First day of class

The pre-MBA workshops that are being offered in July are financial accounting, microeconomics, quantitative analysis, and finance. For some reason, the finance workshop is a one half workshop, meets only three days a week (as opposed to five) and only costs half as much. Finance is the only workshop I am taking and it did not begin until today.

It went well for a first day of class, we were given a syllabus of what chapters were covered, what the homework assignments were, etc. The professor joked around saying we should take as many finance classes at Kenan-Flagler as we could, and that other subjects such as marketing you can pretty much learn out of a book.

In addition to the workshops that I have mentioned above, there are other "general MBA skills" workshops that are mandatory for all students here in July and do not pertain to any particular discipline. They are communication skills and case methodology. Both of these met today. The communication skills workshop teaches us how to do Power Point presentations and speak effectively in front of an audience. The more interesting workshop was the case methodology workshop. Case methodology is a teaching process by which students read about a business situation, called a case, and attend class to discuss the issues facing the business and possible solutions. It is a major derivation from the straight lecture format that most of us are used to and is controversial because there are certain topics such as accounting that many feel cannot be learned via the case methodology. At Kenan-Flagler, about a quarter of the classes are taught via the case method format and other business schools such as Harvard, Darden, and Babcock (Wake Forest) use them a lot more. This workshop teaches students how to learn in a classroom that utilizes the case methodology. We practice reading Harvard Business School cases and how to identify and discuss the issues at hand, come up with different solutions, and arrive at a concensus on how to best solve the problem confronting the company.

We are given the chance to put all these skills together during the last week when we are expected to give a Power Point presentation on a business solution to one of the business cases.