Fast Forward, Pause or Play?

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Memoirs of a "Former WEMBA" Student?

I have now successfully suffered through three final exams in two days to close out my first Term experience as a Fuqua WEMBA. How do I feel? Lousy and tired. If you asked me the same question yesterday, I probably would have answered "tired, but content." The difference? My two exams on Friday (Statistics and Managerial Effectiveness) were challenging but fair - the kind you step out of thinking "I actually learned something in that class." Today the daily special was Financial Accounting. And we are now talking potentially a wholesale dismantling of my dreams of MBA stardom. I don't mean to make excuses, but I truly believe that if I had spent time working over problem sets and old quizzes into the wee hours last week, I would have had a fair shot of getting by on the exam today. Instead, I was up into the wee hours last week reworking our business plan so that my father could have something to present to potential investors in Taiwan during his travel there this week. It was an unfortunate collusion of time and pace (too little time and not keeping pace with classes). Perhaps I will have to prematurely sign off this blog...or maybe the merciful god of partial credit will have pity and I will live to suffer another term. Stay tuned!

Saturday, April 10, 2004

The end is near...

As I approach the end of the first Term and face the looming specter of final exams (wow...when's the last time I took finals?!), I thought I would just reflect back on the first term and what I have learned inside and outside the classroom so far:

1. The answer is "It depends." As we got further along into the term, the right answers seemed to become more elusive and more complex. I suppose this happens to some degree in any discipline, that the phrase "the more we know, the less we understand" (as sung by Don Henly) takes on more meaning. I just didn't expect it would become so uncertain so soon! In the sciences, you have at least 2-3 years of "by-the-book memorization" before you can start to explore the boundaries of that knowledge. In our last statistics case study, there seemed to be about as many regression models as there were teams.

2. We are "branded." I mean this in the total sense of the word - from the stuff they do to cows to the stuff that P&G does for soap. The nametags and tent cards we are issued from the first day of class gives us two brand identities - our name and our company's name. An interesting thing happens in the first term - if no other traits supercede, we default to our corporate brand identity - e.g., "that's Tom from Bank of America," or "Sheila from IBM," etc. This personal branding is limiting in the sense that we are labeled by our affiliations (and if the company is a start-up no one has heard of, like BioResource International (yet!), you really have no brand equity to leverage). On the flip side, brands are useful in the sense that it helps to place us each into a broader context on the business playing field, if you will.

Well, that's about enough pontification for now - it is time to cram for finals!