Important lessons learned

Yesterday was the last day of the second series of pre-MBA workshops (first series was in June). During the long drive home today to pack everything up for the final move down to Chapel Hill next week, I thought about what I have learned in the past three weeks and realized the most important lessons were quite unexpected.

I learned that having a graduate level understanding of a discipline does not require that you know everything out cold. During the first week of class, we were learning about the different formulas used for present value calculations. I remember we had to memorize these formulas when I took finance in college. Someone at the Kenan-Flalger class asked our beloved professor if he could recall these formulas from memory. His answer was "I usually look them up or use the calculator." Earlier this week during the review session for the exam, our T.A. was explaining perhaps the hardest topic in the entire course - efficient market frontier. He said that he's taken a ton of classes in finance and has to relearn the material everytime. In other words, he doesn't remember it.

This confirmed something I suspected, that getting a degree in a particular field does not require you to know everything about that particular field. You're only expected to have sufficient training in the field to be able to understand the concepts that come up over and over again. This was how I felt during a class visit at the school that rejected me, I was sitting in on an elective economics class taught by a world renown professor. He was drawing marginal demand curves that I haven't seen since college, yet the underlying concepts came right back to me. I really think the most important part of getting an education in any subject is that you become at ease with understanding the concepts rather than being able to recite the textbooks from scratch.

The other thing I learned is the difference between thinking you have a good understanding of a topic and being able to do well on the exam. Going into the exam on Friday, I thought I had the material nailed down but I only scored slightly above average. This is probably the result of me feeling over-confident and other students being more prepared than I am.