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.