Now, on the electives..

Here comes the third one in this series on the courses and electives themselves. Again, please read the disclaimer section from the previous post and remember that these are personal one-man opinions and may be totally different for each person. You should consider this among lot other factors (new syllabus, if any, courses that suit your career, etc.) before choosing the electives. But, make no doubt, choosing the electives is the most challenging and important part of the MBA.

Michaelmas term:

You would have all core courses in this term. These are the courses that will help you all through the rest of the course - the Profs in Hilary and Trinity will keep referring to these subjects and will assume that you know all these courses and remember the frameworks. These will also be important from job search point of view; for example, consulting cases will require you to follow Strategy and Economics courses closely; a friend of mine who joined an asset management company had to check the health of a company and value it in 2 hours, the same exercise that Tomo Suzuki will conduct in the class in this term. So overall short message, take extra care to understand these subjects; don’t read them for the sake of exams.

James Taylor teaches Regression among other important topics in Decision Science (aka, statistics). A very good course that should be learnt closely since you will end up using this in some of Trinity electives and sometimes in job (finance jobs - stock analyst, etc).

The only course that might seemed a bit cheesy to me was DEM (Developing effective managers), the first of the organization behavior (OB) courses. Try and attend this course (!?) as much and score in the assignments – an easy one to score distinction. Indeed, it will teach you the psychology behind companies and let you get a new perspective. The Robbins book might be too broad for this course and the course notes might make your life pretty easy.


Hilary Term:

Marketing, a core course, is the top course that will again be very useful in consulting case studies. David Arnold will run the course exceptionally well. The cases and the guest speaker are the best portion of this course. Prepare well for the cases before the class and you would be the best to benefit.

Finance management was the other core subject for us. Eric taught the first 4 classes involving numbers mostly, 5th was a mock exam and Neils Dechow took the rest on some theoirical concepts. The course has some fine concepts like Activity based costing (ABC), Balanced Score card (BSC), etc, but was very badly organized for us. Apparently, the previous class had faired very well in this course, the profs indicated that the exam will be tough. Rather than making it just tough, they made it too lengthy that only 2 CAs managed to complete the whole paper. The whole class went berserk and the administrators had to redo the evaluation (they multiplied all the marks by some factor. The few CAs ended up getting 98s and 95s J. A funny story indeed.

The elective Finance II, taught by Han and one more, is one course that I regret not taking. I was adamant not to pursue a career in Finance for various reasons and decided to skip FII, which seemed like a deep finance course. It indeed is, but is mandatory, in my opinion, for an MBA. This nicely builds on F1 and lays the base for the rest of the finance courses. My sincere advice is to take this elective as one of the two that you will select, irrespective of what career path you plan to pursue post MBA.

Macro Economics, taught by Oren Sussman, is another elective that I regret not taking; but I did go through the whole course material on my own during the Hilary break. This is an important course and gives a good overall perspective to see business on a bigger picture. Oren indeed complicates the course in his own way, but will help well before exams.

Technology and Innovation Strategy (TIS) is a technical elective taught by Victor Seidal, and Marc Ventrasca. A prof from another department teaches just the IP portion (class 6, I suppose). They indeed load the course with tons of frameworks, lecture notes and reading materials. I would suggest to avoid this course, as you will see imminent repetition in ETV and MI (see Trinity). But, this is a better option than DEO, but should be the last but
One.

Developing effective organizations (DEO) is the second in the OB series taught by Tim Morris. Tim comes from LBS and has a knack of running classes. He introduced the concept of teams being evaluated by their presentation and Q&A session, which I appreciated. But I do not see you missing anything big, should you decide to skip this course.

This section is running so long, I’ll have to make another blog for the Trinity electives. Its (very) late Sunday night and I have a long day tomorrow. So Caio, good luck and bye for now.