Because this blog is somewhat an encapsulation of my experience I should really share more about why the pace of my blogging has slowed dramatically. Simply put, school is kicking my butt. Due to the trajectory of the courses here, the vast majority of the work is backloaded towards the end of the semester. Here’s what my finals schedule looks like:
Strategic Risk Management: 15-page research paper due Nov 27th
Innovation Management: 30-page team business plan and 20-minute team presentation due December 7th
Advanced Corporate Finance: 4-hour closed book, closed note exam on December 11th
International Logistics Management: 15-page research paper due December 11th
Innovation Management: 15-page research paper due December 22nd
Needless to say, it’s a pretty brutal stretch through late November into December. A lot of research, a lot of writing, and a lot of studying for finance. All of which is to the good. I came here to learn, and the Finance program here is absolutely outstanding. But it’s also requiring a lot of extra time in the library to make sure I don’t fall behind. With trips coming up on Nov 19-22nd to Amsterdam and potentially in mid-December to Stockholm, the time is now to start knocking a lot of this work out. So unfortunately, I will not be able to post as much as I would like to, but I will still keep production up where I can.
One other piece of good news I’d like to share. I’ve been informally invited by CBS to attend “The Greatest Debate on Earth,” a meeting of the world’s top leaders at the COP15 Climate Change Conference. This will be an exceptional opportunity to hear many top officials from around the globe discuss climate change in a forum where the audience will be allowed to ask questions. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to ask a question. So I put the question out to you my readers: What should I ask and to whom?
Major apologies for the long absence on the blog. I’ve spent the last 72 hours furiously pumping out a 5,000 word paper for my Strategic Risk Management course. That’s a lot of writing. Needless to say, my brain and fingers have been occupied, but I should be back in full blogging force starting tomorrow. Enjoy your Sunday everyone!
A lot of my friends back at home have been asking me how classes are going out here, and how it compares to education back in the States. I’ve already talked about the specifics of the Danish system (100% finals, non-compulsory lectures, etc.). But I wanted to expand a little bit on how that system is affecting my study habits and interests here in Denmark vis-a-vis my experiences at NC State.
In all honesty, I spent the first several weeks here not really doing a whole lot. My finals were far in the future, the classes were kind of all over the place, and there wasn’t any real structure to follow. I wasn’t really doing a great job of adjusting to my new environment, and as a result, I began feeling really unsatisfied with my academic experience here. Where was the structure? Where were the assignments? At the end of the day, I just wasn’t really sure how much I was learning, and that became increasingly frustrating to me.
After going through a period 0f self-reflection and talking to friends and family back home, I realized I needed to adjust my approach. In the United States, I was going to learn whether I wanted to or not. The courses demanded it. Here, I needed to take much more control over my educational experience. If I didn’t want to learn, I wasn’t going to learn (and my grades would almost certainly suffer as a result). So over the last several days and weeks, I’ve begun to refocus myself.
Now, I set aside time each day to go to the library and teach myself the material I find interesting. Instead of relying on teachers and syllabuses to tell me what to study each day, I set my own schedule and pick the topics that are grabbing my interest. For example, there’s a reason I chose finance as a supplementary concentration to supply chain. Oddly enough, I like finance. And now I set aside several hours each day to pore over valuation problems, options analysis, and risk management techniques.
The same is true for my other courses here. I’ve spent less time studying for my Logistics class, but that’s because a lot of that material has been covered in other courses and experiences I’ve had in the States. Rather than bog myself down in reviewing material I already know, I’m trying to learn new material that will add to my skill set.
Unsurprisingly, this process has been very rewarding for me. I wake up and I find that I’m excited to head off to school because I know I’ll be learning what I want to learn, and writing about topics that truly interest me. It has taken some time to find my academic groove here, but now that I have, I’m not sure if I would trade it for the more structured American approach. Much like everything else here, it’s a cultural trade-off, and one that I’m learning to appreciate as we move closer to our final exams.
