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.