Takeaways from my first semester of my MBA

Tomorrow is my last exam for the second qtr of classes which also means the end of my 1^st semester of MBA life! So for people who might be considering an MBA (or anyone else for that matter) here are the key things I found for managing (for the 1^st 4 months anyways) MBA school thus far:

-Make time for things besides school- Given the insane workload, it would be VERY easy to spend all day and all night doing homework. However by the same token, if you just focus on school school school, you WILL get burned out. To prevent this, for me anyways, this meant taking an hour out of my day to go to the gym and get a workout in. I can’t tell you how good it felt to get away from academia for a bit and blow off some steam with some weights. It also let me come back to school-related work with renewed vigor. So be it the gym, playing some hockey, getting some Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 in, whatever…Taking a break helps!

-Prioritize your projects schedule- Because we had some many things coming at us every day, I found it really useful to create a “to-dos” list with associated due dates on my computer. That way I had a visual list of what I needed to do for when and therefore could plan my time every day accordingly.

-Participate in class- This is super beneficial for 2 reasons:

1. You get EASY marks in class for raising your hand and saying something. (sometimes a lot of marks at that!)

2. If by chance you need to ask your prof a favour, he/she will actually know who you are therefore be more inclined to help you out.

-Communication skills are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!- I really can’t stress this enough. Good communication skills makes so many things for you and your peers 1,000,000 times easier. I’ll leave it at that. Please be a good communicator. Thank you. :-)

-Network, network, network- I spoke about this in an earlier blog post but it’s worth mentioning again. Get to know as many people as you can in the industry you want to work in.

-Be nice to everyone- You never know when you’ll need to make a big business deal with one of the other future executives in your class. ;-)

-The Rotman MBA education is as rewarding as it is challenging- As you guys know, I busted my butt pretty hard this semester and despite lots of drama and stress, I’m really happy I have soaked up as much as I could. Yay for learning!

And with that, I am off to get 1 more exam done, then off to Punta Cana (thank you mom) until school starts up again in January. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year and see you in 2012!!

Case Analysis Super Weekend of Total Craziness!!!

One component of our Strategy Class is a case study and presentation that is worth 40% of our grade in the class. It was probably the most challenging but also the most fun grade I have ever worked for in my life! Here’s what we were faced with:

-Friday evening our strategy prof revealed the company we would be doing our case study on. However, he gave us no other information (i.e. not even the problem we were tasked to solve).

-Saturday at 6pm all 265 of us would be randomly assigned to groups of 5-6 people and we’d be given the problem which we would have to solve and present to CEOs and executives including those of Cineplex, what our recommended solution is.

-Sunday at 11pm our presentation slides were due to the prof

-Monday at 8:30 we found out what time we would be presenting at some point between 9am-12:45pm that day

-Finalists announced at 1:15pm

-Final presentations 2pm-3pm

Crazy eh?? I’ll run you through what the experience was like for me:

-Friday night we found out the case was on Cineplex and it would be dealing with an issue they are faced with right now. i.e. was brought up as a “hot button” that needs resolving in their board of directors meeting just one week prior. I love the business side of the entertainment industry and am quite familiar with it so I was pretty excited not only because it was an industry I liked but because I was so familiar with it, I wouldn’t have to do as much research as some other people who don’t know “the business”.

-Some people went NUTS on doing all sorts of crazy research that evening. But I figured without guidance on what problem I needed to solve, what research could I do??

-The prof suggested only that we read the Cineplex annual report’s management discussion and analysis and understand what portions of their business come from where, etc. He also suggested that we go see a movie at a Cineplex. (great research method!)

Friday Night Post-Announcement

-I went home, read some of the MD&A. I also figured that since the rest of the weekend would be so stressful, I’d unwind with some beers with some friends.

Saturday

Morning- Finished reading MD&A and did some brief reading on the history of Cineplex, AMC, Empire (the main chains here in Canada) and Netflix, just in case.

Afternoon-Took prof up on his advice and went to see A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas at the Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre. WHAT A FUNNY MOVIE!!!!!

