One of the myriad reasons why I hate Kogod.

*****DISCLAIMER****** THIS IS NOT MY OFFICIAL BLOG POST FOR CLASS NEXT WED.
READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!

So I'm just sitting here watching Full Metal Alchemist and trying to think of ways I can explain to my Web Programming professor that I'm going to fail the take-home exam that's due on Friday. A take-home exam... something that by the very definition should not be challenging but should just be tedious and time consuming. But looking at this five-paged monstrosity is making my head spin. I can't even understand the questions themselves, much less fathom an actual answer.

On a brighter note: work is going pretty slow right about now. I submitted a proposal to my manager at VeriSign but I have yet to hear back from him; that's not really shocking considering how busy he is. In the last month and a half he has been in Boston, Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Cape Town (South Africa), Frankfurt and Seattle. Being the director of VeriSign's most profitable BU makes you a pretty popular guy in the company.

For those of you who don't know, I'm a product management intern at VeriSign: a company that specializes in SSL encryption. If you look at my Facebook profile I think I mentioned something like Product Marketing and or Management which are both wrong. I've just been too lazy to change it. Anyway, I suppose that the main reason that I'm writing (or typing since we should all be PC) this post is so that I can lambaste the Marketing department at Kogod. I'm taking the Principles of Marketing class and we have this "term paper" which is total crap. We have to write a five page business memo to the CEO of a company that we are "consulting for" and then write an 8 to 10 page "marketing strategy."

If there is one thing that I have come to realize from working at VeriSign is that people DO NOT have the time to read a bunch of crap on market trends, demographic shifts or statistical models. One of the projects that I am working on is market segmentation data on VeriSign's enterprise customers (basically, really big companies with lots of money) which number about 3,000. Now, shifting through 30,000 line items on an Excel spreadsheet, downloading 12,000,000 corporate profiles from Hoover's, and one month after being assigned the project, I delivered a ten minute presentation. Manager's don't want the nuts and bolts of the data. They want a concise and precise summation of it. Why do you think it is called an EXECUTIVE summary? I find it hilarious that the geniuses in Kogod think that this is the proper way to teach us how to communicate and strategize when it comes to marketing. By writing a paper??? COME ON PEOPLE! Instead, have us write a three to five page summary of our findings and then have us present an oral presentation to the "CEO" (aka professor).

That is what the CEO and the other executives at VeriSign have their employees do. I know that every corporate culture is different but I would imagine that most executives and C-level peeps at a lot of other companies would agree with this.

Well, that felt pretty damn good. I like getting things off my chest. If you managed to stomach my incessant ranting and raving and made it this far then thank you and congratulations. I know that it must have been pretty terrible to have read this.