Just a brief post and a promise to start blogging again soon (should anyone, actually, ever read this).
Class participation grades have been a topic of much discussion among my classmates. Depending on the course, class participation can make up as much as 30% of your final grade - but it's typically around 20%.
The promise of easy marks hasn't been enough to motivate a lot of my classmates to actually talk in class. Perhaps 20% doesn't look very important. But the key isn't the % of the overall grade, it's the variability too.
What you find in a lot of courses is that there is very little variability in exam and assignment scores - mainly because they're quite easy and your classmates work pretty hard - whereas there is huge variability in class participation scores. If you make a decent comment per class, you end up somewhere near full marks - if you're absent and/or don't say anything you often score zero.
What this means is even though participation looks like a relatively small fraction, actually it can account for an awful lot of the final variation in grades. Put your hand up and say something, it's not that hard and it might make the difference on your transcript...
02/06/2010
05/01/2010
"The end of the affair?" - it's only just getting started...
I came across this article: "The end of the affair: Falling out of love with business" in The Economist recently and, frustrated by being too late to comment on that site, I thought I would explain why I couldn't disagree with it more.
Far from the downturn being the end of the love affair with business, what it showed at least in the UK was how in the last 10 years ignorance and apathy about business have grown out of all proportion, and just how damaging this has been for the UK economy. The public sector in the UK has grown out of control, with by some estimates well over 50% of the country living off the public purse. Anecdotally bright young graduates from all fields have been piling into "self-actualising" professions like medicine or the charity sector.
They in turn left the grubby business of creating value, engaging in basic capitalism to an unsupervised few, who with access to the purse strings of government by virtue of tax revenues and political contributions, were able to ensure they remained ridiculously under-regulated.
TV shows like the Apprentice bastardise and simplify the mechanics of real business into digestible portions to the nation of business-agnostics whose only idea of generating wealth is to get on the property ladder or wait for their parents to die.
I say the lessons of the downturn are to invest serious funds into the teaching of business studies in schools, and end the progressive socialisation of the UK.
Far from the downturn being the end of the love affair with business, what it showed at least in the UK was how in the last 10 years ignorance and apathy about business have grown out of all proportion, and just how damaging this has been for the UK economy. The public sector in the UK has grown out of control, with by some estimates well over 50% of the country living off the public purse. Anecdotally bright young graduates from all fields have been piling into "self-actualising" professions like medicine or the charity sector.
They in turn left the grubby business of creating value, engaging in basic capitalism to an unsupervised few, who with access to the purse strings of government by virtue of tax revenues and political contributions, were able to ensure they remained ridiculously under-regulated.
TV shows like the Apprentice bastardise and simplify the mechanics of real business into digestible portions to the nation of business-agnostics whose only idea of generating wealth is to get on the property ladder or wait for their parents to die.
I say the lessons of the downturn are to invest serious funds into the teaching of business studies in schools, and end the progressive socialisation of the UK.
01/12/2009
The First 100 Days
It's become a bit of a cliche to have a 100 Day Plan whenever you take over an organisation or project. I don't necessarily recommend this but looking back on my first 100 days at B-School I've come up with some tips for utilising the first 100 days effectively.
1. Meet as many people as you can - spread your net wide, as wide as possible, before you know it you'll be sub-divided into cohorts/streams/groups/teams and you'll struggle to meet people outside of those groups. But for a few glorious weeks, it's your chance to meet anyone who happens to be at the bar when you are.
2. Student Club positions, you really need a few. As disturbing as it sounds your class mates will treat the Fall Term start as rather like the first few rounds of Monopoly, and will race around the board picking up as many properties as they can. They say in Monopoly that the outcome of the game is decided in the first 3 rounds. I don't think this is the case for B-Schools in that club VP positions clearly don't matter THAT much, but don't sit by smug and aloof and watch others scrabble around for these jobs - you'll regret it later.