-Also did some research at the theatre…what amenities do they have these days, how is the theatre laid out, pricing, etc

Saturday 6pm:

-We get our groups, problem to solve and a giant stack of reports about the movie industry, Cineplex and its competitors.

-My group: I was already friends with one of the people in my group which was cool and the others I knew of but didn’t really know. They all turned out being pretty cool people as well and also smart and strong communicators (communication skills= VERY important!!!). I am happy I got a chance to meet and work with these new people!!

Saturday 7-10:30pm: We divide up all of the reports amongst the group and read them

Saturday 10:30-2:30am (yes, 2:30am): We discuss all of our readings and research to begin formulating insights on how to solve the problem we were faced

Sunday

-Slept for 4.5 hours last night

9am-10:30: Meet back at school and used the insights from the previous night to develop our strategic recommendations

10:30am-11pm: Developed powerpoint presentation with our recommendation and insights/analysis supporting our recommendations

11pm: Presentation was handed in. No changes allowed to it beyond this point!

11pm-12:30am: Figured out who will say what in our presentation. Our presentation was to be 15 minutes long. We also prepared for the questions we’d probably be asked by the judges and prepped our answers to said questions.

Monday

-Slept for 5 hours last night

7am-8:30am- Met back at school and practice presentation.

8:30am- We find out we are presenting at 11:15

8:30am-10:00amWe practice a bit more

10:15ish- A teammate falls asleep in the middle of our meeting. Hilarity ensues.

10:20-11:00am- Chill out to calm the pre-presentation nerves

11:15- GAME TIME!!

1:15- We found out we didn’t make it to the finals. BUT if the team that beat us wins the whole thing, we get one of the highest grades in the class! So there is still hope

1:30- Meet our judges and find out we had the best marketing ideas. The only reason we didn’t win was because the other team had better financials. If only we had an accountant in our group! Oh well…A learning experience for next time.

2pm-until now- Catch up on sleep

I am still dead tired but I learned a ton this weekend. VERY valuable learning experience and I had a blast at the same time!! But no time for any more rest or reflection for now because exams start in a week!

Social commentary

I forget if I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts but Rotman separates the entire year of students into sections and you are with that one section for the entire semester. That is, out of apprx 260 students in the Rotman MBA Class of 2013, all of your classes from Sep-Dec are with the same apprx 65 ppl. Each section has different schedules so it ends up being that you do most of your school work with your section and see your section most of the time (since everyone else is on other schedules).

While the social events we do are AWESOME, they are events for everyone in school so it is hard to get some solid chill time in with people from the other sections.

This week by chance, I got to hang out casually (i.e. not a school party, not a school club event, not in the Rotman halls) with some of my friends from the other sections that I unfortunately really hadn’t spoken too that much in the last little while and it made me realize, I MISS THESE GUYS!!! Because of the section splits it’s definitely a bummer we don’t get to hang out that often and I really wish we could!!

And on the subject of friends, non-MBA friends, you are probably thinking I am a huge jerk on account of not having called any of you in the last 3 months. I know I HATE when someone says to me as an excuse “ohhhhhh I’ve just been sooooooo busy.” I think it’s a load of BS. So I’m not going to say it. What I will say is my life since Sep can be summed up as this: class, homework, social events related to school, sleep. Which I hope explains my social non-existence outside of school. I don’t know if it excuses it but I hope it explains it. J Rest assured, as soon as I am done exams, if any of you message me to get a beer, there is a 100% chance I will say yes!!

My favourite class of the year thus far

Our profs are all really awesome. They give engaging lectures (even on topics as seemingly boring as accounting) and have great experience to draw on and are generally pretty fantastic. However yesterday was, I think, my favourite class among all classes and subjects since I started school. It was in our Strategy class and the topic of the day was “blue ocean strategies” basically how to innovate.

Coming into strategy class I was a bit sceptical as a lot of literature on “why company xyz has a good strategy” is very hindsight-y. Based on how such articles are usually written, I am always left thinking there’s no way you would have thought company xyz’s strategy would succeed without the benefit of hindsight. This is a big reason why I don’t read business books that you can buy at Indigo or whatever.

