Riz’s Rotman Blog

I just bought my November metropass and they’ve raised the price by $10. That’s another $120 out of my pocket each year and another reason to just drive everyday. There are a few things that bother me about this:

1. Given global warming and our love for Al Gore, shouldn’t we be making it more convenient and cheaper to take public transit? This means *not* closing subway lines, *not* addressing cost issues with fare increases and maybe even introducing something like an oyster card from the London tube system.
2. Many other cities are able to offer monthly passes in the $30 area, why can’t Toronto structure the TTC’s finances and operations like these cities (I’d link to examples but I’m on the subway right now)? $110 a month is a lot! Even if you factor in the tax deductibility.

A world class city needs world class public transit which includes more subway lines and affordable fares.

Comments?

This is just an overall feeling I’m getting the last few weeks. I’m bored in probably 70% of my classes. It’s painful. This just kills my productivity. I just want to finish right now and get to working.

ARG!

Finally, I can talk about it. Today RIM, Canada’s most valuable company, released the Facebook for BlackBerry app today. This gives me the ability to talk about my summer work a slight bit where I spent a lot of time doing work for RIM in this area and (some specific work) on this app.

It’s a great feeling to see something you’ve worked on launch. I’ve had the app for a few months on my BlackBerry and love it… I don’t think I could enjoy using Facebook without it. Anyways, go download the app and see how you like it by pointing your BlackBerry browser to facebook.com or directly from RIM.

Update: BBCool has a post with some good screenshots.

Den, a perspective Rotman student, asked some questions on the last post. They are good questions and probably of general interest so I decided to give my answers their own post.

First, thanks for the compliment Den. It’s easy to be “the best” when you’re probably the only source.

Now the questions:

Are there many people from non-tech/non-finance background (that’s me) at the school?

Well the vast majority of people at the school have an Engineering, Science, Math, or Commerce background. That being said, there are many people who don’t have these backgrounds and do very well in many courses that us Engineers have difficulty with. They showed us a pie chart at the Taste of the MBA, I believe my class is 20-25% non engineering, science, math, and commerce (but I can’t remember for sure). The Rotman site has a breakdown for this years class:

Is student involvement encouraged/supported? I was thinking of organizing a club if I got accepted, but I am not sure if that is a part of the culture at Rotman.

Student involvement is strongly encouraged supported. I remember getting an e-mail back before I started school (after I started this blog) from a second year who was encouraging me to join an initiative to start a new Rotman student newsletter. That, unfortunately, fell through but it’s just one of the examples of the types of things you can do. Other examples are: starting your own club, running for student government, helping the school with initiatives, or just participating in all the conferences and competitions. With respect to starting your own club, that is definitely a possibility. I believe (and don’t quote me on this) that we’ve had 3 or 4 new clubs created since I started at Rotman.

The biggest issue that I will bring up (and I believe it is a theme in quite a few of my posts) is that people are really busy (especially in first year). This becomes a problem when you’re trying to build clubs which requires a lot of involvement. Students love the clubs but when it comes to execution, many pick sleep over heavy involvement in clubs. This is just an observation of mine and it may or may not be a trend you see across the MBA schools.

Regardless, I encourage you to try different things and if building a club interests you, go for it!

The adcom are not very responsive to my emails so it is very hard to communicate with them. Was the situation similar when you applied?

By adcom I’m assuming that you are referring to the admissions people. I didn’t e-mail them very much but I did find that occasionally it took a few tries before I got a response. I’m not sure why. This isn’t a trend I see inside Rotman though. I usually get responses to my e-mails in minutes and at most hours. Consequently, I’d guess that the admissions people are just swapped with e-mails or there is a process in place for responding to e-mails and perhaps the process needs some retooling.

Thanks for the questions. As I’ve said before, if anyone has any questions please send me an e-mail or post a comment. It makes coming up for content for this blog a lot easier. To me all this information is internalized somewhere in my brain and it’s hard to pick it out unless someone asks.

Cheers.

Wallstrip posted a very funny video today. It’s about assets that make money and assets that depreciate. You’ll learn some good old biz terms and understand why gold digging really shouldn’t pay with business minded people.

The video:

I’ve recently found myself thinking back to my last year of high school. It was University acceptance time and I was getting nervous. My two safety schools had already given my my acceptance but the School I really wanted to go to still hadn’t made up their mind.

My guidance counselor had me in for one of our regular meetings and I shared with her my fear of not getting in. She paused and looked at me. A small smile developed and she said:

Riz, don’t worry. No matter which student comes in here, with whatever aspiration, for whatever school, they all come back and tell me that they couldn’t be happier. It didn’t matter if they get into their first choice school or not.

I walked out of there thinking “crazy lady!” Lucky for me I didn’t have to put that theory to the test; I got into Queen’s, did really well, met lots of wonderful people, and had the time of my life.

The reason I’ve started thinking about high school again is it’s that time of year at Rotman: Second years are all freaking out to get into Investment Banking and Consulting and first years are worried that their marks won’t be high enough to get into Investment Banking or Consulting. I’ve found myself telling everyone not to worry too much about it, that they should just do their best, and repeating some version of what my guidance counselor told me. Quite often I get the “you’re crazy” look.

Over my life I’ve had many triumphs and failures. As I look back, I don’t think I would have been much happier if I had turned my failures into triumphs: Got the girl, didn’t get the girl; got the A, got a not-so-A-mark; scored the goal, scored on my own net; got the job, got a big “you’re a loser buddy.” It hasn’t really mattered to me as far as how happy I feel today… at least that’s the best that I can tell.

My “first year buddy” recently called me on this thinking and I remembered Dan Gilbert’s TED talk. I love TED talks and Dan’s is one of my favorite. You can buy his argument or not (there are some people in the comments section who don’t buy it) but it’s a talk to watch.

Don’t worry be happy now Do doot do do do do do do do do doot do , doo do do do do

Well, it took nearly 4 weeks but I finally find myself doing a consistent level of work. It’s still no where near as bad as last year—it looks like I’ll probably have most of the weekend off, again. My original assessment of the courses still seems true right now.

I’m really happy with the amount of reading this year. It’s easily half to a quarter of what I had to do last year. Furthermore, to a large degree, the readings are just refreshers of concepts from first year and how to apply them to new situations. However, the new situations are far more complex and real world than last year.

News from yesterday: I’m apparently so good at this whole creating value thing that RIMM just kicked some butt. Yesterday their stock jumped ~$3 partially on the news that the US postal service will be giving their workers BlackBerry devices to use some location based services. Then they jumped another $7 in after hours trading due to their quarter results—the iPhone did nothing but help RIMM. Yeah, all that value creation was me.

Finally, I have a cold.