04.01.06

First Quarter in Review…

Posted in MBA at 11:48 pm by Jason Permalink

Again, sorry this will just be a short review of the highlights

The first quarter at Anderson is a little bit unique. We are required to take 5 classes; I regularly did this there in undergrad, but for some reason it was supposed to be SOOO terrible. I tend to assume the worst and am a little gullible when it comes to things that are hyped up

Hey that’s one thing I’ve learned at business school! Not to believe what the marketing department tells you…

UCLA is on the quarter system which is 10 weeks long and, usually, classes take up the entire 10. Anderson thought it would be interesting to cram a whole class into five weeks, though. We had Marketing I weeks 1-5 and Investment Finance weeks 6-10; if anything it made for an interesting change.

I had high hopes for my first quarter… I was going to go through the crucible of the most difficult quarter on my path to my MBA… Well I began to be let down. I noticed that my fellow classmates, who I was told were supposed to be so smart, were merely mediocre. The classes I was so optimistic about were found to be somewhat lacking, and I began to wonder what I was doing there.

There was one good thing about the first quarter; there wasn’t all that much group work. There was, however, a group paper in marketing that turned into a real disaster as every one of my group members proceeded to rewrite it when they were supposed to be ‘editing’. What we all learned form this assignment was to care just a little bit less about what was turned in as it wound up just wasting time. This helped immensely in the second quarter…

I know, I know… this all sounds very pessimistic with a hint of negativity and a dash of arrogance. You’ll have to forgive me, but most of it is truth, and a bit of it is plain old frustration.

I just didn’t see how any of what I learned was going to help me make more money than I was before I started. Don’t get me wrong, the classes were quite interesting, but I came for something applicable and I didn’t find it this quarter. Perhaps next quarter, they say it’s like a dimmer switch, so perhaps I’m just not able to make out the light yet

Classes taken: Marketing I, Investment Finance, Accounting, Statistics, and Micro Economics.

Rating for first quarter: 4 out of 10…