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".

CSR, Management Accounting, Ops Management

So, long time no post! Since Lots have happened since I last posted at the beginning of the month:

As I mentioned last time, we kicked off this month with a week of career stuff. Wall Street Prep and David Ohrvall came to give one day workshops on finance and consulting interviews, respectively. Both were excellent for those interested in careers in finance or consulting.

Saturday after the career week was our first case competition, with A. T. Kearny. Everyone who participated had fun, but at the same time we also realized how much further we still need to go before we could realistically compete for an MBA job at A. T. Kearney. Basically, the case they gave us was an example of what they use for their second round of interviews, where the candidate is given ~45 minutes to read the case and come up with recommendations, after which the interviewer comes back into the room for a presentation from the candidate. For our case competition, we had teams of 7 with 2.5 hours to work on the case, and it was still obvious that there was room for improvement. We really need to double up our case prep effort, which is actually recurring feedback the school keeps hearing from recruiters - that the students are smart, but just don't prepare enough for the interviews.

After the career week, we had a one-week module on corporate social responsibility. It was interesting, because the focus is not "how to be a good corporate citizen" per se, but rather aligning a company's CSR strategy with its corporate strategy. There were some good case studies and great videos, as well as three presentation opportunities for each team, which was an excellent amount for a 5-day course. The only side that was perhaps not so good was that each of us needed to write a relatively long individual essay worth half our grades. Not many people were fond of it, and half the class scrambled to get it done between 2am and 5am the morning it was due.

I also had my first encounter with a prospective student this week, who sat at the back of the class during our final presentation sessions. We chatted briefly during break, and I told him about all the good things that impressed me here at Queen's. I don't say this often anymore, but I do still pause once in a while, look around in amazement, and give myself props for ending up at such a great school. Then my train of thoughts would drift to getting a job afterwards and case interviews, and hectic life resumes.

This past Friday the MBA office organized a sunset boat cruise around thousand islands, which was really good. Gotta love the value-added stuff here. The next day, a whole bunch of people went skydiving and had a blast. I considered my severe motion sickness and chickened out, but went to the salsa class instead, which was fun.

This week we started a new large module with four courses. The ones that we've had so far are management accounting and operations management.

Management accounting is taught by Professor Clinton Free who's a good and engaging teacher, Australian, and a cricket player. He helped the faculty win a cricket match with the exec MBA students, and have now extended the invitation to play to our class. The course content is also very interesting, and it has to do with making good accounting choices within an organization. We do lots of interesting examples in class and there are lots of calculations, so I feel right at home, and Clinton's been impressed by my ability to work the numbers without a calculator. :p

Clinton also did a pitch on the CMA designation, and encouraged us to take advantage of the Queen's MBA-CMA combined program. Which actually prompted me to go to the CMA info session today. I had never thought of doing a CMA, but now I'm thinking. Clinton makes a lot of references to the consulting career, and says that this is a good designation to have not only for accountants, but for consultants as well.

Professor Paul Roman teachers operations management. He's part of the reason why I'm here, because it was his class that I sat in a year ago, and I thought he was one of the best profs I had encountered. He still is, along with pretty much all other Queen's profs! The course content though gets a little difficult for me at times, since we've talked a lot about manufacturing and production lines and such, which I'm totally ignorant of. It doesn't help that this class is always in the afternoon, when my brain is the slowest. But I definitely want to learn this stuff, and it'll probably be one of the most practical and useful courses for my intended career as a strategy consultant.

Now need to get back to reading...

Back to School

Exams for the last module were done with last Wednesday, after which I promptly headed back home to Toronto. Nevermind the end-of-module "party like a rock star" party that night, although I've heard good things about it (and seen hilarious pictures).

Returned to Kingston last night after the long weekend. This entire week will be filled with career stuff:

• Today: intro prep sessions on finance and consulting interviews.
• Over the next two days: professionals who help people prepare interviews for a living will come and give a full day workshop on each of finance and consulting.
• Friday: our corporate partners and alumni will conduct group mock interviews, which should be a good learning experience as well as networking opportunity.
• Saturday: AT Kearney case competition. This is just internal to our class, and we're the only school AT Kearney chose to do a competition at. This will again be an excellent opportunity to score some contacts.

In the background, there are two books that we need to read within this week and the next, for the next two modules. They're both interesting reads, but will take some time.