3. Competitions - Enter them. Yeah, they're lame, yeah, they're time consuming and ultimately futile. But come January and internship recruitment time, those pesky recruiters are going to start asking "So what else have you done at Business School?", and apparently an A+ in Statistics doesn't cut it... There's an IPO Challenge, Case Challenge, Marketing Challenge, odd combinations of all of the above ad nauseam. Get involved even if you don't want to.
1. Meet as many people as you can - spread your net wide, as wide as possible, before you know it you'll be sub-divided into cohorts/streams/groups/teams and you'll struggle to meet people outside of those groups. But for a few glorious weeks, it's your chance to meet anyone who happens to be at the bar when you are.
2. Student Club positions, you really need a few. As disturbing as it sounds your class mates will treat the Fall Term start as rather like the first few rounds of Monopoly, and will race around the board picking up as many properties as they can. They say in Monopoly that the outcome of the game is decided in the first 3 rounds. I don't think this is the case for B-Schools in that club VP positions clearly don't matter THAT much, but don't sit by smug and aloof and watch others scrabble around for these jobs - you'll regret it later.
3. Competitions - Enter them. Yeah, they're lame, yeah, they're time consuming and ultimately futile. But come January and internship recruitment time, those pesky recruiters are going to start asking "So what else have you done at Business School?", and apparently an A+ in Statistics doesn't cut it... There's an IPO Challenge, Case Challenge, Marketing Challenge, odd combinations of all of the above ad nauseam. Get involved even if you don't want to.
27/11/2009
Myth #1 - It's hard to get into a good B-school
Schools go to great lengths to propagate the idea that they are really, really hard to get into. This is mainly because of the Groucho Marx principle that you wouldn't want to be part of any club that would want you as a member. No, instead, rather like the "Cartmanland" theme park adverts in South Park, we're told "There's so much to do at Business School, but you can't come!".
Schools do this by emphasising one particular ratio - applications per place, eg statements like "We had 5,000 applicants for 200 places last year". Implicitly we are supposed to assume that we each have a 1/25 or 4% chance of getting in. Receiving your offer then feels like receiving a valuable prize and you are more likely to accept.
But don't be fooled dear readers, there's one piece of information missing. The ratio of offers made to offers accepted by successful students, commonly referred to as the "Yield". So in our example if the school has to make 1,000 offers to fill its 200 spots, then we understand that our probability of gaining the option of attending the school is actually more like 1/5 or 20%. Still tough but an order of magnitude better.
The Yield is a powerful figure because it measures applicant behaviour for a serious, long-term, and financially costly decision. If you knew that most people receiving offers from your school turned them down, wouldn't that make you think again? Social proof is a powerful motivator.
So it's not surprising that Schools go to great lengths to keep their yields secret. As long as applicant pools are similar, comparing yields across schools would be the most objective way of ranking b-schools. Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen...
Schools do this by emphasising one particular ratio - applications per place, eg statements like "We had 5,000 applicants for 200 places last year". Implicitly we are supposed to assume that we each have a 1/25 or 4% chance of getting in. Receiving your offer then feels like receiving a valuable prize and you are more likely to accept.
But don't be fooled dear readers, there's one piece of information missing. The ratio of offers made to offers accepted by successful students, commonly referred to as the "Yield". So in our example if the school has to make 1,000 offers to fill its 200 spots, then we understand that our probability of gaining the option of attending the school is actually more like 1/5 or 20%. Still tough but an order of magnitude better.
The Yield is a powerful figure because it measures applicant behaviour for a serious, long-term, and financially costly decision. If you knew that most people receiving offers from your school turned them down, wouldn't that make you think again? Social proof is a powerful motivator.
So it's not surprising that Schools go to great lengths to keep their yields secret. As long as applicant pools are similar, comparing yields across schools would be the most objective way of ranking b-schools. Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen...
17/11/2009
Welcome & objectives
Welcome to the blog. I'm a student at a european business school and I want to communicate some my experiences to those thinking about, or already in the process of, applying for an MBA. There are a lot of myths and misinformation perpetuated on online forums like business week and pagalguy, and a lot of marketing spiel put out by the schools themselves, but not much in the way of genuine feedback. This is what I'm setting out to do.
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