Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Class Notes
A brief rundown of my classes, and let me emphasis brief since we've only had one class of each so far.
Statistics: This is not your run of the mill college stats course, which seems to be a general theme of classes here. Instead of drilling into our heads all the fun formulas for standard deviation, chi tests, and multi-colinearity, this is more geared towards using practical statistics in business. We we'll be using Excel and other programs to do most of the calculations for use while we concentrate on figuring out what the hell the results mean rather than how to calculate them. This is really the kind of course that all colleges should teach to business students because the boredom and confusion level should be significantly less. Also, like other classes, many problems will be case based. Teacher is from Tennessee, which some of the Chinese students aren't too excited about since he does have a little bit of that drawl. For me, this isn't a problem, especially since I have to hear Australian, European, and Indian accents from my fellow students.
Marketing: This teacher came highly recommended from the 2004 class and turned out to be true. A very novel approach for this class, and especially the more fact and memorization-oriented Chinese students. There will be no memorization and doing it won't help, since this class is supposed to teach us how to THINK about marketing and learn techniques rather than having to memorize volumes of marketing jargon. Very welcome class format! Mostly case studies.
Business Communication: British professor who is here for only two weeks so this is a short class and thus intense. We have a 1500 word individual paper due next week, plus a 30 minute group presentation. The point is not to research a topic thoroughly and learn a lot but more learn how to write a proper business report and give good presentations. This one is pretty easy for international students since we've been doing this for a while.
Financial Accounting: Chinese professor, which initially worried me since I remember having foreign teachers in engineering school at Lehigh that were very difficult to understand, who is a riot. Really. Yes. Accounting class is the one I have laughed in the most. I can't say I expect this to continue, but here's hoping. Again, this is case based and not about learning how to tranlate balance sheets into income statements into cash flow statements but more about analyzing these statements and drawing conclusions, instead. This does not bode well for helping me study for the CFA since that is far more technical, but at least this class will be able to keep my interest! We will, however, be reading lots of annual reports.
Organizational Behavior: This is taught by a Spanish professor who was also part of orientation and is entertaining. This is more about how business organizations work and will require lots of reading and, yes, case studies.
Economics: First class is tomorrow.
So overall, I'm really quite impressed with the faculty as well as the class formats. I was worried this would be all brute force memorization of information but instead is much more of a thinking man's approach rather than a something that would be far more boring.
And finally, some really interesting news, next year CEIBS... well, I'll let them say it:
Statistics: This is not your run of the mill college stats course, which seems to be a general theme of classes here. Instead of drilling into our heads all the fun formulas for standard deviation, chi tests, and multi-colinearity, this is more geared towards using practical statistics in business. We we'll be using Excel and other programs to do most of the calculations for use while we concentrate on figuring out what the hell the results mean rather than how to calculate them. This is really the kind of course that all colleges should teach to business students because the boredom and confusion level should be significantly less. Also, like other classes, many problems will be case based. Teacher is from Tennessee, which some of the Chinese students aren't too excited about since he does have a little bit of that drawl. For me, this isn't a problem, especially since I have to hear Australian, European, and Indian accents from my fellow students.
Marketing: This teacher came highly recommended from the 2004 class and turned out to be true. A very novel approach for this class, and especially the more fact and memorization-oriented Chinese students. There will be no memorization and doing it won't help, since this class is supposed to teach us how to THINK about marketing and learn techniques rather than having to memorize volumes of marketing jargon. Very welcome class format! Mostly case studies.
Business Communication: British professor who is here for only two weeks so this is a short class and thus intense. We have a 1500 word individual paper due next week, plus a 30 minute group presentation. The point is not to research a topic thoroughly and learn a lot but more learn how to write a proper business report and give good presentations. This one is pretty easy for international students since we've been doing this for a while.
Financial Accounting: Chinese professor, which initially worried me since I remember having foreign teachers in engineering school at Lehigh that were very difficult to understand, who is a riot. Really. Yes. Accounting class is the one I have laughed in the most. I can't say I expect this to continue, but here's hoping. Again, this is case based and not about learning how to tranlate balance sheets into income statements into cash flow statements but more about analyzing these statements and drawing conclusions, instead. This does not bode well for helping me study for the CFA since that is far more technical, but at least this class will be able to keep my interest! We will, however, be reading lots of annual reports.
Organizational Behavior: This is taught by a Spanish professor who was also part of orientation and is entertaining. This is more about how business organizations work and will require lots of reading and, yes, case studies.
Economics: First class is tomorrow.
So overall, I'm really quite impressed with the faculty as well as the class formats. I was worried this would be all brute force memorization of information but instead is much more of a thinking man's approach rather than a something that would be far more boring.
And finally, some really interesting news, next year CEIBS... well, I'll let them say it:
The visit of Mr. Solana to the CEIBS campus follows the announcement that Nobel Prize Laureate, Robert M. Solow, has confirmed to teach at CEIBS next semester. Nobel prize, bitches!Ok, I added that last sentence in.