Anyways, into class we went. Our prof talked a lot about how the best way to compete in an industry is to not compete in an industry at all and rather just invent a new one. i.e. Cirque de Soleil….It’s not a circus and it’s not theatre. Or (my personal favourite), the Wii…make a videogame system for the family instead of one for just hard-core gamers. For all you videogame fans, turns out my prof was on the actual team that invented the concept for the Wii with Nintendo!! He is one super smart guy and strategy class is teaching me a ton. And it’s stuff I can actually use for success in the business world even without the benefit of hindsight. Huray!

However, you too are going to have to shell out the dough to get into Rotman to get the full scoop on what my strategy prof is teaching. ;-)

So yeah, very educational week!!

Case Competition Season

Sorry for the delay this week guys! I was out of town this past weekend with little internet access (or time for blogging). Anyways over the last few weeks (and this week) are a bunch of competitions ensuing at school. Some of the options include:
-Consulting Case Competition
-Entrepreneurship business plan competition
-Stock Pitch Competition
-Marketing Case Competition
And a few others too that I forget. Because I want to work in marketing (and to avoid spreading myself too thin) I signed up for the Marketing one above. I’ll give you guys a sense of what the competition was like as this was my 1st one and I really had no idea what I was getting into!

The case competition was sponsored by General Mills (the guys who make cheerios among other things). On Oct 2nd the General Mills released the case to us. We had to come up with a marketing strategy and tactics to revitalize the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios brand.

We were only allowed teams of 4-5 and the # of teams were capped at 10. I found some of my friends who also want to work in marketing who are also hard-working, fun and creative (important for marketing jobs!!) and we made a team.

So on Oct 2 we got the case and on Oct 9 we needed to create and present to General Mills, our plan. So a week to organize. However, given all of the other things going on at school too (and that we all had different commitments at different times), free time meant case competition prep time.

After a few marathon group sessions we got our presentation finalized, the night before.

On Oct 9, round 1 was a presentation to a General Mills marketing team member (various groups presented to various General Mills judges) as well as Q&A with the judge. After that round was the finals. If you made it to the finals, you presented in front of all of the judges and the marketing director at General Mills.

Unfortunately our team didn’t win but I still felt really good about the work we did. Doing the competitions taught me a lot of valuable lessons about time management, teamwork, presentation skills and coming up with creative solutions to tough business problems (in a very short time!!).

Also, after the competition I got to meet the General Mills people and learn a lot about the company. Important info to have since it is one of the companies I would be potentially interested in working for or with in the future!

We’ve only been back for ONE week??

One of my classmates had a funny comment yesterday, that time spent in the Rotman building is like a time vortex: 5 minutes in real life time feels like 5 hours at Rotman and so on. I honestly cannot believe I was on vacation a mere 6 days ago. This week was long. And stressful. This qtr is a fully-loaded analytical qtr. I have:

-Finance

-Statistics II

-Accounting II

-Marketing (although it is more like “marketing analysis”)

-Strategy (my only sort-of relief from number crunching)

The workload is maybe slightly greater than that which I had in Q1. The reason why this qtr is so challenging is because on top of school, extra curriculars are now in full swing. So for me specifically I have as well:

-Responsibilities on the GBC Twitter team (check us out! @RotmanGBC)

-Case competition (read a case, come up with a solution, present said solution to executives who judge us)

-MBA Games prep (competition with all the MBA schools in Canada, coming 1^st week of January)

-Networking (because intense recruiting begins in Jan)

-Blogging, obviously ;-)

-Attending various club events

It’s funny how things normally I would be stressing over (i.e. doing readings on time) just sort of get pushed by the wayside. Priorities, priorities…

So yeah, lots of stuff going on!!

Do you like networking? Then going to business school might be for you!!

After “Week of Stressful Exam Hell Part 1” we got a week free of classes. However don’t think it was a time to just site on your ass and do nothing. It was time for “Career Discovery Week”! This was a series of presentations from the Corporate Connections Centre (basically the Rotman careers centre) about how to go about the job search and panel discussions with Rotman MBA alum from various industries (finance, marketing, healthcare, tech, consulting, etc) about what it’s like to work in various fields.