Now allow me to rant a little, which I almost never do. We suffered in heat the entire day today, it was brutal. It was hot, I mean HOT, H-O-T, in the classrooms. Something to do with the air conditioning being turned off over the weekend, and probably having trouble coming back on. So it got increasingly hot in the morning, until the AC came back on in the afternoon, but it would take hours for the classrooms to cool down, so it never really cooled down before the sessions ended for the day. Did I mention it was brutal? It also doesn't help that my house isn't air conditioned, but you know, I cheap out on housing, I suffer the consequences. This is not to say that I recommend not cheaping out on housing. For a generally healthy student in his/her prime years without a rich daddy, cheap housing is worth the suffering.

Exams and Resumes

Exams: 1 down, 2 to go.

Resumes have been live for almost a week: http://www.business.queensu.ca/recruiting/student_resumes/mba/index.php

Back to cash flow statements.

Studying

This weekend is full of studying for exams, which will happen Monday - Wednesday. The consensus seems to be that there is way too much to study and too little time to study it. This is certainly true in my case. It's been incredibly difficult to keep up with individual readings and exercises, because people tend to devote most of their time to team assignments/projects, which is more of a priority than individual work, since no one wants to be the reason for potential sub-par team performance.

So now I should get back to the work that I've been neglecting all month, do as much as I can and hope for the best.

Busy Times

I'm having lunch and finally find myself in a temporary moment of peace AND remembering to update the blog.

The past week has been very busy, as is this week. Classes are wrapping up and we have exams next week. Some of the things that's happened since I last posted:

• The marketing club invited the head of marketing here at the business school to give a short introduction to marketing over lunch. It definitely stimulated my interest in the field.
• A full career day again last Wednesday, mostly on preparing for on-campus-recruiting that will start as early as August and will go on till probably the end of September. This included some logistics and ground rules, as well as tips for writing custom cover letters and resumes.
• The second networking event with the other section of the Cornell-Queens exec MBA students.
• Lots and lots of assignment work.

On Saturday Taste of Kingston happened at confederation park downtown at the waters. The food/drinks are pretty good, and cheap with generous portions too, compared to similar events in Toronto. The other difference is that this is a fundraising event, whereas most restaurants in Toronto probably make a profit out of participating. Recommended for future students, since it only happens once a year and we're only here for a year.

So while this was happening, a salsa dance class for MBA students was also happening simultaneously, and I managed to utilize myself to attend both. I've missed dancing (used to do it in undergrad) and the class was great. It's also only an hour every couple of weeks, and a good opportunity to take your mind off anything else school-related.

This week we've concluded our accounting class, and will have the final BDM and economics classes the next two days. Tonight there's a networking event again with the national and Ottawa exec MBA students, we've been promised good food, which I look forward to!

Final HR Class

Today we had a full day of HR class that concluded the course. In the morning each team gave a 5-minute creative presentation on a "hot topic", which was very interesting, and everyone had fun doing it. In the afternoon, we did a "frame build" exercise, which was also a great exercise and we learned more about our teammates as well as the potential we didn't know we had.

In googling this exercise, I stumbled upon this page, which introduces the exercise as well as other team building sessions we did with Shawna back in orientation week. This is just a small portion of what the school provides to ensure that teams have the necessary tools to be successful.

Module 3 Continued

So it's the weekend! Not that it means much, except for some modest sleep-in tomorrow.

We had Tuesday off, which was nice, but the other section had the Monday off, which means they had a long weekend. We had a big individual HR paper due on Thursday ("big" in the sense that it's 50% of the course mark), and for most people it required intensive effort from Monday night to Wednesday night, because we hadn't had much time for it until it was upon us and we had to get on with it. I'm sure most of us were very grateful for the Monday/Tuesday off, I spent almost the entire day exclusively on this assignment.

But not exactly exclusively. We squeezed in some time this week for Business Decision Modeling, both the final assignment and the big term project. In addition, we had an entire day of BDM class today (notice it's a Saturday). The upside of having a class on Saturday is that we get free lunch and Yuri let us out half an hour early.

The accounting project is ongoing and people are really getting into their assigned sections of the project, which take quite a bit of time. I'm not sure if I actually talked about what this project was about, basically we need to read two annual reports and compare them, and write a report. It doesn't help when each annual report is over 100 pages in length.

The second microeconomics assignment is due next week and our team is meeting tomorrow to discuss it. We'll also be discussing a presentation for HR that we'll be doing on Monday. So yeah, not much of a weekend.

Wednesday was full of career sessions, ending with a formal dinner when we all dressed up and were told things like which way to scoop our soup in the bowl. The image management and communications sessions were also very good.

