Week 3: Acquisition & Analysis of Information for Management, Global Environment of Business and lots of reading (Module 2)

As week three comes to a close I am becoming aware of just how unaware I am of the time passing. I find myself so busy most of the time I don't even know what day of the week it is.

This week saw us start Module 2 which is two courses: MBA 860 Acquisition & Analysis of Information for Management (a.k.a. statistics) and MBA 800 Global Environment of Business (a.k.a. microeconomics). Below in brief are some of the topics covered and items of interest:

MBA 860 Acquisition & Analysis of Information for Management:

• Professor Jeff McGill is excellent. He knows how to move through the material at a pace that is "just right". Fast enough to be interesting, but slow enough to get the important points across. He also seems to have an excellent handle on making the material mean something, by using real examples, so it is easier to understand.
• Intro to stats, binomial distributions and normal distributions
• Where information can be found, what do do with it, how it is collected
• A little bit of reading, but not too bad if you have taken a statistics course before, which I have

MBA 800 Global Environment of Business:

• Professor John McHale is quite entertaining. He is excellent at his topic and definitely able to go much deeper than what we are currently covering.
• Intro to microeconomics
• supply & demand curves (aside: the most useful 4 lines you will ever use)
• market forces (a.k.a. "the invisible hand")
• effects of tariffs, subsidies, world prices, etc.
• how "dead weight loss" comes into play regarding inefficient markets
• Several team based presentations on a variety of topics (e.g. Price of oil, carbon emissions, wikinomics, the "next" industrial revolution)
• Lots of reading from a well written text book, but I should have done more reading on the previous weekend

Although we are continuing to work in teams for some assignments and presentations there is an individual component for the final exams.

Other stuff:

• The "point 4" club is now going strong
• Fit-to-lead is continuing to assess student fitness and start running groups
• Student elections are this week to elect the student exec. Some position were award by default, but most have a few people running so there will be speeches and voting
• Various student clubs are getting set-up (e.g. finance, consulting, etc.)

This weekend promises to be busy since I need to complete my duties as "lead" on my teams statistics assignment, hit the gym, spend time with my wife who has just arrived back in Kingston, prep for next week and hopefully catch the game opener for the Stanley Cup finals!