Riz’s Rotman Blog

I’m surprised by how much more efficient I’ve become (either that or my quality of work has slipped). Here’s an update on my big projects:

So this means I have no motivation again and have this strong urge to buy an Xbox 360 with my signing bonus from RIM (did I mention I took a job with RIM? :)) and play lots of Call of Duty 4. It’s always fun to save the world.

Maybe instead of that I should get back into my work-out schedule. I’ve been sick for the last few weeks and have reverted to do the bare minimum at the gym.

Rotman just started a photography club which I’m joining. I’m not an expert in any way but I think it would be cool to hang out with some photo-geeks. 

Finally, I’ve decided to change up some of my courses. The add-drops are still in flux so I’ll post an update once everything is figured out.

Exams in 2 weeks! 

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.

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’ll probably take a few minutes this week to come up with some tips/suggestions for you. Leave me a comment or e-mail me if there’s anything you’d like me to address specifically. I am the social coordinator for the camp so I’ll be planning a lot of the parties etc. for the event.

A few nights ago we held the annual Rotman No Talent Night. It’s a show put together by students where they show off their talent (or lack thereof). Just a note that it was loads of fun. Great jokes. Something to go to next year for sure!

So Q4 has started with a bang. The main course of intrest is the Integrative Thinking practicum. The basic idea behind this course is as follows:

• Your project group becomes the executive team (CEO, CFO, etc.) of a firm.
• Your project group reports to a board of directors composed of business people from the Toronto area.
• Your objective is to write up a business plan and presentation to give to the board which is targeted towards getting some VCs to invest in your business plan.

That’s about it. You aren’t given anything else (save some random data which is just a mess). We have 3 weeks to do the whole thing along with all our other classes/commitments. It’s going to be a ridiculous amount of work but it sounds lots of fun.

The other courses seem pretty standard and I don’t have much to say about them yet except that the first ethics class was LOTS OF FUN! We discussed this Queen’s case.

The GBC elections are in a few days. I decided not to run for any of the positions despite strong encouragement from many people. Although being a social rep was fun I’ve become very discouraged by the lack of participation by my class. The workload and life outside of Rotman seems to put a severe damper on people doing anything social as a class; it feels like you’re pulling teeth every time you try to get people to go to an event. I figure I’ll just enjoy the events and help out when I can next year. To all who are running, good luck.

I haven’t really posted anything about Q2 (other than the obligatory first post). In general, there isn’t anything to say but here are some things I can throw out there:

• difficulty(Q2)>>difficulty(Q1)
• workload(Q2)>workload(Q1)
• freakingOut(Q2)<freakingOut(Q1)
• interestingContent(Q2)>interestingContent(Q1)
• jobSearchStress(Q2)>jobSearchSress(Q1)

That was geeky. Anyways, Friday is the Rotman Semi-formal. I’ve been trying to sell tickets but it seems like demand is pretty low. Hopefully there will be a surge in demand in the next few days.

I’m probably going to enter the Rotman photography competition.

Hopefully I’ll have something of value to post in the next few days.

I was at the CABC Forum on Competitiveness today. One of the speakers provided an analogy to describe what it felt like to be in the wine industry after the elimination of a lot of the protectionisms. It was something simillar to:

It felt like being in a dark alley and suddenly being chased by a guy with a knife. But we found out we could really run.

Pretty good (and funny) analogy.

The forum didn’t go to deep into any of the issues but I did get free breakfast; so there was that.

Yesterday night, I saw George Stroumboulopoulos at the bar. Yeah, that’s right.

Tonight we had the first GBC meeting. There isn’t much to say, it was pretty much a briefing on what’s going on and things we can do to help.

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Just thought I’d mention, Q1 is done.

The end was a little intense. Marks don’t come out for another 3 weeks or so.
Tomorrow is Halloween and the plan is to go to the Brunswick House for some class fun.

Q2 just started and I’ll post my thoughts about it pretty soon.

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