• My First Time Getting Knocked OUT
• Undefeated Champions
• What a save! Wait…he’s not the goalie!
• The Fumberception
• The One Man Tackling Army
• 46 -6

Read the full post at Sports Fan 4 for all the historic details.

Being relatively smoke-free for more than six months now I’m here to tell you about the immense benefits of not smoking and how to quit smoking in less than one minute. There’s simply too much material to cover in one post so we’ll have a 3-4 part series about cigarettes, their dangers and how to quit. Today let’s go through some of my personal history. Next we’ll talk about the pros and cons of smoking, focusing on health, economics, and time. Finally, we’ll discuss how to quit smoking in less than one minute. If you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed, now would be a good time to subscribe!

For the first 18 years of my life I never smoked a cigarette and was very adamant about the dangers of smoking and trying to get people around me to quit. When I was a little kid there was one or two incidents where I threw a cup of water at my step-father while he was smoking. Needless to say I quickly figured out this was not a very good strategy! I’d also see my mom smoking on very rare occasions and would take the cigarette from her and threaten that I’d start smoking it if she didn’t put it out. So, you can see I was certainly not a smoker, knew the dangers and publicly promoted not smoking.

Alas, a few months into my freshman semester at the University of Southern California, I got a little too drunk and ended up smoking a cigarette and enjoying it. Though I smoked on only very rare occasions for a few months, eventually I degraded to being a pack a day smoker. The low point came that summer, while working for my step-dad as a construction worker, I smoked nearly two packs a day!

The next school year, I incidentally transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, home of Tobacco Road. Though I didn’t repeat the mistakes of smoking two packs a day I still smoked way too much. Even as a poor college student, I could easily find ways to scrounge up the $2-$2.25 for a pack of smokes. Yup, they are dirt-cheap there as much of America’s tobacco is grown in the region.

So my drunken slip turned into a habit and six years later at the age of 24 I was still smoking nearly a pack a day. At this point though my desire to quit was growing exponentially every day. A few incidents pushed me past the tipping point. In January of this year I quit smoking cold turkey. I had one relapse, which I expected to happen, but it only served to further convince me that not smoking is clearly the right move. Seven months into my smoke-free existence and I’m wicked happy and healthy. Buying and riding a bicycle personally helped me remember to keep my lungs clear and over the course of this series we’ll discuss similar strategies for kicking the habit and staying clean. Remember to sign up for the RSS feed or e-mail updates to stay up to date.

University of Massachusetts at Amherst Network Stats:

No suprises here, Sublime and Family Guy top their respective charts, half the school is apparently not interested (or at least not affiliated) in politics, maybe that has something to do with the fact that a 1/3 of the campus is single and on the prowl?

Northeastern University Network Stats:

Northeastern has some similarities with Umass, a lot actually. 1/3 of the campus is single and 1/2 are not affiliated with a political view, the top TV show is Family Guy and the top book, like Umass is Harry Potter.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Network Stats:

Hey, here’s something interesting, UNC has only 1% less students who call themselves “liberal” (18%) than Northeastern and Umass (both at 19%)! Harry Potter once again tops the books list, but the Bible (something not on either of the other two networks) comes in at #2! facebook also backs up the popular claim that there are more girls than boys at the campus (46% female to 35% male).

In general, all three campuses have pretty much the same interests even though they have slightly different demographics. There’s some grumblings on the Northeastern network page about the “masculinity” of their campus due to Jack Johnson being the #1 musical artist but at least they don’t have Coldplay topping their charts like UNC! Sorry Coldplay fans, no me gusta…and of course Ben Folds joins the top ten list (they are from Chapel Hill), and the Fray make it into UNC’s top ten list.

