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!