Last night we had a networking event with one section of the Cornell-Queen's Exec MBA students, which was a blast, for me at least. It was good to meet other business students that are somewhat different from ourselves, and not to mention the value of an expanded network. The same event happens again next Saturday with the other section of the CQ students. According to one of Vault's surveys, the number one benefit of attending business school is your expanded business network, so ANY type of networking event is highly recommended.

Clubs, committees and the exec council have been trying to squeeze out time for their non-academic work. It's getting difficult.

I think I'm going to change my blogging strategy a little bit. Basically, sometimes in the middle of the week, something happens and I think to myself "I should blog that", but by the end of the week so much other stuff would've happened that chances are I don't remember all of them. Conversely, crazy as it may sound, I don't always have time to blog the entire week's happenings on the weekend. Therefore, I'm just going to blog little bits and pieces as I go along, and see how it works out.

The folks responsible for marketing our program are also organizing an "official" student blog, with contributions by many students in the class. Stay tuned!

Canada Day Week

I realized that I haven't posted yet this past weekend. It's been a crazy week and this week will be even crazier. Most of the class went to Ottawa for Canada Day, I opted out, which I feel was a good decision, because aside from the fact that I've been to Ottawa before for Canada Day (and I could go again anytime), what was going to be 2am return time turned out to be close to 4am. There was no way I could've physically done it with 8:30am class 4.5 hours later!

Instead, I went to Fort Henry for their sunset ceremony kickoff. If you don't care much for Ottawa, I would recommend this as a nice little thing to do on Canada Day.

Other than that... we have an econ assignment due soon, BDM assignment due soon, accounting project and BDM project in full force, and both the individual and team essay for HR/OB also due soon. So, as I said, this week will be crazy as well as this weekend. Hopefully sometime during the weekend I will be able to update on just exactly how crazy it is! Our team is great working together though, and I think the team-based approach is invaluable in the sense that there's a strong support system and you never need to feel alone. Even if the workload is cut to a level that's manageable by one person, I would still prefer what we currently have, because it maximizes each person's learning as our teammates present what they've learned from doing their part of an assignment.

On a final note, all the clubs and committees have organized themselves and held the first few meetings. The club execs and committee members are really putting a lot of effort into it and doing a great job.

Microeconomics, HR, The MBA Ultimate Challenge, and The MBA Bug

Last Sunday morning we had an MBA mini version of the amazing race, where teams signed up to complete a series of physical and mental challenges, ending with a BBQ lunch and prizes. Everyone who participated had a blast. The school really goes out of their way to try and make the MBA experience as fun as possible, and events like this are a big part of this experience, so it's definitely worth it to take part. These are the things that stay in your memory.

This week we kicked off the other two courses of the module: Microeconomics and HR. Microeconomics is taught by Professor Bo Pazderka, who's an excellent teacher and makes the material interesting and easy to understand. Up to this point there has been quite some overlap between the materials in this course and the previous module's economics course (supply/demand diagrams, elasticity, etc.), but for someone who's not very strong in the subject, it doesn't hurt to go through things a second time.

HR is being taught by Professor Shawna O'Grady, who also spent three extensive days with us on team building back in the first week. Shawna presented some interesting materials, and the class has also included a couple of mock interview prepared and conducted by students whose names were drawn out of a hat, which were entertaining to watch. Thus far we have covered recruiting and selecting talent and employee retention.

In addition we continued with our accounting and modeling courses.

For the past couple of weeks, more and more people have become sick, with either what's known as the "MBA Bug", or something else. Today we learned that the "something else" included something rather serious. The administration has been taking huge precautions in terms of having people stay home if they're sick and doing everything they can together with the faculty to ensure that those who miss classes don't miss too much. This includes videotaping all lectures, having profs run extra review sessions, and securing tutors. Desks in lecture halls are cleaned daily, and we're getting individual teamroom desks cleaned today. Hand sanitizers are everywhere. Hopefully we've really constrained the spread of the bugs.

Accounting, Modeling, Career Stuff, Plagiarism, Clubs, Movie Night

Module 3 began this week with major differences in the scheduling for the two classrooms. (More information about the classroom split can be found here, and we are indeed rotating quarters.) There are four courses in this module, my class had Accounting and Business Decision Models whereas the other class had quite a bit of HR/OB and not as much BDM. It is also where I start to notice major differences between this year's class and Appleseed's documentation of last years class.

