My Term 1 courses are:
- Quantitative Platform for Business - basically Stats for business
- Management Science - using Excel to model scenarios used for decision making
- Business Society Management - basically sustainable development for business
- Organizational Behaviour - studying the psychology of organizations and their cultures
- Human Resource Management - study how HR relates to the strategy and success in business
- Managerial Accounting & Financial Statement Analysis - as it sounds :)
- Personal Leadership Development - this course runs the entire year
- Career Development - this also runs the whole year and is mostly workshops
I have to say that I am learning new things in all of these courses at an incredible rate. I find the HR, BSM and Org Behaviour courses absolutely fascinating and the professors are extremely good at keeping everyone interested. For these classes, we mostly employ case learning so we have studied everything from SouthWest Airlines to Turbococina (a company that tried to sell highly efficient stoves in Latin America).
The other courses are more dry, but I'm still definitely learning in those too. QPB is actually making Stats somewhat interesting as it's showing the real value of it for business. I've learned most of this in Stats for Life Sciences (yikes, more than 10 years ago!), but it makes much more sense now. Management Science is fascinating as well as it allows one to apply real logic and numbers to decision making and test out a variety of scenarios. It's quite powerful stuff. And Accounting, well, that's Accounting. I haven't taken it before so a lot of it is beyond me, but I'm hoping it all sinks in at some point. What's really interesting to me is that it seems like Accountants are mostly just making up the rules as they go and that everyone does the accounts in different ways. There are rules and guidelines, yes, but it seems much less like strict math and more like the wild west to me (I call it the wild west because I had been taught previously that carbon/GHG accounting is much like the wild west at the moment and it seems like regular accounting is as well!).
Most of these courses also have group assignments to go along with it. We are split into two sections and each section has ~8 teams of ~6 people each. We stick with these sections and teams for all of term 1 and then everything shuffles around. So we are juggling classes, readings, individual work, midterms and group work all at once. It is very much like being in 'exam mode' but for 6-7 weeks straight. I get home from school (by 6pm if I'm lucky, but usually more like 8:30pm) quickly scarf down dinner (that my kind and very supportive husband has usually made) and then sit at the books or computer until 10:30pm. I usually quit then because I don't absorb much after that point. It pretty much goes this way all week until Friday night when we relax. Weekends are usually spent doing work all day, but we also fit in time for shopping, exercise and hanging out with each other. I know I can survive 3 weeks of 'exam mode' as I've done that plenty of times, but we'll see how exhausted I am by the end of 6 weeks.
Here's a preview of what's left to come for me this term:
QPB Team Assignment 1 (25%) - due Feb 14
MS Workshop 2 team assignment (13.3%) - Feb 16
BSM Team Assignment (35%) - TBD (Feb 13-17?)
OB group midterm (40%) - Feb 22
MS Workshop 3 team assignment (13.3%) - Mar 1
QPB Team Assignment 2 (25%) - Mar 7
QPB Exam (35%) - March 12
MA Exam (65%) - March 13
OB Exam (60%) - March 14
MS Exam (50%) - March 15
BSM Exam (50%) - March 16
HRM Individual Assignment (60%) - March 24
HRM Group Assignment (40%) - March 24
And then, we get two weeks off - woohoo! We are planning on going to England to visit family, and then we are looking forward to having my parents and my aunt come visit us in April. I can't wait!
The other courses are more dry, but I'm still definitely learning in those too. QPB is actually making Stats somewhat interesting as it's showing the real value of it for business. I've learned most of this in Stats for Life Sciences (yikes, more than 10 years ago!), but it makes much more sense now. Management Science is fascinating as well as it allows one to apply real logic and numbers to decision making and test out a variety of scenarios. It's quite powerful stuff. And Accounting, well, that's Accounting. I haven't taken it before so a lot of it is beyond me, but I'm hoping it all sinks in at some point. What's really interesting to me is that it seems like Accountants are mostly just making up the rules as they go and that everyone does the accounts in different ways. There are rules and guidelines, yes, but it seems much less like strict math and more like the wild west to me (I call it the wild west because I had been taught previously that carbon/GHG accounting is much like the wild west at the moment and it seems like regular accounting is as well!).
Most of these courses also have group assignments to go along with it. We are split into two sections and each section has ~8 teams of ~6 people each. We stick with these sections and teams for all of term 1 and then everything shuffles around. So we are juggling classes, readings, individual work, midterms and group work all at once. It is very much like being in 'exam mode' but for 6-7 weeks straight. I get home from school (by 6pm if I'm lucky, but usually more like 8:30pm) quickly scarf down dinner (that my kind and very supportive husband has usually made) and then sit at the books or computer until 10:30pm. I usually quit then because I don't absorb much after that point. It pretty much goes this way all week until Friday night when we relax. Weekends are usually spent doing work all day, but we also fit in time for shopping, exercise and hanging out with each other. I know I can survive 3 weeks of 'exam mode' as I've done that plenty of times, but we'll see how exhausted I am by the end of 6 weeks.
Here's a preview of what's left to come for me this term:
QPB Team Assignment 1 (25%) - due Feb 14
MS Workshop 2 team assignment (13.3%) - Feb 16
BSM Team Assignment (35%) - TBD (Feb 13-17?)
OB group midterm (40%) - Feb 22
MS Workshop 3 team assignment (13.3%) - Mar 1
QPB Team Assignment 2 (25%) - Mar 7
QPB Exam (35%) - March 12
MA Exam (65%) - March 13
OB Exam (60%) - March 14
MS Exam (50%) - March 15
BSM Exam (50%) - March 16
HRM Individual Assignment (60%) - March 24
HRM Group Assignment (40%) - March 24
And then, we get two weeks off - woohoo! We are planning on going to England to visit family, and then we are looking forward to having my parents and my aunt come visit us in April. I can't wait!
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