Sunday, May 15, 2011

term 2 has flown by!

Term 2 has flown by! Originally I had titled this post "term 2 is flying by!" sometime in mid-April... And I never got around to finishing it unfortunately until now, in the airport waiting for my flight home to Madrid from a perfect post-finals weekend in Mallorca. Little side note here: Ryanair flights around Europe are super cheap, especially if you have a prepaid MasterCard (only card they don't charge a commission for), so if you can get a rechargeable one like you can in the US in the supermarket before you come, it will save you some $$$. So, back to term 2. It definitely went by faster than term 1! What kept me so busy? First of all, a whole new set of teachers and more number-heavy courses. New term 2 courses were: cost accounting, creative management thinking, financial management, managerial economics: policy making and the global context, operations management, and strategic management. Carried over from term 1, we still had: entrepreneurial management and marketing fundamentals. Talking to the students that came before us, everyone told us that term 2 was the worst, that after surviving term 2 everything was a breeze... I found term 2 very challenging and busy because of the group work and the material, but for me personally term 1 was more difficult. Perhaps because term 1 I was still getting used to the program and to group dynamics. I found my term 2 group more seasoned, a was I with te program, and so despite the large load of work, we were able to plow through it with leads stress than term 1. (haha easy to say now after speniding the weekend on a beach!)anyways, I feel like even though term 2 goes by fast and throws a whole bunch of new material at you, you need to be careful to absorbbit all because I feel several of the courses provide a lot of the core knowledge we all came to get from an MBA.

Speaking about the knowledge I want to get from this MBA, the electives bidding process is currently being carried out for terms 4 and 5, and I am not too happy with the knowledge being permitted to learn. It seems like all the classes I want to take are incompatible schedule wise (even though in the mock schedule some of the incompatible
classes don't overlap at all or only overlap one day). In the end, I bid for two classes that I actually wanted and two that were 3r or 4th choice options. IE does not allow auditing. Hopefully, I and others in my situation can with our final bids find a combination that merits what we paid for. If not, I'll leave myself more free time to research on my own...

Tomorrow begins another week of the Accelerate program. This time it's called "Making Change Happen." More on that this week. I figured out how to blog on my phone so hopefully that will help me to not put it off again for so long!