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.