After a 32 year career with PwC I wanted to try one more thing. I had 4 ideas as to what I wanted to do for Retirement 1.0. Two fizzled out quickly, one did not materialize and one stuck.

I earned a contract to deliver a course at the University of Minnesota in the Carlson School of Management. The course is titled IDSc 3104 Enterprise Systems, a 2 credit course delivered over 8 weeks in the second half of a semester (B Term), offered 3 times in the fall and twice in the spring. It delves into large business transaction systems, focusing on one used by very large companies, SAP. If you are getting a Management Information Systems (MIS) degree you may take this your junior year and if you are working on an MIS minor, you likely take it your senior year. MIS majors their junior year in the fall are far more enjoyable to teach than MIS minors in their senior year in spring about to graduate.

I have met people over the years with a strong desire to lecture at a university. This was not top of mind for me and certainly not a goal when wrapping up my time at PwC. I regularly guest lectured at an introduction to IT class at Carlson, which entailed speaking to a couple class sections during one week per semester. Practically, it had a recruiting dimension, but it also felt good to be in front of students conveying the benefits of pursuing a career similar to mine. After leaving PwC, I had the opportunity to shadow a professor and the energy of being on campus felt like it would be a great opportunity to give back and fulfill a purpose I may not have realized was available for me to fill.

The time and effort to deliver a university class is much harder than I imagined. I did not think it would be easy, but since most my materials were inherited from the previous lecturer, I would be assigned a Teacher’s Assistant (TA) to handle most grading, and an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) for each section to assist students with hands on exercises, I did not think it would be too hard. However, preparing and practicing enough to feel comfortable owning a room averaging 40 students who are counting on you to fulfill their learning needs is no small effort. There is also the administrative burden to be the recipient of 200 students in my 5 sections. Between illness, illness of family members, religious holidays, accommodation coordination, and a host of miscellaneous questions along with those who should have gone to the TA or the UTA is a much more time consuming effort than I would have thought.

Not often, but from time to time I have heard someone make the comment about how easy teachers have it. There are what seem like rather naive points of view on the limited hours of teaching and all the time off during seasonal breaks, especially summer. The next person who makes this comment near me will likely get an ear full. The course design, prep, delivery, student interaction and grading are serious time commitments and big energy drains. And I am teaching college juniors and seniors, so I cannot even fathom what it takes to teach at the elementary and high school levels.

Overall, a great experience. However, the next time you are introduced to a teacher, please thank them for what they do and comment on how hard their job must be.

At the beginning of the year we were able to get away to Santa Barbara, CA where my daughter attends college. The motivation for the trip was to celebrate her and her twin sisters’ 21st birthdays. I did not expect to be celebrating their 21st with them as I would certainly not have thought about celebrating my 21st with my parents. It was a celebration where I had so much I had to give some back. Right on the cobblestone streets at the Landing in St. Louis, back in 1989 when it had a vibrant bar / restaurant scene.

My sister-in-law Carrie was able to join, which is always great to have her along. She stayed with us for the couple months at the beginning of Covid and is certainly a member of our family. Santa Barbara is as beautiful a place as you would expect. The place we rented had bikes, so were able to do a nice campus tour by bike and it was not too far from the ocean, so we had some very pleasant walks.

I feel in past trips we were more about the hiking or getting out to surrounding wine country. This visit was more focused on seeing Santa Barbara. There are some great restaurants in this town and we ate well on this visit. The Lark and Sama Sama Kitchen were both amazing. If I did reviews I would give them both 5 stars.

The eve of their birthday there was party at their apartment. I spend $150 on alcohol and Angie and I were treated like royalty. They wanted to go to a bar at midnight, so we went to a speakeasy style place nearby called the The Imperial Lounge. A super trippy place that seemed like it was out of a David Lynch film. A great find and fun to have cocktails with the group.

If ever in Santa Barbara, I cannot say enough great things about Lotusland. It is an amazing property with so many varietals of plant life and overall great background story. Highly recommended, but unfortunately it was closed that time of year. I will plan to go every time I visit.

I am recommitting to blogging for the second time. Hopefully the last. This medium seems right for me. As many who blog, I have soured on social media and overall enjoy story telling and long form writing / journalism.

I have been fairly good at goal achievement, so I have had to do some soul searching why I have not been consistent with this blogging goal. In the past, I have found the best way to achieve a goal is to put it out into the world - mainly to family and friends. The fear of telling those close to me I did not achieve a goal is typically enough motivation to put in the work towards achieving the goal. With blogging, I seem to be over indexed on getting a style right prior to sharing it. Therefore, I am going to commit to creating a couple more posts this month and send a message to family and friends introducing my blog. Once it is out there, hopefully I will become a more consistent blogger.

I need to share some thoughts on books recently read, recent trips, and other random thoughts I have gathered.