Sat, 2-11-17
Part I:
For
those of you who have not yet been informed, one month ago today, January 11th,
I slipped and fell on the ice on the sidewalk in front of my house, fracturing
my left elbow. It was at the time a
simple fracture which a cast would have properly remedied in about six
weeks. And had things in fact gone that
way, it would have been a rather simple scenario that would not at all have
interfered with my plans that had been four years in the making to begin the
formal 14 month course work in the Certified Financial Planning program at
Oakland University starting February 1st. But things did not go that way. Not at all!
The
moment I fell the pain was so excruciating that I was certain I had broken my
arm and could see that my elbow had shifted about two inches. Fortunately, I was right in front of my
doctor’s office at the time of the fall (the office is directly next door to my
house, convenient yes?) and they immediately sent me to Keego Urgent Care where
the doctor equally immediately concluded that it was not a fracture at all but
a simple hematoma which would heal in a week or so. The doctor said the x-ray revealed no damage
to the bone. That was a relief to hear
though I couldn’t believe that a hematoma could hurt so much. But a quick look at a medical encyclopedia
revealed that a hematoma can in fact be just as painful as a fracture. So I had no reason to doubt the doctor’s
diagnosis. The bottom line was that
school would start in 3 weeks and I would be fine in a week and that’s all I
cared about.
But a
week later I was a long way from being fine, a very long way. So the following Friday I went back and this
time saw a different doctor at Urgent Care, this one a bone specialist. This guy took one look at my “hematoma” and
said it was indeed a fracture. I was
told that past Wednesday that a radiologist would be in later that day to take
another look at the x-ray to make sure nothing was missed. I was never called so I assumed they found no
further abnormalities. Now the bone
specialist is telling me that the first x-ray was too blurry to make anything
out and he took another which showed the fracture. He explained it was just a hairline fracture
and if I wasn’t particularly active I could just ignore it and it would heal
itself. But if I wished to have an
active lifestyle, then I should have surgery as the bone would require a few
screws to properly heal for full function.
Of course, I wanted full function.
I work out regularly. I do push
ups and lift weights. Of course I want
an active life style,
So they
phoned my primary who referred me to a bone specialist in Waterford who could
do the surgery. Since I was receiving
this news at 7 p.m. on a Friday evening, I would have to wait until Monday to
call the surgeon. On Monday, I was given
an appointment Wednesday for the surgeon to examine me and determine when to
schedule the surgery.
And
that is how it came to be that I ended up walking around for two weeks with a
broken arm without the benefit of having it treated. Fortunately the pain was tolerable most of
the time except that my left arm is my dominant arm so, being forced to do
everything with my right arm of which I had little control, it was a frequent
occurrence that my right arm would start shaking and that would tense my whole
body up, all the tension of which would go right to my left elbow. And that was excruciating. I had a good deal of anxiety about losing my
balance and falling since a fall would be a hundred times more painful,
something I didn’t want to even think about.
The grand consolation is that the two doctors had assured me that it was
not a serious injury. If I fell again,
it would hurt like hell but at least not cause further injury.
That
all changed Wednesday morning, January 25th, when I was examined by
the surgeon, Dr. Brenda Sanford, who x-rayed and immediately informed me that
it was indeed a very serious fracture, not hairline at all but a clear-through
fracture, and that with two weeks of not so much as even a splint to protect it,
it had now gotten considerably worse. (She
was furious that two doctors had examined me and not seen this major
fracture.) The two bone fragments had in
fact separated by an inch. It was so
serious that she scheduled surgery for 7:30 a.m. the next day, giving me the
strongest admonition not to have another spill in the 20 hours left before the
surgery as such would have very dire consequences. She didn’t come right out and say it in so
many words but the language she used was sufficiently extreme to leave no other
impression – another spill before she was able to fix it might result in losing
the arm. Now even walking across the
room became a very frightening experience as I felt so unsteady that any little
thing could potentially knock me off my feet.
But I
did get through the 20 hours okay not excepting the terrific anxiety and was
even blessed with fair weather the next morning so there was nothing slippery
to traverse between my porch and Val’s car.
