Time well spent

Something happened this past week which confirmed something that I have always suspected. I learned that I spend too much time on homework assignments. A lot of times when I come across something on an assignment that I cannot figure out I would end up spending way too much time on it.

 

I handed in three assignments this past week, one for marketing, one for advanced topics in accounting, and one for fixed income. For the fixed income assignment, the math portion was pretty straight forward, I was able to even solve the extra credit question, but there were two open ended qualitative questions that had me spending hours staring into blank space. When I woke up the next morning, I felt angry looking back at how much time I spent on the entire assignment. I felt even angrier this past Monday when my professor announced that he did not grade the qualitative questions because they were too open ended. My assignment for advanced topics in accounting was similar. About half the assignment I could figure out with no problems but the other half proved to be a stumbling block. And just as I did with the fixed income assignment, I spent a major amount of time trying to figure out something I ultimately could not figure out at the end. I got back the assignment this past week and received a descent grade on it (a “check,” as opposed to a “check plus” or “check minus”). Marketing was a different story. I had only one hour to work on my write up because I waited until the last minute to do it. During that hour, I pushed myself to read, understand, and analyze as much as I could. At the end of the marketing class, I felt so embarrassed about the quality of my write up that I talked to the professor and offered to do an extra credit assignment . The write up was returned to me on Tuesday, I got descent grade on it.

 

What I need to start doing is to set a time limit for myself on every assignment because every assignment will have something that I just cannot figure out. And according to the economic theory of diminishing marginal returns, every additional unit of time (minute, hour) I spend on an assignment will give me a return that is less than that generated by the previous unit.

 

And speaking of time, I found out today that we have no classes on Monday for Labor Day.

Tags: MBA Experience, economics, time management

Zzzzzzzzz

I had trouble staying awake in two out of my three classes today. I get tired very easily sometimes. Last week I started experimenting with something where I would come home after my last class, which ends at 3:30 the latest, and take a nap for a couple of hours before starting my homework. I found it to be quite helpful and will try to do more of that this year.

 

On Friday night we had a reunion dinner at my professor’s house for all the students who went to India in May for the Global Immersion Experience. We all received a CD with about 100 of the best pictures we took during our eleven days there. The professor played the pictures on his living room television set and a running joke throughout the evening was that many of the pictures of me featured me sleeping; me sleeping on the bus, sleeping on the plane, sleeping on the train to Agra. I don’t think I slept more than anyone else in the group, more likely that someone decided it was funny to take a picture every time he saw me sleeping. One of my classmates said to me, “you do sleep a lot.”

Using economics to alter behaviors on the internet

The Wall Street Journal on Friday had a great article about how Yahoo! has been using economists to apply microeconomic theory to improve the services it offers to its users.

 

“These days, Mr. Schwarz is thinking about how to use economics to save attractive women from unwanted solicitations on an Internet dating site. One idea employs the concept of "scarcity," rationing the number of free messages each lothario can send. Another uses full disclosure, by displaying how many people a suitor has already approached.”

 

The article goes on to describe (in the last paragraphs) another research project the economists is working on where he has to predict how parties behave when they enter market where one side is more eager to reveal its preferences than the other. The research has implications on various offerings such as Yahoo! HotJobs and Yahoo! Personals.

 

“Mr. Schwarz also co-wrote a paper examining search-ad auctions. It concluded that Yahoo's system doesn't encourage people to bid what they think the ad is worth to their business, something that caught the attention of Yahoo executives. They expect Mr. Schwarz to work on future versions of their ad systems, a task he has already embraced.”

 

A couple of my projects at my summer internship deals with exactly this issue, how much should our clients (companies that sell products on their web pages) bid for various search terms on search engines. These are the keywords that results in the sponsored links that populate the far right margin of a Google of Yahoo! search results page. Yahoo! is currently fine tuning its search-ad system with a project code named Panama. Yahoo! stock plummeted when it was announced over the summer that Panama’s release would be delayed.

 

This article got my attention because it actually mentions a couple of topics that I know quite a bit about. If only I can convince Yahoo! to hire me based on my grasp of microeconomic theory and my work experience, I’d can then pretty much blow off the rest of my second year, much like what many of my classmates are either doing or planning on doing.

Tags: Internet, economics

Putting it all together

One of the things that’s nice about being a second year, I am told, is that you get to see how what you learn in one class applies to another. It’s a nice feeling that after nine months, eighteen classes, and four Mods, to finally know that what you learn in one class is knowledge that actually “lives” outside the bubble of that one classroom.

 

And it’s about time too. Let me give you an example of how today I was able to apply what I learned in one class to another. In advanced financial reporting, we were learning about bond futures contracts and in response to a classmate’s question, the professor said that many of these futures contracts can only be utilized by investors and institutions with the means to do so. His exact words were “you have to have money to walk into a casino.”

 

Later on in marketing class, we did a case about how a particular casino chain uses its loyal rewards program to attract and retain customers. And I must say that knowing one has to have money to walk into a gambling casino really enhanced my understanding of the case. Because judging from what I know about casinos, I would have thought that they purposely target those who could least afford this type of “entertainment.”

 

Oh and when class ended, the professor showed us this great clip on the potential evils of companies collecting too much data on their customers.

