[8:51 PM – Business School Library]
Net present value is crawling up my ass and trying to eat the lining of my stomach away, one discount rate at a time. Actually, it’s competing for space with his buddies Supply Curve, Discount Factor and Present Value of Annuities.
Most people who know me are aware that I am not a computational giant. Somewhere between my lack of interest in endlessly repeating math problems, my lack of attention to details (like decimal points, numbers, etc.) and my basic inaptitude, I suck at math. Sucking at math is really only a problem in 4/6 of my first term MBA courses. The other two courses, Developing Effective Managers, and Strategy are no problemo. I can talk about cases, and pontificate on psychological theories for endless hours with minimal effort. Unfortunately, Managerial Economics (just Economics, really), Decision Science (Statistics) and Finance (mean math with percent signs) are a big problemo. I will have to slog through these. The last course? Financial Reporting. This is Accounting by any other name. This has nothing to do with math, it’s just a bunch of totally random and crazy rules that change from country to country, company to company, accountant to accountant, and in my sorry little case: apparently from class to class as well. Sigh. One more day until the weekend and Ean drinking a lot of funny English beer. That sounds good, except for the part where I have to spend all weekend studying anyway, so the beer will just get in the way.
Sigh.
On a cheerier note: I am starting to get a vague feel for how to play the game here. Some, not all, but some of the professors give tons of reading (like hundreds of pages a week) that they really don’t expect you to absorb in any meaningful way. They also give you un-collected assignments that are basically what you’re going to see on the exam. The ONE exam you’ll get all term. That’s not brutal or anything, is it? There are also “exercise” sessions for the quantitative classes during which the professors actually answer questions about how to work problems, talk through issues you had with the homework, repeat things, etc… the type of stuff that you’d expect to have in the normal lecture, but in our case (maybe also true at other MBA programs?) don’t. The main lectures that everyone attends are more like big performances where the profs show fancy powerpoint slideshows, tell funny stories, give wacky analogies, and generally behave in the way that eccentric professorial types are supposed to behave. I often wonder if this eccentricity bit isn’t a show put on for rep reasons, and actually when these guys get home, they’re totally normal. Probably not, but then again, considering my friends and family, maybe the eccentric profs don’t seem all that wacky after all? In any event, the idea is (potentially) to skim through the monster reading assignments, do the homework problems backwards and forwards a billion times, and ask lots of questions in the exercise classes. Also, loose teams of MBAs are banding together to share out reading notes, in an effort to reduce the overall workload. We’ll see how that pans out.
Back to the shiz.
3 comments:
I think your yield curve is inverted.
It's a shame, Ean, a SHAME, that you consider yourself to be down to only one friend.
"considering my friend and family..."
Sounds exactly like my undergrad business education. Encouraging to hear that it's pretty much the same at higher levels even at a place as reknowned as Oxford!
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