The next ten days for me consists of: 3 exams, one 2500-word group project, a 15-minute project presentation, a 10-minute discussion presentation, a 500-word individual project and another 250-word or so assignment. Oh, and I’ve decided this blog will henceforth be a place where I just complain about having a lot to do 
Argh. A group meeting, employer session, mining equipment competition research, Stats review questions, a 25-page Economics case study, a chapter of Policy, and another 20-page case analysis. That’s a lot to pack into an evening… And I’m sure I’ve forgotten something…
Today we received the specifications for our first major group project — the Company Project. The object is to produce a written report (2500 words max) and 15-minute presentation on a potential export or expansion opportunity of a Canadian company.
The hard part is that you need to pick the company, but you are given a specific industry and an assigned country. These are distributed randomly. Due to some rather bad luck, we ended up with a difficult combination — A machinery manufacturing company with an opportunity in Tanzania.
Tanzania, as I’ve recently discovered, is one of the poorest nations in the world. They have recently undertaken a massive privatization program aimed at improving their economy. Our group is currently trying to identify some sort of realistic export opportunity. Then, we need to find a Canadian company that could take advantage of it.
Oh, and did I mention? The project is due next Wednesday — the day after 3 back-to-back exams next week. Yes, the fun is just starting…
Boy, things are just hopping along here. It’s 10pm and I still have a mountain of Statistics questions / readings, Economics review and Accounting reading to dig through. Looking at my calendar, I notice there’s only 1.5 weeks before our first 3 major exams – ironically, the same three subjects. Not to mention a major group project due a week later, and several assignments sprinkled in-between.
Looks like the pressure is starting to mount. I spent some time tonight organizing my rapidly growing pile of loose notes by subject. I at least feel like I’m in a position to tackle the remainder of work for the night. Better get back to it…
My apologies to anyone who has visited in the past two weeks and found, well, nothing. I can’t believe that two weeks have gone by already. This program is extremely fast-paced and I’ve been having trouble keeping up periodically. It has caught me a bit off-guard in some cases since I’m used to being able to keep up with things without much difficulty.
So far we’ve been alternating through four core classes — Accounting, Economics, Statistics and Organizational Behaviour. I was hoping it would be mostly review for me since I took one of more undergrad courses in all of these subjects, but unfortunately that only got me through about the first class of each. After quickly summarizing the basics, we quickly rolled on through to more strategic “big picture” thinking. In these two weeks, I’ve learned quite a bit, not so much from the class material in most cases, but from the discussion and points brought up by classmates with widely varying backgrounds and experience.
It is currently lunchtime and I have my textbook open for a new course we have this afternoon — Strategy. I’m really looking forward to this class, since it will take the “big picture” thinking even one step further. This will likely be the primary course to pull all of the other subjects together to the broad-ranging topics that C-level (CEO, COO, etc.) executives have to make decisions about every day. And thankfully, the reading was very light — only one chapter — a stark contrast to the massive amounts of readings that have been assigned in the other courses.
