You think you're too cool for school, well I've got a newsflash for you Walter Cronkite...you aren't.*

I started my class last night, the Human Resource class to help me pass the PHR exam. It reminded me a lot of a class I took in college my first semester, Intro to German. Just a head's up, I dropped it in the first week. The class may have said "intro" but everyone in there had taken it all through high school, I had never taken it.
I say this because last night I took my seat in the classroom, talked to a few people, and then class started. As we went around the room people stood, said their name, what they do, and what designation they were going for (PHR or SPHR). As people were talking about their ten plus years experience (okay, really, that was one person, everyone else was in the 20+ years) I grew more nervous. I was the baby. It wasn't just that I only have two and half years experience (not counting my year as a trainer even though I was in the HR department) but I was beginning to wonder if I was doing this all prematurely. Would the instructor get to me, let me ramble and then say, "Are you sure you're supposed to be in this class?" My kidneys began to ache, my heart beat rapidly, my palms were sweaty - and then it was my turn, "Hi, I'm Jessica, um, I'm actually an HR assistant and um, I am here for the PHR." I refused to tell them my amount of experience. I spent the next ten minutes waiting for my kidneys to stop hurting.
After we wasted the first hour we got into the meat of the course...except it was just the instructor reading quickly through the manual. I hate when teachers do that, they do it at church all the time. You read it before, let's talk about the important stuff and if you are talking and I look down at the book and see that you are just reading random sentences that pop out to you I'm going to stop listening. I can't even really follow because you jump all over the page. I know I need to work on that, but why waste the time? My homework is to read the whole first book before Monday (186 pages), why focus in class only to have to read the same thing later? But I did try to focus, I want to do well, I want to get it over in one shot. The exam itself is about $300...I don't want to have to take that thing twice.
The instructor of course, put me at ease when she let me know that the PHR and SPHR seem to take great pride in their failure rating. Phew, I was worried the test would be easy. We wouldn't want me stressing out about it or anything. It certainly didn't help that she told us at the beginning of class that she has never taught before.
A positive thing about having no experience is that many of the 20+ people have tried to take it once or twice already and they miss by a few points and they kept saying how the exam is not real world, there is a difference between real world and what the book says. Hallelujah, I don't know much about real world HR yet, so I should be able to learn this stuff without the distraction of how it's done in the real world.
Wish me luck folks, I have a 41% chance of failing.