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.