DarqByte

So it’s the end of the year, and you know what that means! Yes, it means final exams at the end of my first MBA semester and self evaluations at work!

Food Poisoning

Unfortunately, it also means I got food poisoning… Not that it happens every year around this time. The last time this happened, Laura was either a Copy Editor or the News Editor for The Rebel Yell back when we were both in our undergrad studies at UNLV. That time was really awful, this one was just as bad.

To be truly honest, I’m not sure 100% that it was indeed food poisoning, just as back then I’m not sure what it was either. All I know is that I couldn’t keep any food or water down for very long and there were times (specifically, when I wasn’t keeping said food or water down) that I felt I was going to die. Not the most remarkable experience ever. Thus, I had to stay home from work yesterday, which I didn’t want to do, but hey… Not much I could do about it. I was pretty incapacitated.

Hell, I even considered playing some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that Laura got for me as a just-because surprise gift (She rocks! Love her!), but I couldn’t focus or concentrate enough to even do that. So I just laid on the couch, intermittently sleeping and “watching” TV and trying to eat and failing.

Today, though, I’m mostly back to normal. Still don’t feel quite right, but I can eat & drink and operate like a regular human being again. I anticipate tomorrow being 100% again.

Final Exams

So enough about food poisoning! Let’s address final exams. Rather, final exam. Just one this time around.

My Organizational Behavior class was structured with an optional final. This means that if you ended up with a decent grade, you shouldn’t take the final simply because if you do worse on the final than the grade you had going into it, you could seriously damage your grade. Thus, I checked my grade. Yeah, with that big beaming A staring me in the face, I’m not taking the final. Boo-yah!

So I only have one final then, and that’s Stats. Ugh. Not the class I want to be taking a final in. I’ve been doing alright in there and I have a shot at an A, it seems, but my group project needs to be pretty solid and I need to get roughly a C or so on the final to get the A. I think I can do it, and I really want to. I’m aiming to have the best grades of my educational career in the MBA program. So far I’ve accomplished bettering my grades at every level, having gotten a 3.4 (unweighted) in high school and a 3.56 in undergrad. If I can better that getting my MBA, then you could say I get better with age.

Self Evaluation

So it’s the end of the year and self evaluations are floating around work. That doesn’t really make me the happiest man on the planet, as I get to sift through an entire year’s worth of work to figure out what I’ve done well, what I haven’t and to note any accomplishments. That, and I’m not particularly good at being assertive and promoting myself very well.

These are things I’ve been working on improving in myself lately, with some mixed success. I figure this self evaluation will be one of my first opportunities to be more assertive and sell myself better within the company. I still haven’t moved up and I want to, so this is a prime opportunity to voice that.

I’m also never really sure how to rate myself. I never have been, really. Like when asked what my level of experience is with different technologies, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, etc. I never know what to say beyond Intermediate. I want to say Expert, but when I say Expert, I take that as meaning I’m leaps and bounds better than your average programmer with those skills and technologies. When I say I’m an expert at something, I intend to convey that I’m THE FUCKING MAN.

Indeed, that feeds into my assertiveness and self promotion. I really should give myself more credit than I usually do. I know that I’m an integral, vital part of my department here at work and that a lot of the stability here is due to me (and my tremendous boss Randy Kochis, to be sure).

I do feel that since I’ve got such an effective boss that I’m a bit overshadowed and get pigeonholed too easily. I just feel that it’s difficult to really shine in my department here at work because Randy is so good at what he does and can take on more and more responsibilities easily. He’s actually one of the people I’m trying to model some of my career after, not a bad example if I do say so myself.

So yeah, my whole point here is that self evaluations are around again and I just hope I don’t over- or under-value myself too much this year. The first year I did these I undervalued myself pretty badly when compared to my superiors’ evaluations of me, and last year I overvalued myself just slightly…

Maybe I’m just destined to be a code monkey the rest of my life??