Financial Accounting
We had professor John Moore for the warm-up, and he continues to be a great teacher. There were a few complaints about some of the first day's class being repeats of the warm-up, but they quickly disappeared by the next day. Besides, with a subject like accounting, it never hurts to listen to the lecture twice, unless you already knew it, in which case you wouldn't have gone to the warm-up anyway. I can't stress enough, for anyone who's coming to this program in the future, that if you have no background in the subject matter, it is very important that you read the accounting workbook before classes start. It took me some time to absorb the material, but now that I've at least read it, I can concentrate on doing more practice problems as opposed to struggling to understand things.

Business Decision Models
"Business Decision Models is taught by Yuri Levin and will cover optimizations models, simulation models, decision analysis and revenue management&dynamic pricing. So far this course has been comprised of symbolic logic with basic math that we then turn into models in excel and use "solver" to complete. Yuri is quite interesting and has a very strong understanding of the material."
- Appleseed's blog (he didn't have this course until module 5)

Career Advantage Program
On Tuesday we had a whole day of career stuff: networking presentation in the morning followed by students giving "pitches", and feedback on those pitches. In the afternoon we had an "industry panel" with whom there were also "networking opportunities" afterwards. Overall I found it useful because there's a lot of information on consulting. On the other hand, those who don't particularly want to do consulting or finance, and don't have a clear goal in mind, will likely need to do more research on their own.

Plagiarism Session
This morning we had a 2-hour session on plagiarism. It was presented by Professor Steven Moore and was far more interesting than most of us thought it would turn out to be, with a lot of good information too. I won't elaborate here, because then it wouldn't be as interesting. I will simply give kudos to professor Moore for making a great session out of what would normally be a boring subject.

Clubs
This week most of the clubs met and had their elections for the club President/VP/etc. People have some very good ideas about what they want to do for the clubs, and we're eager to see them in action.

Movie Night
Last night's point four was a movie night in no other than our regular classroom. There was a great amount of junk food and it was nice to do something in the classroom other than having a class. We watched Russel Peters' Red White Brown, and half of Wedding Crashers before the projector screen crashed on us. It was a good time for me to stop, because I made it home just in time for my 8 hours of sleep. Some people went out to a pub later on and stayed quite late.

This weekend will be full of modeling assignment / accounting problems / economics and HR readings. Prioritizing is definitely of vital importance.

End of Module 2

Appleseed's post

This week we wrapped up the module 2 courses, and had the economics exam on Thursday and stats final quiz on Friday. The fact that they were both open book made it significantly easier for me, and I'm already starting to dread the exams for the next module, at least one of which is explicitly stated as closed book.

After the quiz on Friday morning, a lot of people started getting out of town, myself included. Several carloads of Torontonians went back home for the weekend, and a few cars headed for Montreal, where it's either home or just a nice place to spend a free weekend in.

Next week many of the clubs are holding elections for their excecutives. The next module consists of four courses and spans over six or seven weeks. There are LOTS of readings for the human resources course, which I should be doing right now.

Statistics, Economics, Kingston Venture Tour

Appleseed's week

"Intense" is definitely the word to summarize the week. My perception of time is very confusing right now. Sometimes things are so intense that I'm totally unaware of time passing. At the same time, because everyday is so packed, at the end of the week I usually feel like I've lived a month.

We didn't need to go back to class after the stats quiz, which was excellent because it provided me with the only time slot in the entire week when I could make the visit that I needed to make to the health centre. The two assignments (and the one coming up on Wednesday) had been a lot of work, but also great opportunities for good discussions and to learn from fellow team members. We could've probably completed the assignments individually, but the quality would be nowhere near what we produced as a team.

I am again scrambling to find time to read economics, which I will do right after I finish writing this. Ramzi from last year's class talks about this week's courses here, and I especially agree with what he said about Professor McHale. Hence, the lectures themselves are fairly difficult for me to understand, and as someone who can usually do without reading textbooks, I found it a must to read the books (which, by the way, are very well written) of this course.

On Thursday, we had our Kingston Venture Tour, which Appleseed talked about here. The setup was the same, and we definitely got to see some very cool companies and learned a great deal. The point four afterwards was at the grad pub for their trivial night, which I heard was great. That night I put together the economics assignment and went home to sleep instead, which I believe was the better option for my well-being at that point in time.

This week we also held the election for the executive council. There was a fair bit of competition for every position, and I heard that this was the first time ever when a proper private voting booth was set up. The elections committee really did a great job, and now everyone's looking forward to putting the exec council to work.

You can probably tell that in addition to scrambling for time for economics, I'm also scrambling for time I spend on this blog. I'm hoping to post every week(end-ish), and I have to say that having Appleseed's blog as a reference has made it much easier for me. ;)

Statistics and Economics

This week has been very different from the previous week. Appleseed recounts his week here.

