LA Business Trip

As part of my job I'm required to complete a few training classes. They are a mix of online courses and classroom training. The classroom training are week long classes that are offered at various places around the country. The first one I went to was located in Dahlgren, VA. Dahsgren is a bustling community of 997 people with the main attraction being a gas station. That was one of the boring-est weeks of my life. So when I had to take my next class, I saw there was one available in Los Angeles. I jumped on it.

The training itself was a one week rehash of everything I learned in college. I'm an industrial engineer and the class was about production and manufacturing. No one else in the class had a background in the materials so they all thought I was some sort of genius. On the last day we had a closed book exam. Before the exam everyone was talking about how much they studied the night before. I didn't even take the book home and spent the night getting drunk at the bar. I still got 100% on the test.

LA was pretty nice, especially the weather - which was perfect. I was able to secure lodging at the Embassy suites which was right down the road from the training. I more than made use of the complimentary cocktail's during happy hour, and the cooked to order omelette breakfasts. It was considerably nicer than the "hotel" that was on the base in VA.

A quick rundown of my time in LA. I was surprisingly more busy there than I am normally at home.

Sunday - Arrived in LA. I soon realized that the travel office booked my hotel like 2 hours away from the class. After switching to the much closer Embassy Suites I drove over to Manhattan Beach to check it out and then ate In-N-Out.

Monday - Went to class and then drove up to Santa Monica. Got my hair cut at this little one-chair shop and bought a pair of Puma's.

Tuesday - After class I went up to Culver City for burgers and beers with my RA from freshmen year. We had a good catch up. His life makes my life look as boring as Milliard Fillmore's college years.

Wednesday - I went out and bought a new dress shirt. I had packed for the trip hungover and was short a shirt to wear, I then got sushi and a few beers with a girl I met whilst shopping.

Thursday - I watched the Michigan Basketball game over free beers and then went down to Hermosa Beach with an old friend from college. We went out drinking and I got pretty sauced. I had to take a cab home.

Friday - Took the final test and we finished at 10am. I then went to the beach and chilled for a few hours. I ate my final meal of In-N-Out and then went to the airport. I switched to an earlier flight but it had a mechanical problem and we didn't end up leaving until after the flight I was originally supposed to be on left. I finally made it home tired, hungover and smelling of In-N'-Out.

My goal was if I had to spend all day in dumb training, that I would get out and do stuff at night. I did some cool stuff, but a couple of things like getting to the Getty and driving out to Malibu I didn't have enough time or daylight for. Still it was infinitely times better than Dahlgren.

One thing about LA is that driving there is crazy. I remembered this from the last time I was there in 2007, with Mark driving the 10 while he was drunkover. Drivers in LA do things that other places would be suicidal. People accelerate until they are about to hit the car in front of them and then slam on the breaks or swerve into another lane without looking. Motorcycles just ride in between the traffic. No one uses turn signals and u-turns are commonplace everywhere. It's all par for the course. I consider myself a pretty aggressive driver, but I wouldn't hold a candle to some of the people on the 405.

I can't wait until they read this one.

Perhaps I spend too much time on my teaching evals or perhaps I am too harsh. In the mid-term evaluations I called them out for giving out a quiz to make sure that seniors in engineering could compute standard deviations.

This is from my final eval. The question is "What was the least valuable part of this course?" I sorta let it all out.

The lectures, all of the busy work. Honestly having a interim report due weeks after giving our project proposals was idiotic, especially when one of those weeks was spring break.

The emails that were sent out by the professor were unprofessional, and the emails sent out by the GSI were long winded and tiresome to read. Also, I would have appreciated it if the GSI paid attention in class instead of writing emails.

This course is supposed to integrate four years of courses and studies into one big project but often it felt like this was just a technical communication course with some engineering topics sprinkled in.

Instead of having our proposals and presentation given before the entire class where no one paid attention, I would have been much better served by sitting down with the professor and GSI and going over our project and offering advice. That way they could have given us some feedback and discussed our problems instead of just asking a few questions and moving on to the next group.

This class had the potential to be an invaluable learning experience, but instead was marred by unrealistically expectations and bothersome work by the faculty. More focus should be on the actual projects and less on the busy work and unrelated materials.

There is still much room for improvement.

Shit.

I missed my registration appointment by 75 hours.