The First Week (8th - 13th Sept 2008)

Integrative Thinking, Statistics, Managerial Economics, Managing People in Organizations and Financial Accounting. It was an awefully busy, but engrossing first week. But something I learnt quickly is that the most important skill we need is time management. Its not just about the academics, but throw in information sessions, elections, club events and social events and you will be left gasping for air.
The first week has set the trend of the whole program. Its Monday morning and I already feel sleep depraved. The pace of the MBA is excruciating, to say the least. But then this is what I have set myself for and I am enjoying myself, or at least have enjoyed myself at the end of the first week. Thats more politically correct.
The professors are great. Will Strange is teaching us Managerial Economics. He does liven up the class. He has an awesome sense of humour and his classes are not just about equations and graphs. He is trying really hard to make Economics interesting for us. We already took a look at 'Supply and Demand'. This is one concept which we probably will need to use a lot whichever path we follow after this, be it finance, consulting, marketing or general management.
Uli, the German stats prof was the one everyone was scared of. He is the only one who 'cold calls' in the first quarter and sure enough in the second lecture he picked upon two unfortunate souls to dissect a statistical problem in a business scenario and identify the statistical unit, response variable and factor variable. Although I find the subject matter to be pretty drab, I think he has a way to make the subject come alive. I am actually trying to look at the numbers without thinking of just finding the standard deviation or mean. I am trying to make some sense of the data.
Integrative Thinking is a course I am still trying to figure out. I mean we had a role play negotiation game which was fun. But I am a little behind in this course already and need to catch up on all the readings. John Eesch is reputed in Rotman to mark everybody on an average scale. That is only around 10 % of his class gets an A. Everybody else is assigned a B+.
Jennifer Berdahl is teaching us Managing People in Organizations (MPO). This class uses the case study methodology. We are asked to read cases and come to class, where the case is dissected. This class has marks for participation. So expect a lot of noise.
Financial Accounting is taught by Franco Wong. Mr Wong makes excellent use of the classroom camera when he teaches. So far the subject seems to be ok. But its pretty easy to fall behind. I am making balance sheets after a long long time. It was good recapitualation. But next week onwards, things wont be so hunky dory. We are going to use the Accruals Method in accounting. Which means we will be using the time value of money and take into account factors like depreciation, before putting a book value for our assets and liabilities.
Well thats all about our action packed first week at Rotman. I will keep you posted on our second week.