Sunday, October 30, 2011

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!!

Saturday, October 22, 2011

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 2nd 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

Friday, October 14, 2011

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 1st 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!

Friday, October 7, 2011

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!!

Saturday, October 1, 2011

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 1st 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!