Mo MBA Bloggage

Some folks over at Auburn University have been blogging their way through an MBA too. Here's what they made of it

Kid Icarus and the Gang

I think they're starting to get demob happy.

Footnotes and Mnemonics

If like me, and I doubt you are, you're currently trying to remember what Pfeffers high performance work practices are for an exam you might be interested in this handy mnemonic.

Job Rotation
Selective Hiring and extensive training
Teams
Reduced status distinctions and hierarchy
Employment security
Sharing gains with workers
Sharing financial and performance information

Job-Stress makes for high performance, who'd have thunk it.

Still, if this was the only kind of thing I was trying to remember at the moment I'd be a lot happier, but no. Here at SBS we have to remember not just what we've been taught, but who thought of the ideas and when. So were I to quote the above work practices I'd get more marks for adding 'Pfeffer 1996' at the end than I would if I didn't. Before I go too much further I should point out that the courses have been great and there's been an emphasis on trying to make us understand this stuff and apply it to cases. Which I did.

Now however I have to go through the pathetic and pedantic exercise of remembering who wrote what when. It'd make sense if I was an academic, writing a thesis or preparing an article for peer review. But I'm not, I'm an MBA student on what is essentially a vocational course. My future salary will not depend on whether I can remember who came up with these ideas, it will depend on whether I understand them well enough to choose the right ones to implement and implement them successfully. It will also depend - at least in part - on my ability to work out what is useful information deserving attention and what isn't. Sadly I have to spend the next five days memorising junk when I'd much rather be doing some of the optional reading I didn't have time for during the last few weeks...

I'm working on a much longer rant about this, but after it got peer reviewed and dragged into a discussion of reductivist theories in the humantities and the notion of absolute truth in the sciences I decided it might need some more work - in an over christmas kind of way...

Making progress

All these late nights revising finance are starting to pay off. Sitting through todays revision lecture in finance there's been nothing I haven't followed, and nothing I haven't revised. Of course this is at least in part because I've taken a tactical decision to ignore the stuff about Options, but that's a comparatively small part of the course.

Head down, day 3

Today is the third day of eighth week, I've done 27 hours of work this week, with another seven or eight to get through today. To top it all off something has now come up which I feel about sufficiently strongly that I'm going to need to do something about it.

Damn.

On the plus side I'm getting there with the finance revision, market security lines, beta, all that good stuff - I understand it. I may not yet be able to remember the formulas or apply the skills, but I'm getting there.

A day in the life

When people ask me about why I write this blog I sometimes say things like 'because all the MBA brochures talk you through a typical day for a student, and I want people to know what its really like'. So here is what happened to me today.

7:30 Alarm goes off at, however because I spent last night working till the wee small hours I sleep through it. Finally wake at 8:10
8:43 Skip breakfast, make it to school
8:45 - 12:15 Industrial Organisations lecture, half hour break at 10:15, use it to eat breakfast (mmm doughnuts), design an internal poster for the Oxford Business Forum and talk to my New Business Development Project (NBD) group.
12:15 - 1:15, Lunch - eat food altogether healthier Thai Chicken and rice , talk about options trading with two former traders. Realise I still don't understand it. Refuse to believe them when they claim not to understand strategy. (see below)
1:15 - 2 Talk to a group of applicants who are here on interview about the Oxford Business Forum. Spend another 30 minutes talking to them about what its like to be a student here, whether MBA's are worthwhile and how stressful this is.
2 - 4 Head to the library to finish resurrecting my laptop. (spent too much of the weekend reinstalling windows after all else failed - managed not to lose any data). Getting my network connections back takes an impressive two hours - during various system enforced pauses I try and sort out the problems which are besetting getting the leaflets published for the Oxford Business Forum.
4 - 7 Work on group case study for strategic management
7- 7:45 Go home, stop to eat at the Oriental Cafe (thats its name, as well as being what it is) chicken and mushroom with rice. Mmmm. Look at the job centre opposite and remember how grim signing on is.
7:45 - 8 Remember best practice and back up all data to network drive. Wonder which clueless wonder decided that the right place to put your pst file (email) was in a hard to locate hidden directory.
8 - 10:45 Finance revision. I intended to get through two lectures worth of notes, however a realisation that while I may think I understand portfolio theory the numbers just don't stack up scuppers this.
10:45 - 11 Write Blog.
11 - 12 (planned) work on website for Oxford Business Forum.

A note on the exams, I'm stressing about any subject that includes numbers. Bizarrely people who can do numbers seem equally stressed by the 'soft' subjects. Maybe people all tend toward the same stress level during exams, maybe I'm so used to thinking about soft stuff I don't notice it being difficult, maybe, maybe, maybe I need some sleep.

Must work on website...