Riz’s Rotman Blog

I’ve been put in touch with my first year buddies and I’ve answered some questions that might be of value to others:

• You’ll get your course info after the taste of the MBA. They will provide you full student access to R-world which has a section with your schedule.
• I’m a member of: The Management Consulting Association, Engineers in Management, New Ventures, and Media and Entertainment Association. I decided mainly based on what my possible careers could involve. They’ll provide you an opportunity after the Taste of the MBA to learn more about the clubs. I’d say it’s better to choose more clubs rather than less; that being said, the clubs are quite expensive in some cases so don’t sign up for everything.

I know it isn’t much but I felt that these were time sensitive for the students just starting their MBA at Rotman. As I answer more questions I’ll post my responses here.

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.

Week one of classes for this quarter are officially done. I’m going to reiterate my eariler statement—I’m surprised by the amount of work. I do think I’ve gotten a little better with time management this week and am starting to learn what I need and don’t need to read.

First (as promised) is my impression of the pre-courses. What everyone says is true: if you have a basic understanding of anything taught in the pre-courses, you don’t need to take them. The information is covered again in the actual course. That being said, I found that I did get some real value from the courses since they gave me a little bit of a leg up this week and allowed me to settle into the swing of things rather than to worry as much about learning totally new material.

Second, my thoughts on the courses:

• Statistics for Managers
  This course seems more about learning how to convert management questions to stats questions and how to design an studies than stats courses I’ve taken in the past. I’m not quite sure where it’s going but it’s mostly new information to me. The ideas so far haven’t been that difficult. The project for the course is going to be a pain in the @$$ (more about it in a later post).
• Managerial Economics
  Having taken a 100 level econ course in my undergrad, this course has been a review so far. The one difference I have noticed is that there is a focus on maximizing firm profits (duh!) unlike the 100 level econ course I took. The one thing to note is that this is the only course that we don’t get lecture notes online.
• Financial Accounting
  There isn’t much to say about this course. We are just learning about the major financial statements: how things are categorized, recorded, and some of the rules we should be aware of when reading financial statements. One overriding theme has been been (as mentioned earlier) don’t cook the books. Another major theme (so far) is that a Balance sheet really isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if your trying to gain a real understanding of what a firm and its assets are worth—watch out for GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) changes in a few years.
• Foundations of Integrative thinking
  This is mostly a psychology course so far and I’m really enjoying it despite its “soft” nature. It really shows you how people are manipulated and how we all make bad judgments all the time. The point is to try and keep us from making bad decisions by showing us how we make decisions and what external factors can inversely effect our thinking. I’ll admit it; I’ve fallen into a decision trap just about each time the professor has proposed a question with some sort of trick to it. SHAME!
• Managing People in Organizations
  By far the “softest” course in my opinion. It does provide a lot of interesting information but coming from a quantitative background I’m having a little trouble making the adjustment to being all “touchy-feely.” This one has an exam. Eeep.

I’ve spent wayyy to much time on this post so I’ll skip the rest and post more thoughts at some other point. Enjoy your weekend, I’ll be reading.

Well, that was tiring.

I’m not going to say much because if I go into details this post will be pages long and I don’t have the time to write it up.

The orientation camp was really fun. The 2nd years did a great job of organizing and running the event. It  was really obvious that it required a lot of work—if any 2nd years are reading, the first years really do appreciate it.

Dean Martin gave a few talks during the week:

- He seems very, very, very smart.
- He seems very friendly.
- He firmly believes in the Integrative Thinking program at Rotman.
- My class will have the largest number of mandatory Integrative Thinking courses.

Classes start on Monday and we’ve already been assigned readings. It begins…

P.S. I went to the costume party as Steve Jobs and a lot of people guessed that I was Gates! Ick. I have to try to look cooler next time.

Yesterday was the “Taste of the MBA” day (link to Google cache). The idea was to give students an overview of what the MBA will provide and the types of things that we will be learning. I found it really fun and interesting. It was also very well planned an executed—kudos to Nadia for all the work.

After the events quite a few of us made it out to the bar and just hung out. There are a lot of really, really, really smart and fun people in the class. I’ll admit, I drank a little too much too but I made it to my 8:30.

Today I attended the first of the pre-courses. I’m going to reserve judgment on the courses until I’ve had a chance to see how the courses impacts my ability to take the term courses. What I will say is that I feel the pre-courses are helping me to get back into the school/learning mindset.