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!!