Building My "Math Muscle"

Term 3 is upon us. From all that I've been hearing, this term is going to be the most gruelling of them all - Global Finance, Macro Economics, and Managerial Accounting (listed by order of my current interest). Also this term the two sections have been scrambled, and we have been assigned to new teams, so there will be some breaking in time to get going again. I must admit that while I do like the three weeks away from Fuqua between terms, it does make it that much more difficult when starting back up. It's like you get used to going to the gym every other day, and suddenly, you don't go for weeks - all that muscle mass that takes weeks to build up turns to mush in a matter of days and those tiddly-wink dumbells feel a lot heavier. My "math muscle" that was getting a good workout last term in Decision Models and Econ, has more or less atrophied.

My Dad asked me the other day about what the most important thing I've learned since starting the program. I told him that the most important thing I've learned so far (aside from the importance of a good night's rest), is that business is more quantitative than I imagined it to be. It seems that much of business is about making decisions with limited resources (such as money, information and time). This means, among other things, knowing how to develop and use mathematics to model risk and uncertainity, given a set of reasonable assumptions. Math is making sense in a way that I never really grasped in my science classes.

We learned the concept of "arbitrage" in my Finance class today. For the uninitiated, arbitrage is the idea of "making something from nothing" - taking a discrepancy in price or value between two or more things, and leveraging that discrepancy to make money. I think that is an appropriate metaphor for my pursuit of the MBA, finding opportunities to arbitrage undervalued concepts and ideas. Plus, the word arbitrage just sounds cool...