In this post I will briefly describe our MBA journey at Ivey starting from where I left it off last time (month 4 of 12) up to our current point in the program (month 9 of 12).
After we finished module 2A (Finance, Strategy and Accounting) at the end of August and wrote our 48 hour report we had a first week of September off for our recruiting efforts. During that time there were number of self organized groups of students that went to London UK, Calgary, Toronto, and New York to meet with alumni and potential recruiters.
Just to put things in prospective, the main recruiting cycle for consulting and finance falls on mid September. That resulted in at least 20 job postings for each consulting and finance with couple of new postings coming up every day. With recruiting in the full swing we have entered our first elective cycle with an option to choose one or two out of the following three courses (Financial Strategies for Global Success, Competitive Analysis and Negotiations).
Electives are quite an intense experience, with three hour classes for each course running for two consecutive weeks. You get immersed in the course material to that degree that you start having dreams about it… which is kind of scary; especially if it’s an accounting elective :) In my experience electives don’t feel rushed but they do fly by in a blink of an eye, just imagine, you do the whole course in only two weeks.
I definitely recommend Bob White’s course, Financial Strategies for Global Success, as a must have for people going into finance. It’s generally considered one of the harder electives with a lot of material packed into it. That is also the course that really separates the future investment banking gurus from us mare mortals.
After those two weeks of electives we had the last week of September off for consulting and finance job interviews. Interesting fact to note: by the end of September close to 15% of students in the class have already landed jobs.
October 1st marked the return to the core MBA material, this portion of the course is called Globe module. The purpose of this module was to expose us to issues facing a global manager. Although we have covered fascinating topics ranging from Corporate Governance to Environmental impact of doing business it still didn’t feel like the module accomplished everything that it set out to. That was a bit unfortunate as we had some great professors teaching in this module. The nice part about it was that the time during this module felt quite relaxing (we had every Friday off for recruiting purposes) and I was able to put some quality time into my extracurricular activities and catching up with friends whom I’ve ignored for the past couple of months.
Following Globe we had another intense cycle of electives in which my personal favorite was Corporate Financial Reporting with Rick Robertson. Here’s an amazing professor and one of the very few people who can energize you about accounting for an 8am in the morning class. Simply amazing!
Two days after finishing the second cycle of electives large part of our class went off to an optional 10 day China study trip (CST). More on that in one of the future posts.
Finally, on January 7th we’ve started our current, pre-final leg of the Ivey MBA journey. This is module 2B and we are coming back to the core material. Our current courses are Marketing, Operations, and Managing information technology. I have to say that Marketing classes with Niraj Dawar have been an eye opening experience for me. I will admit, in the past I thought of marketing as a bit fluffy, but our time with Niraj has totally changed that perception. I guess the fact that Niraj is one of the top professors in his field doesn’t hurt neither.
Till next time,
George
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
To Fall or not to Fall?
And if to fall than when? (Figuratively speaking of course)
I have been repeatedly asked by potential students the following two questions: What is the difference between the two cohorts Fall (starting in September) and Spring (starting in May)? And is there an optimal time to start the program? I will try to answer the first question in this post.
I am myself a member of the Spring 2007 cohort, so I might be a bit biased towards our cohort. Spring cohort is advertised to be specifically geared for people interested in getting into the consulting and finance jobs. The main reason Spring cohort is positioned that way are the so called historical recruitment cycles for those two industries. If you think about it, those same employers are actively recruiting from major MBA programs all over North America and are therefore doing it in the beginning of the second year of the typical two year program, which incidentally falls on months of September and October. Those are pretty much the only two industries that recruit a year in advance, meaning that those students who are recruited into those firms would start their jobs in the fall of the following year.
The tricky bit comes from the fact that if you are a member of the Spring cohort you are competing for the same jobs with every other major MBA school in North America. While members of the Fall cohort are flying solo as there are no other major schools that function on the same schedule (at least to my limited knowledge).
Furthermore, from what I understand about finance and consulting jobs, if you are a good candidate you will get hired no matter when you are applying to them. Having said that members of the Fall cohort might have to put in some more proactive work to connect with the firms, and in return will enjoy lack of competition from their peers at other schools. If you ask me, it’s actually not a bad trade-off.
Theory aside, our cohort has tracked much stronger when it comes to finance jobs while the previous Fall cohort enjoyed a good track record when it came to consulting jobs.
In addition there are couple non recruiting differences between cohorts: Spring appears to have a higher male/female ratio (more guys) as well as quite a competitive spirit. It’s probably due to the nature of jobs that people are going after in our cohort. In general there wouldn’t be as many women who are going after the Investment banking and Management Consulting jobs as those types of jobs typically don’t mix very well with a family. Fall cohort has a Health stream mixed into it, meaning that there are 4-5 PhDs and M.D.s in the class, which makes for a very interesting class dynamic. While Spring class shares part of the curriculum with an AMBA stream (Accelerated MBA’s are students with an undergraduate degree in business from University of Western).