Because I am somewhat unique amongst my peers in that I know exactly what I want to do after I graduate, some of the info was definitely skippable for me. But if you are on a quest of self-discovery for what you want to do with your life, everything that happens in the week will definitely help you out a ton.

One constant theme that was rammed down our throats hard is NETWORKING. Because I want to work in big corporations, I used to think it wasn’t that necessary because to apply for a job in a big company you have to apply though some anonymous job application tool online, get filtered through HR, then meet the hiring managers, etc. If things were so bureaucratic, what difference would it make if you knew anyone at the company? Apparently say you meet some random guy that works at Kraft and he likes you, then when you apply for a job at Kraft, he’ll tell HR to keep an eye out for my resume. So I guess when HR is doing their filtering of applicants they must have a filtering option: “Did someone internally mention this candidates name? If so, interview” ;-)

Anyways, me being Mr. Proactive, I already a) worked with the Rotman resume experts to get my resume ready for distribution weeks ago and b) set up meetings for networking purposes at the companies and industries I am interested in. I also needed to get away from Toronto for a bit to maximize my break before I get back into the swing of things with school. So this weekend I killed a whopping 4 birds with one stone!

1. Went to Vancouver- my favourite city in Canada- for 4 days

2. Got to see one of my really good friends who I hadn’t seen in a few months, and chilled with her

3. Visited my family on the west coast

4. Met with some of the main companies I am interested in working for in the future

Very productive weekend but I am VERY tired now. I feel like I could sleep for a week. But that’s impossible because tomorrow it’s back to school!!

First quarter of MBA, DONE!!

Ok so this past week was without a doubt one of, if not the most stressful week of my life ever. Let’s recap:

-Sunday Oct 16: Exam (at 6pm no less, which threw off my studying for the rest of my classes!! Especially because the rest of my exams were at like 9am or so)

-Monday Oct 17: No exam but studing for 3 classes in 1 day

-Tuesday Oct 18: Exam

-Wednesday Oct 19: Exam

-Thursday Oct 20: Exam

-Friday Oct 21: Exam

Given the constant barrage of exams, it was tough figuring out what to study for when, and so that I learned enough to at least pass. On top the studying itself, the exams were TOUGH. It wasn’t like undergrad where you memorize a book and the exam is the same as the stuff you memorized. The profs in Q1 pushed us…HARD. As you may know, Rotman bell curves: grades are adjusted such that x% of the class gets A’s, y% B’s and so on. I am praying we all failed so I can at least get a B after bell curving! haha (by the way, the majority of the class failing is a very real possibility based on the stories I heard from the 2^nd year students)

Apparently last year, once Q1 ended, Q2 started the week following. Oh man would that have been tough. I am very grateful to the class academic reps for changing that! We get a week off now before we start Q2. …Well not totally. This coming week is “career discovery week” where the Corporate Connections Centre for Rotman is giving a bunch of seminars by industry veterans about what it’s like working in various industries as a rotman grad, how to write cover letters, etc. Some of the seminars I am sure will be interesting and useful but given I already know what I want to do with my life, not sure how many of the seminars I will actually attend….And I need a rest anyways. I am completely spent. No more gas left in the tank!!

Now I am off to sit on my butt and do the exact opposite of studying in preparation to become a world leader…WATCH JERSEY SHORE!! haha

Exam season

Exam season, in October?? Yup! Rotman does things a little differently. As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, we go by quarters, not semesters. So an entire course is packed into about 10.5 weeks and then we have final exams. Come November, we start all over again with 5 new courses and then again in Jan and March once more.

The amount of content is manageable; I mean I have written final exams that had as much content in them before. What scares the pants off of me is how intense the grading is. The profs here are TOUGH. If you don’t write exactly – and I mean EXACTLY – what they want to see, it’s wrong. And it’s not even like “oh, I understand what he meant but just used the wrong word; I’ll just deduct ½ a point.” No- if you don’t write exactly what they want, you might as well have written an essay in chinese instead (i.e. worthless for the exams). You get ZERO.

