End of the 3rd quarter of school!

On Thursday was our last exam for the 3^rd qtr (Q3) which meant my 1^st year of MBA school is officially 75% finished! Some reflections on the quarter:

This is BY FAR the easiest quarter of the 3 we’ve had so far. Not many assignments and a huge % of our grade was based on just getting involved in class. Two classes didn’t even have final exams. We just had to write enormous essays for the end of the qtr. Although it’s not like the essays were that easy; they were very time consuming in their own right.

The exams we did have were another story. Because I am not a finance guy, things that might be common knowledge for our soon-to-be investment bankers and such are completely unknown to me. I feel like 2 of our 3 exams for this quarter (finance II and macroeconomics) gave a distinct edge to anyone with a finance background. Finance for obvious reasons and macro because a lot of the material we learned related to movements in the financial market, which finance guys would have already known and understood. We also had an exam for Strategy II (the ones we had no exams for were marketing and leadership). Strategy was challenging but mostly because it is a class at Rotman and everything in this school is challenging. But whatever, the exams are done and behind me now.

Another challenging aspect of the quarter was the fact that it is recruiting season. As I alluded to in a very early post, consulting and banking jobs get 99% sorted in January. Marketing drags on for 4 months. So besides dealing with school I’ve had to do cover letters, interviews, etc again and again... Very very time consuming. I am looking forward to getting an internship so I can move on with my life.

With Q3 over, we get a week off. I am spending half the week on my job search and doing networking. The other half, I am going home to Ottawa. I am looking forward to seeing my Ottawa friends (and family, of course) again. It was been a while!

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!