All of a sudden it’s late October, and school has finally started to bear down on us here at CBS. Most of my time this week will be spent catching up on school work, reading, cases and starting to work on my final projects.
In the meantime, here’s three business/economics/finance blogs that I read for analysis on global events:
Calculated Risk: Focuses primarily on real estate and the mortgage crisis. One of the primary reasons I’m still relatively pessimistic on the economy.
Naked Capitalism: Awesome financial analysis of global events
The Baseline Scenario: Simon Johnson is considered one of the top minds in macroeconomics/finance and his writing here is top notch
In the meantime, it’s time for me to hit the books!
One of the more difficult adjustments I’ve had to make at CBS has been dealing with the final exam as 100% of the grade policy. For a class like Corporate Finance, where the exam will cover most, if not all of the material presented in the readings and lectures, this is fine. We as students know what to study and where we need to focus, and then we just have to perform at exam time.
But for my other three classes, this is a much trickier proposition. Both International Logistics and Strategic Risk Management require individual 15-page papers. The topics of the paper are pretty much left up to us, as long as they have something to do with Logistics or SRM, respectively. There’s very little in the way of guidelines and structure. As a result, going to class and doing the readings for these classes is truly optional, and when I do the readings, I interpret every word through the prism of whether or not that particular article or chapter in the text will help me write my final.
This approach is a complete 180 from how we learn and cover material at NC State. Almost every class has a variety of projects that receive grades, whether those are midterm exams, presentations or other assignments. The courses are much more structured, and students know from the first day what exactly will be expected of them throughout the semester. That’s not necessarily the case in Copenhagen. For example, here is an excerpt from an e-mail we received from the administrative office regarding our finals:
Automatic Exam Enrollment Exam enrollment is done automatically in the courses you have in your course enrolment status. Don’t panic if you do not see all your courses in the exam enrolment status at this point. However, please contact the course secretary if your courses do not show in your exam enrollment status at the latest two weeks before the exam is set to take place. Before then – don’t worry.
If we had to wait until two weeks before the exam date to figure out when, where, and how the exam would go down, I know many people back at home who would be freaking out.
So it will be up to me to take more control of my schedule here and navigate the assignments the Professors have laid out for us. Fortunately, I already have some interesting ideas for my Logistics and SRM exam papers, and I feel like I’m up to the challenge. While this can be a frustrating experience at times, it’s much more similar to a non-academic environment. In business, managers are expected to be pro-active and to not simply wait for direction from upper management.
Now that I’m a little more than a week into classes, and I’ve had at least one lecture for each course, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what my schedule looks like:
Corporate Finance: Judging from the syllabus this class will be a lot of review of topics covered in my Intro to Finance course from last semester, but with more depth and advanced concepts thrown in. There will be an individual final exam with problem solving and potentially a short essay or two.
Strategic Risk Management: This looks like one of the more interesting classes I’ll be taking. While the class will have a heavy emphasis on managing risk from a financial perspective, there will also be an emphasis on holistic risk management from other threats (i.e. environmental, political, economic, etc…). There will be an individual research paper addressing how a specific organization manages risk as well as an oral defense of the arguments presented in that paper.
International Logistics Management: A requirement for my Supply Chain concentration, this class will discuss both basic SCM concepts as well as more advanced theories and applications of logistics management. The course also requires a 15-page research paper, but is more of a pure research paper looking at Logistics management from either a theoretical or practical perspective. We will be proposing a research question, and then attempting to answer it.
Innovation Leadership: This class was my wildcard. It’s not required for either SCM or Finance, but it looked interesting, and the class already has a heavy focus on networking as a driver for moving innovative ideas to exploitation on the market. For the final, we will be working in teams of 4-5 to develop an entrepreneurial business plan relating to clean energy innovation.
Unlike American universities, at Copenhagen Business School, the final exams are 100% of the grade. There is no homework, no compulsory attendance, and no midterms. Needless to say, this is quite a paradigm shift from how I usually approach school. Every note I take or word I read is now seen through the prism of the final. Does this piece of information relate to what I need to do? If yes, write it down or capture that memory. If no, discard.
