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.

T minus 10 days

Since apparently countdowns are a popular theme around this time of year, I'm going join the club.

So I've finally started to pack. Haha. I'm a little delirious at this point. Still can't believe I'm doing this. But only ten days till I move, and my life is going to drastically change.

What's new:

• Signed loan documents and have student account set up with Royal Bank - ready to go financially.
• Finalized housing arrangements - made some atypical choices but I think it'll work for me. (There will be a separate post.) Have place to live for the next 12 months.
• Read all I have to read from the annoying business statistics book, and finished all Excel tutorials.
• Handed in all assignments given by the career centre - forgot if I mentioned this before, we basically had a couple of questionnaires to complete as well as a resume, so that the career centre will be prepared to work with us as soon as the program starts.
• Got a couple of books recommended by the career centre's reading list: Barbara Minto's The Pyramid Principle (but no, I did not exactly spend $125) and Marc Cosentino's Case in Point. The materials presented in these books coincide with my personal interest and intended career in consulting.
• Received schedule for the first week of school, which is similar to last year's schedule.

What's still outstanding:

• Two more chapters of the finance and accounting workbook to go.
• Three more papers/cases to read.
• Would like to get started on economics, since I have no background whatsoever.
• Serious packing!

Now back to the outstanding items.

Business Statistics

For the past week or so, I have been going through Schaum's Outline of Business Statistics as recommended by the prof that teaches the stats course. There's a one liner review on amazon, stating that "This is a poorly presented text in terms of language." I didn't quite get it when I ordered the book, but after reading a few chapters, I totally understand what it means. The language is very counter-intuitive, and it is unlike any textbook I have ever read. I did learn all of these statistics materials back during my undergrad years, and what I learned was way more advanced than what is required/presented here. I still have my old stats textbooks, but I got this (cheap) book anyway, to see the level of understanding that's required in the MBA program. I have to say that even with familiarity of the topics presented, I have a hard time understanding what the book is going on about sometimes. It does a poor job explaining anything that's slightly complicated. I'm mostly using the examples as a refresher, so I can't imagine someone who never studied stats learning and understanding much from this book. The problems are a good resource though. Solutions are provided, so if you only need to reinforce your understanding in something you've already learned, doing these exercises is not a bad idea.

On a different note, the emphasis of business statistics lies in the applications of problems, which is different from my undergraduate courses. As part of my math-intensive program, my undergrad stats courses centred around theories, complicated formulas, and proofs.

Microsoft Office 2007

I've just installed a trial version of office 2007. I originally wanted to do this because there is a tutorial on Excel 2007 that's recommended , and I only had office 2003. Now I realize that this would be a very good move even if it wasn't for the tutorial. Office 2007 looks completely different from office 2003. All the functions are there, plus more I'm sure, but it just takes me forever to find anything right now. Definitely a good idea to install the trial and get used to the new layout for anyone who's starting the program and haven't used much of office 2007.

Activating the trial today gives me an expiry date of May 31, which is more than enough time to last after the full version is supplied by the school.

Prep Materials Arrived

Today I received a package from Queen's. Appleseed documented the contents of his package, which were much the same as what I received:

Pre-Study

I am definitely going to go over these materials word for word. It'll take a lot of time, but it's worth it if it makes the workload a little easier to manage when I'm actually in the program.

The introductory letter states that I should've been notified by email about access to the class portal, which has not happened. I'm going to email the IT helpdesk about the detailed requirements for a laptop, as well as to inquire into the portal situation (most likely just a delay, as Appleseed mentioned in his blog last year).