Strategic Implementation, Nexen CSR Case Competition, Halloween

The Implementation course has started and is going great. Professor Tina Dacin plans for many activities in class and really gets it going. She's bold and straighforward, but fun at the same time. The course deals with the details of implementing change, and has a lot to do with the organizational behaviour and leadership courses that we had earlier on in the program. In addition to a lot of case analyses in class and in teams, the major individual assignment requires us to come up with an idea for a social change, and an execution plan. It should be very interesting to see what people come up with.

Last Thursday and Friday, Nexen came to host a case competition. I wasn't involved, but it was a great success, and you can read all about it here.

Friday also happened to be the day before Halloween. After the case competition, the school took us out to Fort Fright at Fort Henry, for a frightening tour and dinner, which were excellent. Because we're split into 2 classes, we don't get to see much of the other class, so it was good to spend time together. All had a good time.

Managing IT, Negotiations, Finance Strategy, International Business, Nicholas Boothman

So we started a new module last week! And of course I neglected posting anything, but I'll blame it on having a full day of classes on Saturday. :p

Professor Jim McKeen teaches Managing IT, and uses a textbook that he's written. Professor David Detomasi teaches International Business. The reason I mention these courses together is because they're very similar in terms of teaching method and style. They both have an emphasis on cases, and both professors are great at capturing the class's attention and engaging the students.

Finance Strategy is taught by Professor Wei Wang, who's young and energetic, and if I'm going to HAVE to take yet another finance course (*sighs*), it won't do me any further harm to take it from him. As someone who has neither interest nor ability in anything finance-related, I even managed to enjoy his class sometimes.

Professor Rick Jackson came out of retirement to teach Negotiations. It's an interesting course, we did a negotiation simulation in the first class.

Strategic Implementation has yet to start.

Overall this module is definitely qualitative, even finance is going to focus on strategies more than formulas. The lectures are all very interesting and there's a lot to be learned, but again I'm not looking forward to the writing components. I'm also going to be off to do some finance right now - at least I'll make an attempt to not stay behind.

On Saturday Nick Boothman came to give a workshop on - for lack of a better description - effectively connecting with people. It was a good workshop, and the career centre also ordered his books for those of us who attended. There has been some changes going on in the career centre the past couple of months, but whatever it is, I think it's for the better.

Exams, Interviews, Outlook

I thought I had blogged last weekend, but I guess not. Exams last week were not much of a surprise - they were okay for people who devoted massive amounts of time to studying, which is almost nobody. I won't go into a rant here about people who could in fact afford the time to study. The rest of us in survival mode weren't slaughtered, but our ol' rankings are definitely taking a hit.

Getting invitations to first and second round interviews have been incredibly competitive, and many are disappointed by reality. But life goes on, and it's not the end of the world to do job search on your own outside of OCR.

I'm in a quasi-panicking mode, looking at work for the next module. We're definitely shifting to the qualitative components and I don't know how I'm going to write all those papers. I've been able to wing it so far, but it is incredibly difficult and takes unbelievably long for me to write anything (yes, that includes this blog). No idea how to deal with multiple papers. I guess we shall see.

Exams, Interviews

This past week we had exams in management accounting, finance, and marketing. In this module, I (and a number of us) felt slightly "disconnected", for lack of a better word. In our previous courses where we've had exams, we've also had assignments that closely resembled exam questions, so that if you understood the assignments, you would have little trouble with the exams. This module, on the other hand, bombarded us with presentation and report assignments that didn't have much to do with preparing for the exams. There were problem sets that somewhat resembled the exam problems, but they weren't to be handed in, and honestly, most people wouldn't have had time to look at them while doing all the assignments and career stuff. As a result, studying for the exams was more difficult than it had been in the previous modules.

We have the coming week off, so many are rejuvenating, many have gone away on trips, and many others have interviews. Making it back to Kingston for on-campus interviews in the middle of the week off isn't very appealing, but we suck it up.