I have almost exactly the same experience, and it was definitely a switch of gears as far as course contents are concerned. I should really read more of the economics textbook - it's difficult to find time to read everything!

Had fitness assessment done. Had first meeting with a career centre lady, which was very helpful - I'm looking forward to keep working with her towards making myself more presentable.

The social aspect has also been going strong, although I've missed out on more than a couple of social activities. I naturally need lots of sleep, so I'm almost either awake and doing something school-related, or asleep. Hopefully I can find a way to fix it somewhat so that I can be less anti-social. :p

First Week of Real Classes

Let me start by saying that last Saturday night we had a kickass transition event organized by members of last year's class, who sent us running all over Kingston on a scavenger hunt, which ended at a pub, where more fun activities happened.

This week has been a full-blown week, with classes 8:30-4:30 everyday and four assignments due. And we did it! Challenging as they are, I'm having a great time doing crush assignments (where you get the actual assignment after lunch, and you have from 4:30pm to midnight to finish it with your team).

Here's Appleseed's account of his week, and I just have a few things to add.

We did not end up getting home at 3am last night! Our team went home after we handed in the assignment at midnight, had a great night's sleep (much needed because of the combination of late nights and early mornings this week), and came for our presentation this morning after 11, which went very well.

I'm loving every moment of my time here at Queen's, even though sometimes it's just struggling to not fall asleep. The classes have been amazing, and I'm just constantly in awe of what excellent teachers the profs are, and what everyone in the class has to say from his or her own experience and perspective. It definitely promises to be one of the best years of my life.

I haven't heard anything official on starting up the .4 club, I'll wait and see. The election for the executive council is going to be very soon (Monday, if I'm not mistaken).

I'm going to go freshen up now for a wine and cheese this afternoon with alumni who graduated 5 and 10 years ago. For the rest of the weekend, I'll squeenze in as much reading for economics next week as possible. I've wanted to read some economics before I came to Kingston, but never ended up doing it. I've heard that the prof is such a pro on the subject that the basic concepts are just second nature to him, so it'll be challenging for those of us who never did anything on the subject.

Orientation Week

This week is the official start of the program. It's been so overwhelming that it feels like much more than a week has passed. I am tempted to just link to Appleseed's experience of his first week here and skip writing about it myself, but there are a few things I would like to add.

Appleseed's first week

I too am very tired from this week, but unlike Appleseed, I don't get to sleep in tomorrow, because some of us have our team facilitator meetings at 9am. Queen's assigns each team a professional facilitator, and a brief introduction can be found here. I am truly impressed of the amount of effort put into the two distinguishing factors that sets Queen's apart from other business schools: the team approach and the level of personalization. Teambuilding is such a conscious activity here, there is so much time (and money) invested into getting our teams to the high performance level. I'm very excited and look forward to working with my team. In addition, although I've heard a lot about the personal service that the students receive here, it's not until I experience it myself that it truly dawned on me. I'm sure everyone really appreciates having everything delivered to our desks (binders/textbooks/documents/gift baskets!), and it just impressed us to no end when one of the ladies in the program office sent us all an email, asking the six people who bought their textbooks from the bookstore to bring their receipts to the office to get reimbursed. How did she even know? I would never have imagined being a student and receiving this level of service.

I would write more, but I've written the highlight and I should really get back to my readings for next week. It looks like next week is going to be one of the busiest weeks of the entire year: it's the first week of "real" classes and we have four assignments due, with a team presentation on Saturday. Go team!

Accounting Warm-Up

We had the accounting workshop today. Professor John Moore is an excellent teacher with a great sense of humour, who have won many teaching awards - rightfully so. He makes the subject of accounting very intersting and easy to understand.

I have to say that for someone with no accounting background, having read through the accounting and finance workbook helped a lot (in fact, also helped a lot in yesterday's finance class). I could tell from the way that some people asked/answered questions, that they hadn't read particular sections of the book. Although, while I understood everything, I still need to be more familiar with them, so that essentially I'd be able to tell what's going on more quickly from the numbers.

To keep up with the socializing aspect, people are meeting up at The Iron Duke later this evening. It has just occurred to me as I'm typing this, that this should've been the point four club kickoff, haha.

Finance Warm-Up

Today we had the Finance workshop, and I'm really tired, mostly from getting up early the previous two days. I should mention that despite my complaints about yesterday's basic math, Professor Jeff McGill is a great prof, and is very enthusiastic about the things he teaches, even if they're at the elementary level.