The other tough part is the schedule: One exam on Sunday (at 6pm which messes my whole schedule up), and then one on every day Tuesday-Friday. My 1^st exam is largely conceptual (Foundations of Integrated Thinking) and is unlike any class I have ever taken so I don’t really know what to expect (you could say it is the devil I don’t know while my other exams are at least devils I do know). I mean, I think (and hope) I have studied as much as I could for it (which is why I am blogging today) but you never know come the actual exam. Crossing my fingers.

For the other exams, I have a study sched all set up and ready to go. Even though all of my exams are going to be BEASTS I feel weird studying now for an exam I won’t have for at least 4-5 days; I am going to forget everything if I start too early!

Early October and…BURNOUT!!

Foundation of Integrative Thinking (FIT) is definitely my favourite class: the prof is incredibly engaging and the material is incredibly interesting. However, part way through the lecture I had this feeling come over me of: “I DON’T CARE!!!!” Even though I normally would have found what we were discussing quite interesting, I realized what happened- I hit the academic wall and burned out!

Yes, it took only about 6 weeks and there I am. It was probably a testament to the insane workload mentioned in earlier posts. Thankfully though, if there was any time to burnout, now was the time. Part of FIT required reading the book (now movie as well), Moneyball and write an essay based on the themes in the book. So with the essay handed in and the quarter nearing end, a bunch of us (including our prof) went to see it. A welcome brain vacation!!

And on top of that, thanks to some very excellent planning, I don’t have much work to do this weekend- a long weekend at that- so I can just chill and take a mini school break. I am definitely going to need it because exam crunch time is fast approaching!!

One month of school…feels like a year!!

So today is October 1 meaning I have been at Rotman for 1 month. Although with the speed at which things go around here, it feels a lot more like it’s been a year. In undergrad, one month might involve a test, a group project and a social event. Here, that’s one week…every week.

As you may know, Rotman’s big thing is “Integrated Thinking” and I know a lot of you are probably wondering what that even means. None of us even knew when we started school! But now I have a pretty good sense of it….

The workload in our Integrated Thinking class is completely insane- 150+ pages of reading on a weekly basis, group projects due in a matter of days (i.e. 3) requiring use of software we have to learn on our own and then use to complete said projects, etc. I have also heard many horror stories about how the final exam is horrendous. Nonetheless, the class is incredibly interesting. It basically combines psychology, sociology and business together to help us be better managers (and people in general). You’ll have to spend the $90,000 to come to school and find out specifically what I mean though. ;-)

Something cool I forgot to mention in my last blog was I attended the first meeting of the latin america business club a few days ago. We opted to do the whole meeting in spanish. At 1^st I was a bit nervous as most Spanish accents I am fine with but some, I really have to focus to understand (i.e. Venezuelan, Cuban). So I was a bit nervous that I would miss some key points. However, 1.5 hours of presenters and I understood every single word! Woo-hoo!! So I guess I am bilingual?

2 more weeks of class and then exams. I am praying every day that I come out the other side alive!! It’s going to be nuts!

And now the fun really starts!!

So this week I had:

-2 tests 1 day after the other

-Club events

-2 group projects

-“Normal” rotman social events

-Class

It was NUTS. Basically no time idle whatsoever!! The crazy workload is balanced out with super fun social events. You might think “Mike, why are you socializing if you have so much work to do?” Well socializing is part of the job too. Based on everything I have heard, it is really important to get involved at school, and make sure you are out there. For marketing jobs in particular (my career of choice), this is key.

I was always used to striving for A+ in all of my classes, meaning foregoing extra-curriculars here and there if it would help me maximize my grade. So it has been a bit of an adjustment learning how to go out with classmates and just be comfortable with B’s and B+’s. Hopefully it will be worth it!

One super annoying thing I learned though is that the people who want to work in finance or consulting get to do their recruiting in the early part of 2012 whereas marketing recruitment tends to be much later, like March or April. But my internship would start in May!! I’ve been given a lot of pep talks about how I should not freak out if I don’t have a job by April given the nature of marketing recruiting but still, I am 100% sure freaking out will ensue if I am still jobless come April. I am definitely going to try to get a job set up as early as possible so I can worry about other things for the rest of the year.

So many activities!!!