The surgery went fine and now I was under an even stronger admonition
for the next week to allow the healing to begin. As she put it, “if you have another trauma
and undo all my good work, that will complicate things a hundred times worse
than if you had no surgery at all. So Be Careful!” I was in an enormous bandage and looked and
felt just like a cast that kept my arm ramrod straight all that week.
Prior to the surgery I at least had
some very limited use of my left hand.
Now I had none. It was an extreme
challenge trying to do anything with only my right hand. Everything was tough, some things
impossible. For instance, if not for Val
loosening the caps on my medicine bottles, I would never have been able to take
my prescriptions. Eating was strictly
finger food, nothing that I could not hold in my right hand. Taking the cap off the toothpaste was
impossible. I couldn’t open a can of
soup, nor for that matter even microwave a frozen dinner since you need two
hands to (a) pull the wrapper off and (b) carry it from the microwave. And I had exercises to do all day long,
namely wiggle my fingers and move my hand and wrist as much as possible.
A week ago Wednesday, the big
bandage came off and the doctor was very pleased with my progress. There had been a danger of nerve damage that
might compromise my ability to keep doing the workouts and … yes, restrict my
piano playing. At the time of the
surgery, she had told me it might be a couple months before they could evaluate
the true extent of the damage. But on
that Wednesday last, she already confidently told me that I would have full
function again, she’d be sending me back to the gym in two months and I could
play the piano all I want, all the way to Carnegie Hall. At least I did not have to give up my plans
to continue the lessons through to all the advanced courses.
A week ago I was not able to bend
my arm more than 90 degrees. As of
today, I am within inches of touching my
mouth and can even get a fork up there now with great effort (and pain.) My instructions have been to use the arm as
much as possible and, with the initial healing done, I no longer need fear
further injuring the arm which has taken a great load off my mind and made me
much more relaxed.
Part II:
Which brings us to the “change of
life” part of this story, even though until a week ago Wednesday, that change
of life could have meant giving up a fully functioning arm and probably giving
up ever becoming an advanced pianist. Of
course, as soon as I was told by the doctor at Urgent Care that it was indeed a
fracture and that I was looking at a two month recovery, I immediately
contacted Oakland University for their assessment of whether I should drop out
of the financial planning program for another year or if they could somehow
accommodate me. The first class was
going to be on income tax and I was very pleasantly surprised to find the tax
instructor being quite willing to let me take the entire class by webinar in my
living room since I could not attend campus until April.
The
question was would I even have the physical capacity to do a webinar (besides
the energy factor of being glued to the computer for 3-1/2 hours every
Wednesday all through February and March, I still had no ability to write or
take notes and did not know when I would.)
The instructor was quite happy to cut me slack for the first two weeks,
but after that I’d have to be all in.
Thus I made a simple inquiry to the director of the program: since I won’t know how much function I’ll
have for at least two to three weeks, will I be able to get a refund of the
tuition based on medical grounds if it turns out I just can’t physically do the
work until April.
I was
registered for the class, paid up, and had purchased the text e-book
online. As of 10 p.m., Tuesday night
January 31st, I had every intention of doing my best to tune in to
the first webinar 6 p.m. Wednesday night February 1st . I had looked over the 1,200 page textbook that
we would be covering in 7 weeks but, according to the syllabus, we’d be covering
just 800 pages which averaged 20 pages per day, something I felt I could
handle. Then shortly after 10 p.m., I
get a response to my inquiry regarding refunds and am urged by both the
program’s director and my mentor to withdraw from the program. Certainly there was the practical
consideration that the course would be so intense that it was not be doable while
recovering from surgery. The initial
recommendation was to simply withdraw now and rejoin the program in April,
repeating the tax class next February.
But when I expressed doubts about how that would work given the fact
that February and March of next year would be prepping for and taking the
two-day national exam, (how could I do the tax class and the exam prep at the
same time?), I received a second email urging me in strong terms to withdraw
from the program permanently on the rationale that the program was designed for
professionals with industry experience and that I decidedly lacked such
experience. The recommendation was to go
to a different school that did not require experience and the names of two
reputable institutions were offered where I would take the classes online and
completely at my own pace.
