Thursday Night Pints

We accounting Ph.D. students are a fairly tight knit bunch. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. I think you’ll find that any small group of individuals subject to the same set of rigorous and oftentimes stressful circumstances will tend to band together in support and camaraderie. One of our recent graduates did an incredible job of reaching out to me and the other “newbies” to properly acclimate us to the program. His graduation left the program without a true leader for achieving a similar level camaraderie. Well, that changed when Lane entered the program last Fall. Lane is hands down one of the most inclusive and social individuals I have met. He quickly ascended to the ranks of Ph.D. program social chair and set to work trying to pull the “F.U.N.” out of “Financial Accounting Standards Board” (trust me, it’s in there somewhere).

One of his first acts as governing social chair was instituting Thursday Night Pints, which we students affectionately call “T.N.P.” The premise of T.N.P. is simple. We meet at a Knoxville watering hole at 6pm, kick back with a few pints and some bar grub, and socialize for a couple of hours. Cara is quick to point out that school topics tend to dominate the social time. Though we try our best to steer clear, we always end up back on the topic of school. And Cara never fails to let me hear about it. Lane’s fiancée, Sarah, makes it out to join us most of the time, so she and Cara have happily bonded in their avoidance of accounting Ph.D. program boredom. Lucky them.

Early on, Lane did a bang-up job of mixing up the locations to keep the environments fresh and fun. However, late last semester he found his T.N.P. “Mecca” and he hasn’t looked back since. So, I’ll have to try and push for a little bit of variety to keep things interesting. In the meantime, we have ourselves the official T.N.P. headquarters of the Business School Ph.D. program. Before I “let the cat out of the bag” and name our current headquarters, I thought it might be fun to tour (and review) some of the more memorable T.N.P. hot spots. Here is a quick list (to whet your appetite):

• The Roaming Gnome
• Toddy’s Back Door Tavern
• Cool Beans
• Long Branch Saloon
• Downtown Grill & Brewery (DGB)
• Half Barrel
• Sidestreet Tavern
• Aubrey’s
• The Crown & Goose

Note: The above list of nine includes the name of the current T.N.P. headquarters. But, I’m keeping that a secret for now. I’ll review these prior T.N.P. destinations in a three-part mini-series in the coming weeks right here at Shenooligans, concluding with our current “world headquarters.” Oh boy!