Professor Louis Gagnon is equally enthusiastic, if not more, in the classroom. The morning was interesting, in the sense that the material covered was basically from the finance and accounting workbook, but I found the instruction engaging and easier to understand than the book. The afternoon was more challenging as people tend to experience a lack of oxygen in their brains, but in all fairness there were some interesting topics discussed.

This has felt like a long week already, and I'm already looking forward to sleeping in Friday. In exchange for having all that time to do all that prep work because I was almost free of actual work, I gotta really get used to getting up early, a challenge that probably wouldn't exist had I been working in a normal office the past little while.

Housing and Unofficial Start

I've settled nicely into the house I found. I might as well talk about my housing situation here. I was well aware of the intense workload of the MBA program, and figured that I likely won't have much time to prepare food for myself. Since I'm pretty serious about food, my number one priority was to go for a meal plan. I had initially wanted to rent a 1-bedroom apartment or the grad residence, and go for the meal plan that the university offers. But, the university meal plans have assigned time slots for when you go for your meals. If you miss it, you stay hungry until the next meal. With crazy MBA schedule, I didn't want to be confined to these time slots three times a day. Besides, if I were to go for an apartment, I'd have to worry about furniture, since furnished apartments that are within my price range are pretty much nonexistent. And of course, I didn't want to be bothered to think about furniture.

Then I found out about co-op, which offers furnished rooms with meal plans. Great, except the meal plan isn't offered in the summer. The university doesn't have a meal plan in the summer either. Looked like I couldn't escape cooking for the summer in any case, so the next item on my agenda was to find a place for the summer where I can comfortably cook. I could've stayed at co-op for the summer as well, but with ~10 people and one kitchen per house, I doubt it would work out nicely. After searching around on the internet, I found a nice house to share for the summer with a couple of other girl grad students. The AMS Marketplace is where I found this place, I think this is one of the lesser-known sites for some reason. The internal portal provides a list of sites to search for accomodation. In addition, check out craigslist.

A couple of suggestions regarding housing:

• While it might be tempting to try secure housing as early as possible, realistically there's no need. When it gets closer to the date of your intended move-in, more places become available, and at lower prices.
• If you look for a private apartment within a house, be sure to personally pay a visit, or have someone check it out for you. I've heard horror stories of apartments that are not suitable for human habitation.
• You may hear about various rules governing the application process for the grad residence - don't pay much attention to them. In the end, if you apply, you'd probably get in. I know people who applied the very last minute and still got a spot.

In other news:

I finished all prep materials. I'm finding that I'm way ahead of a lot of people in the class in this respect, I guess I have it easy, not having a lot to do for work in the past couple of months.

A whole lot of us met at The Tango last night, it was great fun. I heard that some people also went for poutine afterwards - gotta stay in the loop and join them next time!

Had our first pre-MBA workshop today, on "Basic Math and Spreadsheet Skills for Business Analysis". I was less up for the "basic math" and more for the spreadsheet skills, but the prof spent most of the time doing basic math (starting from 2 + 3 = 5), and went a little fast, in my opinion, with the spreadsheets at the end. I didn't think people needed to relearn math that's THAT basic (since we've all done our GMAT), so would've been nice to spend more time with the spreadsheets, or possibly extend this to beyond one day.

Tomorrow is Finance. I haven't bothered much with looking at my calculator, it's the only "prep" that I haven't done. I figured I'll do it once I have a better grasp of doing the same things on paper first.

Hello Kingston

It is officially May 2nd at this point. May 1st has been a long day - I moved, and fussed around forever to put everything in place and make my room look nice and cozy. I have a furnished room in a house shared with a couple of other people, so everything is immediately functional and I can focus on other things, such as:

• Still half a case to read.
• Study my new financial calculator.
• Locate nearest supermakets, banks, drug store, etc etc

I'll just end it here for now, and will write when I'm not as tired and ready for bed.

T minus 10 days

Since apparently countdowns are a popular theme around this time of year, I'm going join the club.

So I've finally started to pack. Haha. I'm a little delirious at this point. Still can't believe I'm doing this. But only ten days till I move, and my life is going to drastically change.