Fall cohort starts at the same time as the main university so they get a chance to do a lot more social fun stuff at the onset of their program. Spring cohort, on the other hand, starts when the main university finishes in May and majority of undergraduate students leave the city for the summer. So Spring cohort gets to do a lot more outdoor sports stuff instead.
Overall, jokes aside, there’s no clear advantage of picking one cohort over the other. To figure out if one cohort “fits” you better than the other you might want to consider coming down for an actual visit, sitting in both classes and talking to students from both cohorts.
In the next post I will try to share my thoughts on whether there is a best time to do an MBA.
Till next time,
George
I have been repeatedly asked by potential students the following two questions: What is the difference between the two cohorts Fall (starting in September) and Spring (starting in May)? And is there an optimal time to start the program? I will try to answer the first question in this post.I am myself a member of the Spring 2007 cohort, so I might be a bit biased towards our cohort. Spring cohort is advertised to be specifically geared for people interested in getting into the consulting and finance jobs. The main reason Spring cohort is positioned that way are the so called historical recruitment cycles for those two industries. If you think about it, those same employers are actively recruiting from major MBA programs all over North America and are therefore doing it in the beginning of the second year of the typical two year program, which incidentally falls on months of September and October. Those are pretty much the only two industries that recruit a year in advance, meaning that those students who are recruited into those firms would start their jobs in the fall of the following year.
The tricky bit comes from the fact that if you are a member of the Spring cohort you are competing for the same jobs with every other major MBA school in North America. While members of the Fall cohort are flying solo as there are no other major schools that function on the same schedule (at least to my limited knowledge).
Furthermore, from what I understand about finance and consulting jobs, if you are a good candidate you will get hired no matter when you are applying to them. Having said that members of the Fall cohort might have to put in some more proactive work to connect with the firms, and in return will enjoy lack of competition from their peers at other schools. If you ask me, it’s actually not a bad trade-off.
Theory aside, our cohort has tracked much stronger when it comes to finance jobs while the previous Fall cohort enjoyed a good track record when it came to consulting jobs.
In addition there are couple non recruiting differences between cohorts: Spring appears to have a higher male/female ratio (more guys) as well as quite a competitive spirit. It’s probably due to the nature of jobs that people are going after in our cohort. In general there wouldn’t be as many women who are going after the Investment banking and Management Consulting jobs as those types of jobs typically don’t mix very well with a family. Fall cohort has a Health stream mixed into it, meaning that there are 4-5 PhDs and M.D.s in the class, which makes for a very interesting class dynamic. While Spring class shares part of the curriculum with an AMBA stream (Accelerated MBA’s are students with an undergraduate degree in business from University of Western).
Fall cohort starts at the same time as the main university so they get a chance to do a lot more social fun stuff at the onset of their program. Spring cohort, on the other hand, starts when the main university finishes in May and majority of undergraduate students leave the city for the summer. So Spring cohort gets to do a lot more outdoor sports stuff instead.
Overall, jokes aside, there’s no clear advantage of picking one cohort over the other. To figure out if one cohort “fits” you better than the other you might want to consider coming down for an actual visit, sitting in both classes and talking to students from both cohorts.
In the next post I will try to share my thoughts on whether there is a best time to do an MBA.
Till next time,
George
Friday, January 4, 2008
Happy New Year!
С Новым Годом! Which is Happy New Year in Russian (pronounced S Novym Godom). All the best wishes for 2008 and good luck to all of you trying to join the Ivey family this year!Special thanks to all of You, our readers, for making the first year of the Ivey MBA blog such an overwhelming success. Having started at the end of February 2007 this blog has seen almost 5,000 unique visitors from all over the world since its inception.
Thank you for all the emails asking for a follow-up posts. I guess people are finding this stuff at least somewhat useful. I'm personally guilty of not having written in a while and there’s a good reason for that: it’s been a very busy couple of months with school, recruiting and the other fun stuff all happening at the same time!
Good news is that graduation is only 16 weeks away and I’m about 15 weeks away from running dry on my student loans. One might say its a good timing, while others might argue that it’s the pure genius of an evil mind, either way I can’t believe that our cohort is so close to being done…
So here it comes! Over the next couple of weeks I’ve set myself an ambitious goal: I’m hoping to write a couple of new posts talking about our Globe module and the second round of electives which we finished in December, our China study trip, advantages/differences between the two Ivey MBA cohorts, and finally some general fun stuff about the city of London Ontario. So one might ask: Is this goal a bit too ambitious? - Maybe. But is it impossible? - Never!
Finally, there’s now hope of actually saving my back while I attempt this near Guinness record. I’ve ordered myself an Asus Eee laptop which is supposed to be a new disruptive innovation coming from Asus. Weighting a mere 2lb (1kg) and advertised to cost only $200, in reality it costs $400 (hence the above mentioned one week shortfall in my self financing though student loans) it will hopefully act as my muse and will also be much easier to carry around on my expeditions to Starbucks.
Till next time,
George
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