Career Stuff, Exams

The last couple of weeks have been filled with employer info sessions, networking, and job applications. Many people have also been invited to interviews. For me personally, there has been no time whatsoever to do any studying, except to help write and read the last couple of team report assignments of this module. Next week is exam week, I've now been studying management accounting for three hours, and let's just say, outlook not so good. One definitely needs a fine balance and to prioritize between job search and academics. A lot of us are really trying to utilize our current rankings for on campus recruiting these days, but at the same time, it is almost certain that not everyone who looks for jobs will get a job, in which case our grades would've taken a hit for nothing. By sacrificing study time for job search, we're all taking a great risk.

Marketing, Finance, OCR, Craziness

I haven't posted for almost a month? I mean, I knew I hadn't posted for long, but I thought it was just a couple of weeks.

Since I lasted posted anything about the program and course content, we've started Marketing and Finance courses. Before I even have a chance to write about these courses, this entire module is coming to an end already. Each course will only have one class next week, and exams will take place the week after. The course load in this module has been crazy:

• Ops: 8 mini cases, 2 individual cases, 1 field trip report and presentation
• Management accounting: 2 reports and presentations
• Finance: 2 quizzes, 2 reports and presentations
• Marketing: 2 team cases, 1 giant assignment separated into 3 stages of deliverables with huge report and presentation at the end, 1 individual paper that I've been procrastinating writing for 2 weeks

As you can see here, the theme of the program has really switched to "reports and presentations", which means way more qualitative material. The dynamics amongst students have also changed, as super quant people start to struggle through these reports.

We have received our first ranking. I'm very proud of my team, at least 5 out of 7 of us are ranked within the first quartile.

On Campus Recruiting also kicked off this past week, which is the cause of all sorts of craziness for MBA students, in addition to marketing deliverables. As well as attending company info sessions, which are an hour and a half each, two slots per day every day, applications are usually due midnight right after the info session. Essentially, for an aggressive OCR job hunter such as myself, all evenings since 5pm onwards have become non studying time. The key is to utilize our half days off effectively, and if that's not happening, then a lot of the work would have to be done late at night. It doesn't help that the undergrads are back this week, and as a result of them fighting with us for classrooms, all morning classes in my section have been bumped earlier to 8am.

I would write more but I still have loads to do. Hope to have time to jot down more stuff next weekend.

English

This might be going a little off topic, but I've wanted to talk about this for some time, so I'm going to exercise my power as the owner of this blog, and post whatever I want for today.

I have this pet peeve for obvious and consistent improper/weird uses of English, especially if the speaker/writer has perfect command of the language otherwise. And in fact, this does have something to do with the MBA. Since a large number of students come from places other than North America, it might help straighten out a few things and potentially avoid confusion that may cause other people when they hear certain odd phrases for the first time. Or it might not help. I dunno. I just wanted to vent a little. :p

1. You did not "pass out" from undergrad, and you're not going to "pass out" now.
You graduated. And you will graduate from the MBA. You've probable had a few episodes of passing out, but you don't use the phrase when you actually mean graduate.

2. You did not "give" the GMAT. You took it.
The GMAC gives the GMAT. Not you. You take the GMAT. A student takes exams, giving exams is the teacher's job.

3. You don't have a "query". You have a question.
This does not cause as much confusion, but whenever I see "query", I think of SQL. In the context of normal langauge (as opposed to computer language), you have questions instead of queries.

4. Sign up for "the same".
Again, does not really cause as much confusion as it causes me personal misery. Haha. A classic example: we have an event next week, please sign up for the same. We don't need to sign up for "the same", we simply need to sign up. If we have to sign up FOR something, we can simply sign up "for it". Why not save a few keystrokes.

I feel better now that I've gotten it out of my system. I might even add more items as I think of more. But for now, bed time.

Added Aug 24, 2009:

5. I must be knowing
Classic example: you must be knowing that we have a class tomorrow. I'm not knowing. I just know. I must know that we have a class tomorrow. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think in general we tend to use "be doing" more when the doing is an actual action that we do. Example: we'll be going around collecting money. "Knowing" is not something you physically do.

Added Aug 25, 2009 (the list just keeps growing...):

6. Very less
"Less" is a comparative adjective, which means you don't stick "very" in front of it. What you mean to say is "very little" or "very few", depending on the noun you wish to qualify. For example, "very little quantity" or "very few units sold". Of course, "much less" is perfectly fine to say, but from my experience, people almost never mean "much less" when they say "very less".