University of Southern California Network Stats:

From my personal experience at USC, the campus was a great source of new music and movies as many of the students had connections within the music industry either through friends in bands, or internship experience and of course the USC Film School is one of the best such programs in the country so I was expecting for USC’s musical and cinematic preferences to be different from other schools, yet the facebook network stats doesn’t back up this hypothesis. There are some slight differences, for instance USC has Gladiator and Zoolander in it’s top ten movies and John Mayer in it’s top ten music list, but other than those two slight differences, USC students like the same things UNC, Umass, and Northeastern students like. Not a very groundbreaking statement there, considering how students from everywhere attend schools everywhere and we’re all so connected it’s tough not to watch the same movies and listen to the same songs.

Let’s see if these stats change any for the City of Boston network:

Aaargh, Coldplay at #1 again. Other than Rap and R&ampB making their way into the top ten list, there’s not much of a difference between the Boston network page and the four colleges we’ve looked at. Looking at a few of the other cities across the country generally leads to the same results. There are differences in musical tastes between say Cincinatti, Ohio and Boston, Massachusetts but not a huge difference. What does this conformity say about our society? Are we all really that similar?

Although I had an amazing time at USC, I decided to transfer to a more competitive business school, and enrolled the next year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I performed poorly there in a few classes outside the business major (due to poor attendance more than anything else) and was thus denied admission the the Kenan-Flagler business school, even though I performed extremely well in my business classes (usually in the top 2-3 of the class). Due to the Kenan-Flagler’s inflexibility and personal issues I was struggling with at the time, I decided to withdraw from UNC-Chapel Hill in the middle of Spring 2005 semester and move back home to Boston.

I then worked some odd jobs, such as loading trucks in a Home Depot warehouse and valeting at the Boston Harbor Hotel (a very nice hotel in Boston, highly recommenced for anyone with the money to splurge) before landing a job temping at the State Street Corporation (here’s the wiki on SSC) in Quincy, MA (my second stint at State Street, I also worked for them for a very short time as a high school intern many years ago) in October 2005. SSC is a global custodian (basically a bank for mutual funds and other institutional investors) with nearly $11 trillion assets under custody and $1.5 trillion assets under management. I came into SSC to assist in finalizing the integration of Deutsche Bank’s custodial business onto State Street’s books, which was acquired in March of 2003. Being an accounting and finance geek, I was very happy to be working on such a high-profile project.

Having stabilized my professional life and found a job I enjoyed, I decided it was a good time to go back to school part-time and enrolled in two online classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, Management Accounting and a Communications class. I was considering, at the time of re-enrolling at UNC-Chapel Hill as I wanted to prove to the school, myself, and friends and family that I could earn a degree from their Kenan-Flagler school.

After doing a lot of thinking, I decided it was impractical to go back to UNC-Chapel Hill as it would add to my massive debt (whereas if I stayed at SSC, they would cover the cost of tuition) and add a lot of stress to my life as I had a multitude of problems with UNC-CH’s administration. I stayed un-enrolled until SSC’s tuition benefits would kick in, 6 months after my hire date. On April, 10, 2006 I became a full-fledged State Street employee and would become eligible for tuition benefits in 6 months.

I then took two classes at Northeastern University in Boston, Financial Reporting & Analysis and Business Law in the second half of the Fall 2006 semester (both courses were 6 week intensive courses). I originally wanted to take classes at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but my tuition reimbursement eligibility did not kick until after the Umass-Amherst classes already started for the Fall ’06 semester.

Finally, I come to my point for this post; I’m currently enrolled in the online Bachelor’s degree of Business Administration, with a focus on Management, at Umass-Amherst. Due to my extensive experience with college coursework at multiple institutions, I can be a great evuluator of the effectiveness of the online program at Umass-Amherst (although admittedly biased). My thesis is that the educational value of my Umass coursework will at least match the value I received from USC, UNC-Chapel Hill and Northeastern.

I’ll be posting essays, solutions and other classwork from my previous and current classes in the Education section. I’ll also periodically comment on my progress in posts. I welcome any comments on the coursework I post in the Education section and will eventually formulate a conclusion. If I find that the value of the online program is lacking, I will let everyone know, but so far after completing one course and currently taking two courses, the evidence is supporting my thesis. In fact, the Principles of Management course I already completed was one of the most educational classes I’ve ever taken!