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!

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.

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.