Four
years of preparation with particularly intense preparation during 2016 were now
off the tracks. This all started 15
years ago when I first began observing that all my fellow MBA classmates were
finding it progressively more difficult to continue careers if interrupted by a
layoff after age 50. By age 55, all of
my classmates including everyone I knew from high school who had pursued MBA
careers had been forced into early retirement.
In the depths of the Great Recession, this could not have come at a
worse time and it took most of them over two years to find new positions, none
of which were on par with the old. But
they were still okay. Between their
golden parachutes, their pensions, their reduced expenses from having houses
paid off and kids out of college, their new positions combined with these other
benefits just about put them even with their former lives.
But it
did give me pause seeing them all drop like flies. One thing I had never considered in my life
was that the MBA might have an expiration date.
Now it appeared that was precisely the case. Thus is why I approached the business faculty
at Oakland University four years ago with this simple question: I want to keep working but it seems the MBA
is no longer marketable. I have a strong
skill set, but how I can use it in a capacity where I won’t be forced to retire? They immediately jumped on the CFP. In that initial meeting with the then program
director, I was told four things: (a) as
a financial advisor, you can work until you drop; (b) the CFP is one occupation
in which there is no age discrimination.
In fact, due to the 20,000 baby boomers who are retiring every month,
many without adequate means to live another 20 to 30 years, CFP’s in their 60s
are in very high demand since your average retiree would rather hire an older
advisor than trust some 20-something kid fresh out of school. (c) With the MBA I have such a strong
background already that I need only take five courses rather than what was then
a two-year program, and (d) as soon as I am enrolled in the program, they will
immediately place me with a financial services firm (within a few days) so that
I can begin my two-year work requirement, then finishing it just about the same
time that I’ll be passing the national exam.
Due to
the burden of the enormous executor work, I could not entertain entering the
program until about a year ago. By then
the world had changed. It was no longer
a matter of taking five classes at my leisure.
In fact, I had planned to just start the program last spring, take one
course, see how it went, then decide the rest of it. Then things got even better. I was informed in 2014 that they had
redesigned the program into six 7-week modules that you could take in any
sequence and at any time. That was wonderful. Now I could enroll at virtually any time,
take one 7-week class, then take a couple months off for a long overdue
vacation, then finish the rest of it.
That had been my intention until January of last year. Then I got an email from them that once again
changed everything.
This
was the announcement that the program would now be an uninterrupted 14 month
cohort where you would take all six courses in sequence back-to-back, then two months of intensive
test prep followed by the two-day, 12 hour national exam in March. So last January I had to prepare myself to
begin the 14-month program in February.
I signed up. Fortunately there
was an orientation in mid-January that once again changed everything.
At that
orientation, I was advised that I did not have sufficient experience to enter
the program. They did however have a
rather attractive alternative. I could
take a special 7-week intro class that would then be followed by a two-month
part-time internship. The class plus the
internship would be considered sufficient background for me to be accepted into
the cohort beginning February 2017 … that is, now!
Then
things changed again! Turned out there
were insufficient enrollments for the intro class so they canceled it and
replaced it with a one-on-one mentor program for seven weeks. The mentor program was really quite wonderful
except that my mentor could not schedule weekly meetings. Thus the seven weeks, which started last May
15th, stretched into late September. There
was also a fair amount of stress involved because one of the mentor’s
requirements is that we take and pass a 10 question exam each session covering
all the assigned material (usually 100-150 pages) and, as a sign of our good
faith and commitment, we were expected to have the material studied with
sufficient mastery to pass the exam each time. One F probation, 2 F’s and we were out.
Since the exam questions were taken
directly from the national exam database, they were not introductory questions
at all, but very tough. Since the class
was a prerequisite for the internship and the internship was a prerequisite for
the cohort, failing now would mean that I would not be admitted to the
cohort. So every session brought the
possibility that I would be expelled.
