CSR, Management Accounting, Ops Management

So, long time no post! Since Lots have happened since I last posted at the beginning of the month:

As I mentioned last time, we kicked off this month with a week of career stuff. Wall Street Prep and David Ohrvall came to give one day workshops on finance and consulting interviews, respectively. Both were excellent for those interested in careers in finance or consulting.

Saturday after the career week was our first case competition, with A. T. Kearny. Everyone who participated had fun, but at the same time we also realized how much further we still need to go before we could realistically compete for an MBA job at A. T. Kearney. Basically, the case they gave us was an example of what they use for their second round of interviews, where the candidate is given ~45 minutes to read the case and come up with recommendations, after which the interviewer comes back into the room for a presentation from the candidate. For our case competition, we had teams of 7 with 2.5 hours to work on the case, and it was still obvious that there was room for improvement. We really need to double up our case prep effort, which is actually recurring feedback the school keeps hearing from recruiters - that the students are smart, but just don't prepare enough for the interviews.

After the career week, we had a one-week module on corporate social responsibility. It was interesting, because the focus is not "how to be a good corporate citizen" per se, but rather aligning a company's CSR strategy with its corporate strategy. There were some good case studies and great videos, as well as three presentation opportunities for each team, which was an excellent amount for a 5-day course. The only side that was perhaps not so good was that each of us needed to write a relatively long individual essay worth half our grades. Not many people were fond of it, and half the class scrambled to get it done between 2am and 5am the morning it was due.

I also had my first encounter with a prospective student this week, who sat at the back of the class during our final presentation sessions. We chatted briefly during break, and I told him about all the good things that impressed me here at Queen's. I don't say this often anymore, but I do still pause once in a while, look around in amazement, and give myself props for ending up at such a great school. Then my train of thoughts would drift to getting a job afterwards and case interviews, and hectic life resumes.

This past Friday the MBA office organized a sunset boat cruise around thousand islands, which was really good. Gotta love the value-added stuff here. The next day, a whole bunch of people went skydiving and had a blast. I considered my severe motion sickness and chickened out, but went to the salsa class instead, which was fun.

This week we started a new large module with four courses. The ones that we've had so far are management accounting and operations management.

Management accounting is taught by Professor Clinton Free who's a good and engaging teacher, Australian, and a cricket player. He helped the faculty win a cricket match with the exec MBA students, and have now extended the invitation to play to our class. The course content is also very interesting, and it has to do with making good accounting choices within an organization. We do lots of interesting examples in class and there are lots of calculations, so I feel right at home, and Clinton's been impressed by my ability to work the numbers without a calculator. :p

Clinton also did a pitch on the CMA designation, and encouraged us to take advantage of the Queen's MBA-CMA combined program. Which actually prompted me to go to the CMA info session today. I had never thought of doing a CMA, but now I'm thinking. Clinton makes a lot of references to the consulting career, and says that this is a good designation to have not only for accountants, but for consultants as well.

Professor Paul Roman teachers operations management. He's part of the reason why I'm here, because it was his class that I sat in a year ago, and I thought he was one of the best profs I had encountered. He still is, along with pretty much all other Queen's profs! The course content though gets a little difficult for me at times, since we've talked a lot about manufacturing and production lines and such, which I'm totally ignorant of. It doesn't help that this class is always in the afternoon, when my brain is the slowest. But I definitely want to learn this stuff, and it'll probably be one of the most practical and useful courses for my intended career as a strategy consultant.

Now need to get back to reading...

Back to School

Exams for the last module were done with last Wednesday, after which I promptly headed back home to Toronto. Nevermind the end-of-module "party like a rock star" party that night, although I've heard good things about it (and seen hilarious pictures).

Returned to Kingston last night after the long weekend. This entire week will be filled with career stuff:

• Today: intro prep sessions on finance and consulting interviews.
• Over the next two days: professionals who help people prepare interviews for a living will come and give a full day workshop on each of finance and consulting.
• Friday: our corporate partners and alumni will conduct group mock interviews, which should be a good learning experience as well as networking opportunity.
• Saturday: AT Kearney case competition. This is just internal to our class, and we're the only school AT Kearney chose to do a competition at. This will again be an excellent opportunity to score some contacts.

In the background, there are two books that we need to read within this week and the next, for the next two modules. They're both interesting reads, but will take some time.

Now allow me to rant a little, which I almost never do. We suffered in heat the entire day today, it was brutal. It was hot, I mean HOT, H-O-T, in the classrooms. Something to do with the air conditioning being turned off over the weekend, and probably having trouble coming back on. So it got increasingly hot in the morning, until the AC came back on in the afternoon, but it would take hours for the classrooms to cool down, so it never really cooled down before the sessions ended for the day. Did I mention it was brutal? It also doesn't help that my house isn't air conditioned, but you know, I cheap out on housing, I suffer the consequences. This is not to say that I recommend not cheaping out on housing. For a generally healthy student in his/her prime years without a rich daddy, cheap housing is worth the suffering.

Exams and Resumes

Exams: 1 down, 2 to go.

Resumes have been live for almost a week: http://www.business.queensu.ca/recruiting/student_resumes/mba/index.php

Back to cash flow statements.

Studying

This weekend is full of studying for exams, which will happen Monday - Wednesday. The consensus seems to be that there is way too much to study and too little time to study it. This is certainly true in my case. It's been incredibly difficult to keep up with individual readings and exercises, because people tend to devote most of their time to team assignments/projects, which is more of a priority than individual work, since no one wants to be the reason for potential sub-par team performance.

So now I should get back to the work that I've been neglecting all month, do as much as I can and hope for the best.

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!

Final HR Class

Today we had a full day of HR class that concluded the course. In the morning each team gave a 5-minute creative presentation on a "hot topic", which was very interesting, and everyone had fun doing it. In the afternoon, we did a "frame build" exercise, which was also a great exercise and we learned more about our teammates as well as the potential we didn't know we had.

In googling this exercise, I stumbled upon this page, which introduces the exercise as well as other team building sessions we did with Shawna back in orientation week. This is just a small portion of what the school provides to ensure that teams have the necessary tools to be successful.

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!