What's new:

• Signed loan documents and have student account set up with Royal Bank - ready to go financially.
• Finalized housing arrangements - made some atypical choices but I think it'll work for me. (There will be a separate post.) Have place to live for the next 12 months.
• Read all I have to read from the annoying business statistics book, and finished all Excel tutorials.
• Handed in all assignments given by the career centre - forgot if I mentioned this before, we basically had a couple of questionnaires to complete as well as a resume, so that the career centre will be prepared to work with us as soon as the program starts.
• Got a couple of books recommended by the career centre's reading list: Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle (but no, I did not exactly spend $125) and Marc Cosentino's Case in Point. The materials presented in these books coincide with my personal interest and intended career in consulting.
• Received schedule for the first week of school, which is similar to last year's schedule.

What's still outstanding:

• Two more chapters of the finance and accounting workbook to go.
• Three more papers/cases to read.
• Would like to get started on economics, since I have no background whatsoever.
• Serious packing!

Now back to the outstanding items.

RBC Line of Credit

A couple of weeks ago, I sent in an application for a student line of credit with the program that Queen's MBA has with Royal bank. (There's a brief description on this page.) The huge advantage of the program is that it's specifically for Queen's MBA students, providing very competitive interest rates, and Queen's pays for all the interest during the time that you're at school.

It took the Kingston branch less than a week to process and approve my application. Today I spoke with the banker in charge of it, and he walked me through some of the logistics. Basically, since I will not be in Kingston before school starts, he will send whatever documents I need to sign to a branch close to where I live. At the same time, he will open a student chequing account for me and mail me a bank card. After I get the card, I can take it to my local branch, who will have received the loan docs, to sign the documents and activate my card, and whatnot.

Towards the end of this month, the banker will pay the first instalment of my tuition for me, directly into my student account at Queen's. This is because I told him that I'd like to use the money to pay this tuition. If I'd rather have the cash instead, I guess either he would just deposit the amount into my new chequing account, or I could use the account to take out money as I need (like any other line of credit).

Technically, you need to pay the bank the interest that's accumulated, on a monthly basis. The first such payment is due at the beginning of June. At this time the bank will charge whatever interest there is, from your new chequing account. Around the same time, Queen's would've gotten a bill from the bank for the students' interests for the month, and the school will also pay the bank at the beginning of the month. After the bank receives payment from the school, it will credit the amount back to the students' chequing accounts.

Therefore, effectively, the students don't pay the interest during the school year, but are just required to have some amount of money available in the account so that it can be debitted first when reimbursement from Queen's comes a few days later. It's a seamless process. RBC also has a very competitive rate - prime + 0% - for the first two years that you're in this loan program. Prime is 2.5% at this time.

Business Statistics

For the past week or so, I have been going through Schaum's Outline of Business Statistics as recommended by the prof that teaches the stats course. There's a one liner review on amazon, stating that "This is a poorly presented text in terms of language." I didn't quite get it when I ordered the book, but after reading a few chapters, I totally understand what it means. The language is very counter-intuitive, and it is unlike any textbook I have ever read. I did learn all of these statistics materials back during my undergrad years, and what I learned was way more advanced than what is required/presented here. I still have my old stats textbooks, but I got this (cheap) book anyway, to see the level of understanding that's required in the MBA program. I have to say that even with familiarity of the topics presented, I have a hard time understanding what the book is going on about sometimes. It does a poor job explaining anything that's slightly complicated. I'm mostly using the examples as a refresher, so I can't imagine someone who never studied stats learning and understanding much from this book. The problems are a good resource though. Solutions are provided, so if you only need to reinforce your understanding in something you've already learned, doing these exercises is not a bad idea.

On a different note, the emphasis of business statistics lies in the applications of problems, which is different from my undergraduate courses. As part of my math-intensive program, my undergrad stats courses centred around theories, complicated formulas, and proofs.

Microsoft Office 2007

I've just installed a trial version of office 2007. I originally wanted to do this because there is a tutorial on Excel 2007 that's recommended , and I only had office 2003. Now I realize that this would be a very good move even if it wasn't for the tutorial. Office 2007 looks completely different from office 2003. All the functions are there, plus more I'm sure, but it just takes me forever to find anything right now. Definitely a good idea to install the trial and get used to the new layout for anyone who's starting the program and haven't used much of office 2007.

Activating the trial today gives me an expiry date of May 31, which is more than enough time to last after the full version is supplied by the school.

Portal is Up

As the title suggests - portal is up!

The only useful piece of information on it right now is the online resume template from the business career centre. Email is functional too, so that's something to play with. As a veteran outlook user, I would need some time to get used to this lotus thing.

Technology and Portal Update

Heard back from IT helpdesk. The portal administrators are just placing the finishing touches on user access, and we should receive access in a few days.

Also received a document of notebook requirements, which are similar to last year's requirements. Looks like my 2.5-year-old computer will do.

