Riz’s Rotman Blog

Related to this earlier post, I recently listened to a lecture by John Ralston Saul on Big Ideas. It’s a good listen, despite his obvious dislike of management schools. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he is saying in his lecture but I think the overall ideas have merit:

• The good of society is not best viewed through an economic lens.
• Economic theories are just theories and models, not truths and realities so question them.
• A lot of trade today is “bad trade” since there is no real wealth creation. (listen to the lecture to understand this one)
• Society has the power, if it demands it, to force leaders to actually lead and make real decisions. Most currently manage within an unproven model with unproven assumptions. This model declares the inevitability of certain outcomes so they just manage the approach to the outcomes. Remember the quote from the earlier post: …if leadership is reduced to management, well then, problems are not to be solve. They are to be managed. In fact, the are no longer problems.

Speaking of leadership, there’s a related article on Slashdot about India and free broadband access.

P.S. Exams are done. Two papers left!

The Toronto Star has published an article about Rotman’s ITP. Excerpt:

Imagine you’re on the management team at Porter Airlines, the six-month-old commuter carrier running flights to Montreal and Ottawa from the Toronto City Centre Airport.

You’ve put together a presentation on Porter’s financial prospects and marketing strategy for potential new private equity investors.

But first, you have to pitch the plan to your board of directors. The board will ask tough questions and tell you whether you have a good case for raising money.

What would you say?

This would be a challenging assignment for any executive. The airline industry is fraught with risk and many small carriers are no longer flying.

It was even more challenging for first-year MBA students, who had to pitch a real-world company to a board made up of real businesspeople.

This was the course that made this quarter hard.

This tip isn’t really for people who have been accepted to Rotman but more for people interested in b-school. I recently got a question from someone asking for GMAT tips. The best I can come up with is an overview of what I did to prepare for the GMAT. Remember, these are just my experiences… your mileage may vary.

I purchased two books: The Princeton Review and Kaplan study guides. I found that the lessons in the Princeton Review (PR) book were superior to the Kaplan book. I used the PR lessons to learn all the tricks etc. of the GMAT. When I felt comfortable with the material in the book I booked my GMAT test date.

For the 3 days before the test I structured my day as closely as I could the actual test day. I got up at 6 AM, got dressed, had brekfast, relaxed for a bit (driving time), and started to do a practice test at 9:30. I took breaks at the same time as I would during the actual test and simulated the test environment to the best of my ability. I used the Kaplan CD tests to practice—they are more difficult than the actual GMAT test. In the afternoon I would review my test results and try to understand where I made mistakes.

The day of the test was uneventful, I got their early and wrote the test. At the end of the test the computer provides you the opportunity to not have your test marked. I thought about not having my test marked because I found it really easy. In my experience, if I find a test very easy, I probably screwed up. I finally decided to have my test marked because I just really wanted to know how well (or badly) I did. I’m glad I got it marked because I got a great mark which helped me get into Rotman.

One tip I can provided is that you should pay more attention to earlier questions in a section rather than the later ones. From what I understand, the computer uses a form of binary search to give you a mark. That basically means that it is easier to move to a higher or lower score with the earlier questions than it is with the later questions.

There are plenty of other GMAT tips online so read all you can. Good luck.

For many of our courses we have to write these things known as “reaction papers.” They are basically a way for a course which has no real way of evaluating you to give you a mark. These marks, to the best of my knowledge, follow the century old stair method of marking. These courses are:

• Negotiations
• Leadership
• Integrative Thinking Practicum
• Foundations of Integrative Thinking
• Ethics

I really dislike writing reaction papers. You have to somehow come up with 10 pages worth of content based on experience and apply very generic frameworks/ideas. They take a very long time and you have no idea if what you produced is a good or bad paper. When they give the papers back, they usually just have a mark and no comments about how the mark was derived. Of course you can go see the professor and demand that he/she justify your mark but they can always make stuff up.

This is entirely my personal opinion.

I really don’t want to write these reaction papers.

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” That quote is true in just about every case but is especially true, I’ve found, of the Rotman CCC. There are lots of numbers that get thrown at you about job success rates and ways in which people find jobs. Of course the numbers are true but people can come up with statistics to prove anything, forfty percent of all people know that. For example there are lots of indications that you’ll easily find the summer job you want through the CCC.

This is not true!

For example, somewhere in the area of 70% of summer students want an I-Banking or Consulting job. My impression is that about 15% of summer students actually get these jobs. Another example is that the school claims that 90%+ of students get summer jobs. This is true but there are two important caveat:

1. That’s 90%+ but they don’t say how many of them were landed the job before the summer started.
2. It doesn’t say how many people had to settle for a crappy job that they have no interest in.

Now all this doom-and-gloom doesn’t make Rotman and the CCC look very hot. In reality they both do a great job in trying to get lots of recruiters in (mostly for I-Banking and Consulting with a few random marketing analyst type jobs). The problem is that the summer job market is very competetive. The recruiters go to lots of different schools to try and fill very few summer jobs.

My tip to you is to not rely on the CCC for a summer job. Try and set something up before you start the MBA. If you can’t do that then try and look for jobs outside of Rotman as early as possible. This is especially true if you don’t want an I-banking/consulting gig since there were very few interesting jobs offered outside of these two industries.

This problem is not Rotman specific. It exists at all schools.

P.S. Last week of classes and I’ve caught ANOTHER cold. Is that 3 or 4 since class started?

Don’t get frustrated when you find that you’re no longer the smartest kid in class. It’s something that takes some getting use to. The program has some of the smartest and most competitive people I’ve ever met. Rotman marks on a very strict bell curve. In some classes there seems to be no relationship between the work and the mark. This means you can usually expect a B+.

Don’t buy the books until you have to. I’ve found that most of my books are unused. The most useful books I’ve found are:

• Strategy book (if you spend the time and effort to actually read it carefully)
• Financial Accounting book
• Ethics (because there are no lectures, only case discussions)

Many will disagree with this list. Everyone finds different things useful. Usually you don’t have to actually do the readings for class, with the exception of cases.

I’ve got a summer job now. It took a long time and one of my future “Tips” will talk about the summer job process. I’ll be at Research In Motion. Job Description:

The PMDP is a three-month intensive training program where MBA interns will work on challenging product management projects within several key RIM divisions. Working with the best in the mobile communications industry, PMDP interns will learn firsthand the development and execution of product launches for new BlackBerry products and services. All interns will develop relationships and integrate with internal engineering and technology groups. Working alongside a Product Manager, interns will receive coaching, mentoring and opportunities to explore a future career at RIM. Interaction with senior-level executives, networking social events and off-site development days, will enhance your overall internship experience.

Sounds cool to me… I’ll be looking for a place to stay in Waterloo from June to August (the position doesn’t start until June so I’ll have a month off).

I’ve noticed that the “finance guys/girls” sit in the back corner of the class. Use this as you will.

Pre-courses are a waste of money (mostly). If you’ve never taken a statistics course EVER, then the stats pre-course is probably worth it. The Accounting pre-course is covered again in the first two weeks of class. The content of the finance pre-course don’t really become useful until Q3, by which point you’ve already forgotten everything.

The two reasons I can think of for actually taking pre-courses is to get you back into the learning mindset and  to make Accounting easy for the first 2 weeks and thus reducing your course load for a bit.