Riz’s Rotman Blog

I’m finding this quarter’s material in general to be less interesting than the previous two quarters… Here’s the skinny:

• Managerial accounting - We spent 20 minutes talking about y=mx+b. Ouch. Sometimes I miss diff eq… but then I slap myself.
• Macro econ - Interesting discussions but the concepts seem very simple. This might be because I took a macro course back in my undergrad. The most difficult part is remembering things like: environmental regulations came in about 1973 or a possible reason for high GDP growth in the US (and not the rest of the world) is because it was isolated to the IT industry.
• Strategy - Important material. Useful stuff. It just doesn’t seem as interesting as the previous quarter. A lot of reading.
• MCV - Important material. Useful stuff. I just don’t see the thread that connect the entire course together. Yet.
• Finance - Death by excel. Voodoo magic.

I have nothing to report on the job front since the jobs I really want haven’t gotten back to me yet.

This upcoming week is going to suck. We have 3 group assignments due. Now you could say that we’re just slackers and should have gotten to work earlier but allow me to defend my group by saying:

• We don’t get one of the assignments until tomorrow.
• We didn’t get another of the assignments until a few days ago.
• We don’t know how to address the third assignment until this Friday.

Yeah.

This article has some of the dumbest moments in 2006. They aren’t all business fumbles as the article name suggests but they are funny nonetheless. If you just want what I feel to be the highlights:

• Kazakhstan misspells ‘bank’ on their currency
  
• Video of the sleeping Comcast guy
• Starbucks using e-mail for LIMITED coupon distro
• Poisoned bottled water
• Interviewing the wrong guy about the iTMS, way to go BBC
• Playboy bunnies that should be at Rotman instead of me
• Greatest, burger, ever…
• Including the black-market in GDP calculations
• MBA students are big cheaters (I of course, do not cheat :))
• Awarding stock options to a dead guy
• Printing the number for phone sex rather than customer service
• The number one sign of a company in trouble. They won’t let you cancel the service.
• Microsoft uses Google
• Racist ads for the PS3
• You’re losing your job but you have to train your replacement first
• Promoting a product that’s no longer for sale
• Lawsuit for making my site too popular
• Money is worth more than the face value
• Not reading a contract

Finance proffs seem to make a lot of funny quotes. I’m not quite sure why:

Lets say you’re adding a new high-return, low-risk stock to your portfolio like GM. Wait, no, not GM.

In other news, the first of my friends @ Rotman just got a summer job. Congradz are in order… I also need light a fire under my ass to actually submit my job applications.

… So… I guess I’ll post something.

I had a mock interview with IBM today. It actually went very well. The woman interviewing me told me I did great except I should:

1. Play up some of my other interests some more because she found them very interesting.
2. Find a nice way to say “I left my previous job because the opportunities to advance were limited.” I think that is “niced up.” I probably said something different in the interview but I can’t remember.

If you hadn’t guessed, the job searching period has arrived. It’s actually starting to eat a lot of my time despite my decision to avoid info sessions (usually 2 a day) like the plague and only to apply to jobs that I’m very serious about—so far that’s only 4 jobs. Hopefully this strategy will allow me to get a job and keep my sanity/GPA.
Speaking of GPA, marks came out. I’m happy.

I guess I’ll also take this procrastination period to provide my initial impressions of the classes this quarter:

Biz finance - YIKES! The proff. just threw a bunch of stuff up on the wall yesterday and I had no idea what he was talking about. He was apparently giving a review. This does not bode well. Seriously though, I have no idea what to say about this class yet. More details when I can do the whole EBITDA-depreciation(1-tax rate)-Investments thing.

Strategy - This could go either way. In the first-half we focused on deciding on a strategy. In this half we’re focusing on how to implement that strategy. I think that implementation is the more important (and far more difficult) part of strategy. It should be interesting to learn though.

Managing Customer Value - I’m not quite sure what this course is about yet. It seems to be a little bit of promotions, a little bit finance, and a lot of bit of work. So far we’ve only touched on how to use “customer value” to value a company with no profit.

Managerial Accounting - This course seems like it’s all about cost allocation. Stimulating!

Macro Economics - I almost fell asleep during the first class. ’nuff said.

Well, that’s what I think about the classes after the first session. The information I provided isn’t very valuable. Meh… it’s my blog and I’ll waste bytes if I want to, bytes if I want to, bytes if I want to…

Just finished the “Negotiations intensive” week. It was really, really fun. The course is very focused on experience. Generally there would be some basic theory given followed by the class breaking up and trying to negotiate a deal based on some case information.

The coolest part of the course was the fact that you would be given a bunch of information and you get to apply a lot of the stuff we had learned in the previous 2 quarters.

On Saturday Rotman also had a big team building exersise where each group for Q3 and Q4 would be given a bunch of clues and we had to go on a scavanger hunt across Toronto. It was a lot of fun; the main downer though was the 9AM start. I wanted to sleep in.

One thing I have to mention though is the constant use of Pizza for meals. Rotman serves food at quite a few events and this week I had Pizza  3 times. Yes, 3 times.