignment.

There are over 60 people in my class, Uribarri divided us up into ten teams. My group had a 10% chance of getting picked and if our team did get selected, then within my group of seven, I had a 28.4% chance of being one of two team mates that would be presenting. Professor Uribarri organized the teams alphabetically, I was one of three girls and we all had similar names Erin, Eliza, Elina, I thought that factor also played a piece of his random selection and changed my odds as well.

It was sort of hit or miss with who was taking the assignment seriously, I heard quite a bit of my classmates say “it’s just preprogramme...” I approached the assignments with typical Erin let’s go down to business. My team was a little bit less intense. Politely two teammates said I was a “go-getter” I suppose they could have called me much worse.

I stayed up until just before 3 am Wednesday night trying to reintroduce myself to accounting and complete the assignments. I completed what I could and labeled everything so that I could contribute and ask questions. In the morning I met with (companero be banco from Spanish class) Greg, my teammate, and we started to go over the cases. He was so easy to understand, so logical. I do remember really liking accounting in college, and it makes the biggest difference when someone spells it out very clearly.

Our team met at noon and it was a frustrating but productive four hours. At one point we could not find the answers to a few questions and I said I felt like I lived and breathed accounting friends in Northern California, if I could just call one. The Los Angeles time on my computer said 3:54 am. My teammates had a few more comments about how I was taking this too seriously. With minutes to go before class started we finished the assignments and I was relieved and very proud of my team, group 4, for pulling it together.

Professor Uribarri walked in, looked at the group assignments, “let’s see whose presenting?... Group 4…Elina Tretiakova and…Erin Byer”

It was kind of a moment. I was up for the first presentation in our preprogramme masters program, presenting on, of all things, accounting. I felt like there was a little bit of karma in there too.

My buddy in the program, Mike LaMothe unintentionally gave me some advice my first day in Madrid about presentations at IE. He told me that one of his classmates was giving a presentation one time and opened by asking which males in the audience were from the United States, about “four” classmates raised their hands, including Michael and the presenter said “…it shows that 1 out of every “4” American men will experience erectile dysfunction,” then he continued about the drug industry, touching on ED fighters Cialis, Viagra & Levitra. The guys clearly had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

One of the nights I was staying with Michael, he was getting ready for his presentation the next day in class on a custom t-shirt company. He showed me a custom t-shirt that he had had made online with a picture of himself on it. It's a photo of just his face and it's mug shot attractive. He told me that he was not sober when he ordered it online, I’ve seen it and he couldn’t have been. He considered wearing it during the presentation. I like that it sounds like there is a bit of personality in business school presentations, dually noted. When I was working on the cases the night before, I said to myself if I was called on to present that I would play my strength, personality.

Well here I was, I felt 98% confident in our work and I was comfortable too if I had to say I didn’t know the answer. It’s funny how nerves have a way of taking all the smarts out of you; suddenly you can’t read, multitask, listen, write and you don’t speak English. I say that but I actually felt like it was fine, great in fact for being the first time. I didn't consider my 60 colleagues in the room as having judging or critical eyes, but sympathetic ones, relieved it wasn't them, ones. The hardest part was being able to follow the multiple papers in front of me and the tiny font of the corresponding transactions (our answers). I think I was charismatic and collected, I remember the teacher laughing at something that I said...

From 101021

Elina & Erin and our Income Statement

From 101021

with Professor Uribarri...

Class got out just before 7 pm and I went home and rested before going to a friend's party. I was thrilled to decompress and end the day with a celebratory glass of wine. As it turned out quite a few of my accounting classmates were there and they passed on their kudos and congratulations.

At the end of the night, Mandy and I found ourselves dancing in the living room, first just sort of rocking out next to each other, then we were "red-rovering" moves across the larger area in front of the rest of the party sitting on couches and Clare from Korea who makes amazing beef joined us. After forty-five minutes or so just the two (then three) of us dancing essentially in front of a wall-flowered audience, Mandy over the music, commenting on the shy audience around us, said "What's wrong with these people?!"

One presentation down…52 more to go…