The material was voluminous and complicated and, after being given an
estimate of 3 hours per week of study the first day of class, I actually ended
up putting in four to five times that much.
Plus there was the added frustration that so much material was covered
in such a short period that I had many more questions than answers but the classes
were so brief that there was no time for more than one or two questions. I was hoping the cohort would be more
deliberately paced.
The
good news is that I got along great with my mentor, Tom, and he genuinely
seemed to be quite impressed with me as well.
The material was fascinating, so though it was very burdensome, I
thoroughly enjoyed it and regretted only the fact that it was so rushed that
there was no time for any in-depth questions.
I finished the mentor program with flying colors. Tom had spent much of the 16 weeks getting to
know me since, as he was also in charge of the intern program, his job was to
find an job placement for me that would be a very solid fit for my
background. Since he knew I had a great
deal of background in writing and video production, he had been hinting that he
would be placing me with a firm that produced financial training
materials. What an ideal fit that would
have been.
Again,
in the end, it didn’t work out that way, not even close! I felt for sure that at minimum he would be
identifying companies for me that were looking for older candidates with MBA
backgrounds. Nope! In fact, in three months, he gave me just two
leads. One was for a company in Ann
Arbor that required me to go through HR in Indiana which, in turn, required me
to create a web site and produce a ten minute video explaining why I wanted to
work for them. I produced a killer ten
minute video which killed two weeks of my time and, within hours of submitting,
received an odd one-line email saying that they did not feel I was qualified
for ANY position in their company. (Did
they even understand that I was only applying for the specific position of a
two-month part-time internship and only in their Ann Arbor office? Really, when sitting on the other side of the
desk, it’s really quite difficult to have any respect for HR departments; they
seem completely worthless.) In that
short of time, they could not have possibly reviewed my material, let alone
share with the Ann Arbor office. No, there
was only one reasonable explanation.
They got one look at me, saw I was over 50, and wanted nothing more to
do with me. I could see that my mentor
did not do much to line me up with a good fit.
The
second lead was no more productive but at least much less time consuming. This time the company was in Southfield and
the guy said he’d be happy to meet with me and would get back to me in a couple
weeks. I never heard from him
again. My suspicion is he looked me up
on LinkedIn, saw from my photo that I was obviously over 50 and that’s all he
needed to know. Unfortunately, the two
weeks coincided with my accident so I have not yet been able to follow up. I still intend to but do not have high
hopes.
What is
the lesson from all this? It would seem
that everything that one professor told me four years ago was either not at all
true or is no longer. I have either been
lead astray or the world and Oakland University very much changed in the last
four years. Of course, the biggest thing
on which I was lead astray was the fact that successful completion of the
mentor program would qualify me for the cohort.
I was so encouraged all the way up until 10 p.m. that Tuesday night two
weeks ago. The tax professor was being
so nice and optimistically opining that … of course I could handle his
class. I was fully prepared to do all
the webinars and then formally join the cohort to do the rest of the program,
beginning with the insurance class in April.
So the
emails that came in after 10 p.m. threw me.
In the space of one day, I had gone from being definitely in to being
definitely out, now on the rationale not that it was unrealistic to do the
class while recovering from surgery, but rather that my MBA background was in
no way relevant to this program. I’m
really wondering why they didn’t just come right out and say so last
January. I could have started the online
program at Kaplan University a year ago and maybe even be done with it by
now. That has been my primary
frustration with Oakland University since the beginning. Every single faculty member from whom I have
solicited information about the program has given me completely different
answers. And, so far, none have been
accurate.
Until
Wednesday afternoon February 1st when the tax professor was kind
enough to grant me a telephone meeting to help me decide whether I should stay
in his class. We had a very nice talk
for about twenty minutes and, since it occurred to me that neither the director
nor Tom really knew a whole lot about my MBA background, I gave this professor
the whole nine yards about my 37 years experience in financial management, 15
with the Fortune 50. And then I put the
question to him directly: do you agree
with the director when she says that none of this is relevant to a career in
the financial services industry? None of
this prepares me to be successful in the cohort? And he said that he did agree with the
director. That was another complete
turnaround from all the encouragement he had been giving me up to that
point.
