Life in the Journey

Today I had my second class, Accounting for Lawyers. The Professor, Stanley Siegel, seems like the nicest man! Today's class was so interesting! He gave us such a rich background about accounting, it's objectives, relevance and inner-workings. I know everyone won't find it as interesting as I did, so I'll just offer one or two illustrations. The first thing he did was draw a shape on the board that looked just like a Bell Curve (even more so than this pic). He then said, think back to your childhood, what is this? I (obviously from my description) immediately thought of a Bell Curve (but sticking with my previously mentioned policy regarding hand-raising did not offer that up). Before anyone replied, he said, "If you are thinking a Bell Curve, you had a tragic childhood." Lol. Anyways, to make a long story short, it was supposed to be a snake with an elephant in it's belly. He later explained it is an illustration from the book, The Little Prince, which I have read, I just didn't recall this specific item. Anyways, he made lots of interesting points with the drawing, but the most interesting one focused on the elephant. He asked us to quantify the elephant - give it a number, bottom line. We then went over all the ways you could put a number on an elephant - it's weight, lbs of food it consumes per day, life span, gestation period, age of maturation, etc. He then made the point that even if you could provide pages and pages of number representing all of these things about the elephant, it wouldn't really tell you anything about how it feels to see an elephant, the incredible things they can do with their trunks, the effects on the jungle when they stampede (he went on, but you get the point). He then drew the analogy to the shortcomings of using financial statements to represent a firm - it is equally as illogical to think that those numbers reflect the human elements behind the firm, the work-ethic of the employees, the customer loyalty, all of the intangible things that make up an enterprise. I could go on and on about really insightful things he said in class, but I'll spare you the play-by-play.

All in all, I'd say this example really highlights my NYU experience so far. The Professors seem to go much deeper with the material than any educational experience I have had thus far. Of course, they have the luxury of doing so because we come to them with pre-established knowledge of the fundamentals, a less glamorous task that was imparted by previous Professors. All the same, I'm really glad I'm here. In some ways, I had imagined the educational experience would play second fiddle to the life lessons of living in New York, but it seems that NYU will be giving the city a run for it's money!

On a totally unrelated note, I did encounter a quite humorous challenge today - I am wearing a dress & have a backpack on my back and the backpack caused my dress to incessantly ride up! It seems the backpack was causing the dress to bunch around the small of my back and I had to vigilantly keep pulling it down in the back! So, if anyone out there has a solution to this tricky problem, I would greatly appreciate being able to share in that knowledge!