Excel Monkey for Hire

While I was in Ecuador, I read a book by Keith Ferrazzi called Who's Got Your Back. The book is about building relationships with people who will help you to reach your goals (in life, career, etc).  One of Keith's main points in the book is that one should approach new relationships with the mindset of generosity.  Ask yourself what can you offer that would help others?

 So, being the little Excel monkey that I am, I recalled that I was asked at my old company to teach all the new hires how to be good little Excel monkeys like me.  This led to me creating an Excel training tool, which was full of tips and practice exercises for keyboard shortcuts and various useful formulas and functions for beginners (nested if statements, vlookups, etc).  I thought it might be nice to offer my classmates this same training since a lot of them actually had interesting jobs where they never needed to learn Excel, and this offer was enthusiastically accepted.  Over the last 4 or 5 weeks, I have taught 4 sessions of Excel basics to classes of 12-18 people.

I've already seen a lot of dividends from this effort, because I've met a ton of people from other sections that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten to know.  The payoff got even better this Thursday though, because a group of students decided that they had seen me wearing UVA apparel too often for their tastes, so they decided to thank me for teaching Excel by giving me a Duke hat, t-shirt, and mug.  I'm pretty psyched about these, since I wanted a Duke hat anyway and a Duke tshirt and mug certainly won't go to waste. Team Fuqua strikes again.