Queen’s MBA Notebook Computer Requirements

A notebook computer with Microsoft Windows is a requirement for the duration of your Queen’s MBA program. This document outlines the minimum requirements for any notebook that you wish to use and also outlines the minimum specifications you should be seeking should you need to purchase a notebook.

If you plan to bring to the Program a notebook computer that you already own, not only should it meet our minimum specifications, but you should ensure that it can be serviced conveniently and quickly in Kingston. Nationally-known brands such as Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba HP should present no problem but it may be difficult to find service for lesser-known systems. You would be well advised to purchase extended warranty coverage for the duration of the program to avoid any unpleasant surprises. It is also wise to ensure that you have a copy of the original invoice should warranty service be required.

Queen’s School of Business Technology Helpdesk stands ready to assist you in any way possible with regards to any computer-related problems or issues that may arise throughout your studies. Our specialists are available from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Monday to Friday to help you with any of your computer-related needs for your various courses. Service is available by phone, email, website, walk-in or even team-room visits. We will act as a “first contact” point in troubleshooting system problems, providing simple diagnostic procedures and possible suggestions toward the fastest possible resolution. Should it be necessary to contact your vendor or manufacturer we can direct you to your nearest service depot as well as provide you, when possible, with the appropriate phone number or web address.

It is possible to use a Mac PC in the program as long as either Windows XP or Vista is installed and running under Bootcamp or a virtualization system such as Parallels. We are not in a position to be able to support Mac OS. Moreover, some software integral to the program will only run under Windows and we cannot guarantee full functionality of Mac OS with the Queen’s MBA portal or Domino-based email and collaboration services.

Should your notebook computer require service we maintain a limited stock of notebook computers that are available to you for short-term loan.

Our helpdesk staff members are fully trained in all of the software applications required for your studies including Microsoft Office applications, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Symantec Antivirus, and Lotus Notes/Domino applications. We support Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional/Home operating systems.

We will do our very best to relieve you of any worries or concerns surrounding the technological component of Queen’s MBA program allowing you to remain focused on the course material.

Minimum Notebook requirements

If you have purchased a computer within the last year or two then you can pretty much be guaranteed that it will meet at least the very minimum requirements for the Queen’s MBA Program.

The main concern for the purposes of the Program is that your system runs well with the following:
· Internet Explorer 6 or 7
· Lotus Notes 8.0 or 8.5
· MS Office Pro 2007 (which will be supplied to you)
· Windows XP Home or Pro or Windows Vista

To achieve this we would suggest at least the following computer configuration
· Processor of at least 1GHz
· 1GB of RAM memory (2GB if running VISTA)
· A hard disk with at least 20GB of free space
· Video of at least an XGA resolution (1024 x 768) and 256MB of video memory if running VISTA
· Ethernet and wireless LAN support

If you have any questions or concerns regarding either your current notebook computer or wish advice on purchasing a new system please do not hesitate to contact the QSB Technology Helpdesk.

1.866.622.2667
helpdesk@business.queensu.ca

Prep Materials Arrived

Today I received a package from Queen's. Appleseed documented the contents of his package, which were much the same as what I received:

Pre-Study

I am definitely going to go over these materials word for word. It'll take a lot of time, but it's worth it if it makes the workload a little easier to manage when I'm actually in the program.

The introductory letter states that I should've been notified by email about access to the class portal, which has not happened. I'm going to email the IT helpdesk about the detailed requirements for a laptop, as well as to inquire into the portal situation (most likely just a delay, as Appleseed mentioned in his blog last year).

More Facebook Group

I found another facebook group that's more active than the one mentioned in the previous entry:

Queen's MBA Class of 2010

Facebook Group

I have no idea how many (or how few, haha) of my soon-to-be classmates have found or will find this blog, but if you are one, come join our group on facebook!

Queen's MBA 2010

On a separate note, I finally finished all the back-dated blog posts towards the end of last week, so I'm just taking a little break with the blogging and will post as soon as there are updates.

Confirmation of Attendance

The next weekday after I received the message from Queen's, I got a FedEx package of the official letter of acceptance and scholarship letter. Since I was to provide a "passport style" photo when I sign back my offer, it took me a few days to arrange to get it done. I also signed up for all three days of the pre-MBA warm up. I figured it wouldn't hurt, and $375 is not too much to spend compared with the tuition and living expenses I'm about to pay.

I mailed my stuff back to them around boxing day, and come January 5th they emailed to say that they had received my material. Now I had yet another letter FedEx'd to me, confirming that I am indeed attending Queen's.