Week 2 left me feeling a lot like Will Ferrell in Step Brothers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpCk1VWGAI

SO MANY ACTIVITIES!!

We had the Clubs Fair and International Fair this week which left me quite overstimulated. There are so many cool things you can get involved in on campus I really didn’t know where to start! As it stands, I joined the following clubs:

-Management Consulting Association (they apparently have the toughest job interviews so I figure if I can learn how to succeed in a consulting interview, surely I can succeed in any other)

-Marketing Association (for obvious reasons)

-Latin American Business Club (Spanish is one of my life obsessions, so this was a must)

-Business & Technology Group (to get even better connected with the tech space, one of my other huge interests)

-Entertainment & Media Association (An industry I find incredibly fascinating and would love to learn more about on the biz side)

-Rotman Sports Business Club (another industry I’d like to learn more about)

I am probably not going to be able to do everything in every club- probably focus more on 1 or 2 clubs than the rest as the year goes on- but I figure at least by being a member of all, I can go to the events that interest me.

For international opportunities, Rotman has a few really cool things going on:

-Exchange programs with all of the top schools outside North America

-“International study tours” to India, China, Latin America and Europe. These are basically 2 weeks trips to any of these regions where you visit some of the major companies of the region, learn about business practices there, culture, etc. Obviously, I will be applying to go on the Latin America one. ;-)

On the academic side, the workload is as crazy as ever. I can’t believe it has only been 2 weeks. It feels like a semester has gone by already!! The pace is just so incredibly fast that planning (for me anyways) is incredibly important. I have settled into a pretty good routine although that will most definitely change when:

A) clubs activities get into full swing

B) I am faced with our killer exam sched: 5 exams in 6 days Oct 16-21. Hopefully I am still alive and/or still a student at rotman come Oct 22 hahaha

My life summarized in 1 word: Reading

This would be a hilarious commercial for an MBA:

HEY THERE!!

Do you like reading??

Or how about doing almost nothing besides reading??

Oh and maybe a group project every 10 minutes??

And don’t you just hate that thing called “social life”?

Well, good sir, you would LOVE an MBA, then!!

***************

Of course I am joking but the truth is not far off. MBA is like undergrad on Barry Bonds-level steroids (i.e. A LOT). While it is A LOT of work I am actually learning a lot. Everything is very “big picture” oriented which is excactly what I am at Rotman for.

And the profs are fantastic. They come from some very, very impressive backgrounds. You can really tell they know their stuff. So learning from them is definitely a valuable experience.

Also Rotman does a very good job fostering a community within the 1^st years and with the 2^nd year students. So there are always people around to help, or share in suffering and stress.

Next week is the clubs fair. Definitely excited to start getting involved!! Stay tuned to next week’s blog to see what I am doing!

It's business time

Hi Guys!

Welcome to my MBA blog. I am writing this blog to help MBA outsiders get a better idea of what exactly goes on in a (top-ranked) MBA school. What are we learning about? How do we get better prepared for the exciting world of senior management positions? And for Rotman in particular, what exactly is “Integrative Thinking”? (Integrative Thinking being the core component of the Rotman MBA program)

I am thinking I will try to update this blog once a week with some of the cool and exciting things going on in MBA land.

A little bit about me: I was born in Ottawa (Canada) and did my undergrad at the University of Ottawa, majoring in marketing. I also got a chance to do a semester abroad, on exchange at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. From my time abroad I became a HUGE fan of international business and travel. Since my exchange semester, I’ve been all over Europe, the US, Central America and the Caribbean (and will hopefully add to that soon…).

All of my work thus far has been focused on marketing, which is what I hope to continue doing. Once I graduated from my undergrad, I did an internship at RBC, then was at Dell for a few years and finally KPMG. All of my work though was very executional-based. I knew I wanted to continue in marketing, but marketing at a much higher level. i.e. I don’t want to be the guy making ads but rather the guy that decides if it is even worthwhile to do ads in the first place.

How to get such skills? Why, an MBA from one of the best MBA schools in the world, of course!!

So this gives you a bit of context about me, so you know where I am coming from as I write. Hope you enjoy!