It will be very interesting to see how this dynamic plays out over the course of the semester and how it affects my work. Studying will definitely be a topic I return to in future blog posts. But for now, I have to head to the library to do some more reading!
It’s that time of year again. After the end of an amazing introduction week capped by a truly international formal dinner on Saturday night, we are ready for the first week of classes. As I write this, I’m sitting inside Dalgas Have, one of the four buildings I mentioned in my last post. In a little less than 45 minutes I’ll be heading to my first lesson here at CBS.
The classes I’m taking this semester are:
Earlier today, I stopped by the bookstore in Solberg Plads to buy my first round of textbooks. Needless to say, the Strategic Risk Management class looks like it’s going to be the true beast of the group. The material looks difficult, and even worse, the class is held in seven sessions: four 3-hour blocks on Fridays and three 6-hour blocks on Saturdays. Yuck. But I do know the class will be worth it. I’ve always wanted to understand the financial markets and the economic crisis better, and this class will be a key to that knowledge.
I’m also excited for my other classes, Corp. Finance and Logistics Management because they fit into my two concentration areas, and Innovation Leadership because it should help me learn how to think more like an entrepreneur.
As an added bonus today, I finally got my cell phone topped up and ready to work. Unlike the US, the Danish cell phones that the students use here have a pay as you go policy. I’m hoping I can make the $100 I spent today last at least a couple months. I really haven’t been using my phone much here because I really haven’t needed to. With so many planned activities during the first two weeks, we all knew where we were going and where we’d be. But now that classes have started, having a cell phone has become necessary again. Those two weeks of freedom from calling/texting sure were nice though.
Over the last few months I’ve unfortunately strayed from writing about my experiences at school. Part of this has to do with the crazy economic circumstances, and part of it has to do with a general school overload. But a classmate reminded me the other day that this is an NCSU MBA weblog, and should at least make an attempt to address the events and happenings inside the walls of Nelson Hall.
So here we stand, exactly 30 days from the end of our first year of business school. The next four weeks will be full of tests, papers, and presentations for all of our classes: Strategy, Leadership & Ethics, Finance, Career Effectiveness and our concentration course (Supply Relationship Management in my case). On top of this stress, many students are still working towards finding an internship for the summer. This has proven a tough nut to crack in the current economic environment.
Fortunately, several students in the program have been successful in their internship search, myself included. I will be spending the summer in South San Francisco with Genentech, a leader in the biotechnology industry. I’m tremendously excited for the opportunity to work with an amazing organization and to return to one place I consider home. Early next week, I’ll produce a video highlighting the summer plans of other students within the program.
Over theses last four weeks, I’ll try to post more updates about end of semester events and highlights from the year. At the end of the day, I just can’t believe how quickly the last eight months have passed.
For our marketing class, we were given a take-home final based on a Starbucks case study and a brief article in the Wall Street Journal about McDonalds. I thought it might be illuminating to post the take-home final questions to give a flavor for the type of analysis we’re expected to produce. Here it is:
1) The Starbucks case segments the market into “new” and “established” customers. Analyze and describe the composition of customer value (“benefits” and “costs”) for each segment, highlighting the relevant brand, service, and product components. Compare and contrast the customer value offered by Starbucks and McDonald’s to each of the two customer segments. Which type(s) of customer do you risk losing to McDonald’s, and why?
2) How can Starbucks best respond to the McDonald’s threat? Specifically, what improvements or changes to your brand, service, and product do you need to implement, if any? Explain why, and discuss the implications in terms of delivering advantageous value to “new” and/or “established” customers to counter the McDonald’s threat.
For a deliverable, we’re expected to produce a 3-page single spaced response including any exhibits we deem necessary to back up our argument. While three pages doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s kind of the idea. The professor would like us to put together a concise, well thought out argument that reads like an executive summary. If three pages seems light, that’s because it is. We also have a 10-page paper documenting our marketing simulation as well as a 12-minute presentation due next week. Fun times.
