Globe module and electives

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