Then he finally told me the truths
I had been looking for during the past year.
Was it true that 3 hours outside of class each week would be all the
study that would be required? No, not at
all, unless you were already a tax professional. The average student puts in about 8 hours per
week but, for those like me without much background, they are putting in more
than 20 hours per week and are still struggling. The program is designed for those who are
already professionals. There is an
enormous amount of material to cover in just seven weeks. In addition to the 800 pages in the text
book, an additional 1500 pages of supplemental materials would be
assigned. And since two presentations
are required, one in late February, one in late March, I would have to come to
campus on at least those occasions; I could not webinar the entire course. Once again, I was being given a total
turnaround.
But at least now I felt I was being
given some reliable facts. I was feeling
much relieved that I was withdrawing and feeling that perhaps the self-paced
program at Kaplan would indeed be the best alternative. Tom agreed that I should drop the tax class
but that doesn’t mean that he agrees I should be out of the cohort, even though
I’m thinking I want to be out anyway.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that he is no longer available to be my
mentor or find a suitable job placement for me.
Of course, it may mean just that.
When I am recovered, I will get back in touch with him to see if he is
still available to mentor me or if I’m out on my own now. My suspicion is that it will be the
former.
But even if it is the latter, the
intro class and mentor program were very rewarding and productive. I got the entire 14 month program squeezed
into as many weeks and feel this intensive overview was most useful, certainly
worth the $200 I paid for the text books.
I will continue to study those books as I continue to progress. But now I have plenty of time to regroup and
consider my next move. I have been
thinking for a long time about taking the 6 week online IRS course and getting
licensed to be a tax preparer, something I would be very comfortable with and
would count as experience for the CFP. I
can also take the 6-week online Series 7 broker’s licensing class since passing
that exam will certainly make it easier for a job placement to start my work
requirement. And, when I’m ready, I’ll
try to pick up with Tom where we left off if he is game.
Right now, I have a two-month
vacation to rest on my laurels and consider future steps, and may end up having
a good deal longer than that. I have
lots of time to decide whether to go the Kaplan route or some other option …
or, as I will explain in the next section, an entirely new direction.
Part III:
It may
have taken 23 years to complete “Ash Wednesday” but it is now appearing to have
been time well spent. In mid-January I
was named a quarter-finalist in the WeScreenplay competition in Los Angeles in
which the judge ranked my script in the top 6 percent of the more than 1,000
screenplays submitted. At the end of
January, I was named a semi-finalist in which the judge placed me in the top 1
percent. On February 17th, I
find out if I’m being advanced to the finals.
The judge for the finals did not give me as high a ranking as the other
two but did give the script a “Consider” which is the second highest accolade
they give out and which I think they said automatically advances you. I’ll find out in five more days.
Of the
40 odd scripts out of over 1,000 that will chosen as finalists, four will be
chosen as winners in March. The prize
for the winners is that their scripts will be sent to agencies for
consideration of representation. My
guess is that if these scripts represent the top 1/10 of 1%, that should be
enough to secure representation. If I’m
lucky enough to get an agent out of this and if said agent can sell the
screenplay for even close to what screenplays go for these days (generally 5%
of a film’s budget, which will be a very nice payday even it’s relatively low
budget), I may be at liberty to finally launch my career as a writer and waylay
this entire financial advisement thing until a later date. Not that I want to abandon it completely, I
still want to start and manage my own fund, but it’s nice to know that options
might be there,
My success
with WeScreenplay has also motivated me to enter the most prestigious
screenplay contest in the industry, The Austin Film Festival Screenplay
Competition. In this case, I’ll be up
against about 10,000 other scripts.
Again, the winners will be given representation and quite possibly even
a production deal. So my accident and
subsequent withdrawal from Oakland University’s CFP may end up being a blessing
in disguise. As all these other
potentially life-changing opportunities are in gestation, if there is to be
fruition it will all happen while I am taking my time pondering my next
move.
Stay tuned. The next big step may be taking place as soon
as five more days.
No comments:
Post a Comment