Riz’s Rotman Blog

A few of us went and did the Steam Whistle brewery tour. Picture:

The Geekery really kicked in during the tour when the guide was describing the different stages of production and we calculated the bottleneck of production kept them to 12 million bottles a year (max). This explains why they’re expanding.

I was asked by Paula to write up some words of wisdom for the Unofficial guide to Rotman. I’m also posting my answers on here. (some of these were brought up in my earlier tips)

Textbooks:

• Don’t buy them until you have to. The store seems to have more than enough textbooks so don’t worry about them running out. Reading them is also usually optional (Google is your friend).

Tips for Study Groups (what worked well/what didn’t work well):

• It sounds silly but MAKE A CONTRACT. Let me say that again MAKE A CONTRACT. Outline meeting rules, expectations for attendance, acceptable e-mail/phone times (e.g. no 1am phone calls), and standard meeting times/days.
• During the first week, after you get the due dates from all your courses, hold a group meeting. At the meeting draw a big calendar on the board and write out all the due dates. Now figure out how and when you’re going to finish all your work. It’s scary when you see all the stuff that’s due.
• Use survey monkey to create anonymous surveys of each group member’s performance. Do some 360 feedback after the group disbands to help everyone improve their work with the next group.

Tips on Courses:

• All courses – Always apply the “does this make sense” or “would a 10 year old laugh at me for this answer” test. It sounds funny but it’s really easy to get caught up in the process, tools, and terminology to produce a solution that would even get you kicked out of Schulich (Harsh Burn! :)). Just think about answers for a bit and walk through the logic in your head before you move forward.
• Accounting - Le Yawn. (sorry, I have no words of wisdom here, just bite your lip and do what you gotta do)
• Economics - Very important for Strategy and other courses later on. The basis for a lot of future theory. The lectures are where it’s at so don’t skip class. Reading the book isn’t very useful before class but can be very useful after class.
• Ethics - Write your reaction paper’s early and choose topics that you have some personal experience with.
• Finance - Don’t split the cases up among group members, you’ll hurt yourself for the exam. The cases aren’t too long, every group member should do it on their own and come together to compare (and argue) about answers. This is the best studying for the exam you could ever do.
• Integrative Thinking Practicum - Gah! This class will eat your life if you let it. Focus on the mental model merging stuff they teach you and less about the details of your project solution. Hopefully they reorganize the course this year to make it easier for you to learn about model merging before you finish your slide deck for the project.
• Negotiations - Before you come in make a plan for how to approach the experiential exercises in a way to actually make you learn. For example, be really confrontational and keep info close to the vest for the first negotiation and then very cooperative and freely share information for the 2nd. Use what you learn from the first 2 to try a 3rd strategy for the next exercise..
• Operations - Pay attention in statistics. Engineering degrees help.
• Statistics - Make sure you know how the data was collected for your project if you don’t collect it yourself. This will save you hours (if not days) of rework. Don’t sweat the quizzes too much.
• Strategy - “Trust the tools.” Tim Rowley always says this and he’s right. Don’t go with your gut (yet).

Who would have thunk it? Even in b-school being a geek rocks. Not in the “you get all the girls” or “can co-ordinate your body so you don’t trip over yourself” ways but in other ways. For example, when bidding for courses.

First some background. Rotman (like many b-schools) doesn’t do first-come-first-serve electives sign-up, you have to bid. I was allocated 1000 points and needed to sign up for 10 courses. Space in the courses is allocated to the higher bidders and those who don’t bid enough get their alternate choice (maybe).

It really is a fun (yeah you heard me) resource allocation problem. I sat down and cranked out an Excel spreadsheet that would take a bunch of random data they gave us (e.g. how much space is in the course, how many people have expressed interest in the course, etc.), infer a mean bid/standard deviation, and give you a max/min bid. This gives you a good range and you try to bid towards the upper portion.

It paid off, totally. I got all the courses I wanted

Here are the courses I’m in (links aren’t so great since they don’t have dedicated pages for each course, sorry):

• Corporate Financing
• Management Science
• Entrepreneurship
• Corporate E-biz Strategy
• Real Estate Economics
• Venture Capital
• Mergers & Acquisition
• Technology Strategy
• Financial Management
• Case Analysis & Presentation

I’m not going to go into the reasons for taking these courses—everyone has different reasons and needs.

In conclusion, I rock. I also have Fridays off all year and Mondays off during 1st semester (we don’t do quarters in 2nd year).  Yay for 4 day weekends!

Related to the previous post. It looks like yesterday’s AGM for RIM went well. The 8820 was announce and The Dean is now a Director.

p.s. Again, to cover my butt: I currently work for RIM but any opinions I’m expressing are my own and not RIM’s. All information in this post is public knowledge.