Tags: MBA Experience

Volunteers needed for Comfort Zone Camp

After my lunch on Saturday at the Boar’s Head Inn, I met a gentleman at the resorts wearing a hat and shirt bearing the initials CZC. I randomly struck up a conversation with him and asked about the initials. He explained that he works for Comfort Zone Camp, a non-profit organization that operates a year round camp for children who have lost one or both parents to death. The camp needs volunteers for its locations in Richmond and New Jersey.

I told him that while I do not know anyone who would be interested in volunteering, I would put a mention of it on my blog. So if you are 21 or older, love to work with kids, and wish to volunteer for a worthy cause, please get in touch with Mr. Kelly Hughes, whose contact information is below.

Kelly Hughes

Operation’s Director

Comfort Zone Camp, Inc.

2101-A Westmoreland Street

Richmond, Virginia 23230

804-377-3430

866-488-5679

Kelly@ComfortZoneCamp.org

Dropping derivatives and exercising my options

I ended up dropping the derivatives class last week because I found the material to be a bit too technical and did not like the professor's teaching styles. This will let  me to further concentrate on the other five classes I am taking. And by dropping the class I can go to an earlier section of the marketing class and end my day a bit early.

 

The first assignment of the marketing class is due this week. We have the option of writing a case write up for either the case due tomorrow or the one due Thursday. I am going to do the one due tomorrow. Usually when professors give me the option on which assignments to write up, I always do the early ones because they are usually graded more leniently and doing so gets them out of the way so that I can concentrate on the other assignments.

 

While this is the second week of class at Kenan-Flagler, the rest o the university will not begin class until Wednesday. On my way home tonight from the library I drove past many small groups of undergrads navigating their way between the dorms, the fraternity houses, and Franklin Street. As I drove I marvel at the options that are available to them at this stage in their lives and wonder if they will take full advantage of them or if they will look back when they are in their thirties and wish they had made some choices differently.

Tags: MBA Experience

Tough times ahead for the Wahoos

Greetings from Charlottesville, Virginia. I stopped by Central Virginia this morning on my way to our nation’s capital where I will be attending the thirtieth birthday bash of a friend of mine from UVA. I will be having lunch later today at the Boar’s Head Inn with another friend of mine from my undergrad years whom I have not seen in almost eight years.

 

These are tough times for students, alumni, and other supporters of the University of Virginia.  Earlier this week, U.S. News & World Report came out with its annual rankings of America’s top college and UVA’s rankings fell to 24th among top national universities. While we are still the number two public university in the national (behind Berkeley), number 24 overall is the lowest we’ve been in the years since I have been a Wahoo. During my first year, UVA jumped from number 21 to number 18 and during my last year, UVA was still the number 1 public university in the country.

 

And we are not doing all that well in other areas. After arriving in Charlottesville five years ago to much fanfare, Al Groh has failed to light new fire into our football program. In September, I will get to see Virginia play in person for the first time in two years as the Cavaliers go to Durham to play against Duke. Never in my life did I think Virginia would be chosen to play at Duke’s homecoming.

Tags: UVA

CNN will leave this to your interpretation

I am not sure what CNN is trying to convey in this headline paragraph. Is it trying to tell us that John Karr has been "saying quite a lot" or that he has been "staying quiet a lot." I don't know because the folks down in the CNN Headquarters in Atlanta do not proofread their stories before they are posted on the Internets.

Through the roof

I don’t believe all the news about inflation being non-existent. I was at the Martini Bar earlier tonight and went downstairs for a 25 cent beer only to find out that the price of the beer has been increased to 50 cents. That’s pretty significant. Not only is it a 100 percent increase but if you were to consider the basket of goods that an average Kenan-Flagler student has to purchase on a given week, the “25 cent beer” makes up a substantial allocation of that student’s financial aid disbursements every semester.

Tags: Economics, Martini Bar

What almost could have been

At lunch today I was milling about Café McColl trying to decide what to have for lunch. Normally the place gets mobbed at around 12:30 each day as students rush from classes, which end at 12:20, to the lines that form by the cashiers. But it was well past 1 o’clock and I noticed the relative calm in the cafeteria.  There was a lot of people in the cafeteria but most had segregated themselves into different geographical subsets and were busy either enjoying their meals, typing into their laptops, or having animated conversations. The television in the corner was showing the news (it was actually showing The 700 Club) and no one was paying particular attention.

 

I then tried to imagine what very easily could have been an alternative to what I was witnessing. I imagined the television screen showing breaking news coverage of airplanes having blown up over the Atlantic, reporters interviewing terrorism experts, and discussing the impact of an international full ground stop. The sound I was hearing in the cafeteria was replaced by the stone silence of students standing in front of the television screen, a silence regularly interrupted by the sound of students sobbing at the news of what had just occurred.

 

Some people look at horrors that occurred and ask “if only we had known.” I look at the tragedies that were avoided and ask “why aren’t we more grateful.” 

Tags: Terrorism

Practicing negotiations

Not a whole lot happened today. I front loaded my classes by going to the 8am section of fixed income followed by the 9:30 one for mergers & analysis. I dropped negotiations but still have not decided on whether to take all the six classes I am currently signed up for or to drop either derivatives or fixed income.

 

The negotiations professor emailed me yesterday because I had missed the first class. When I went to talk to her, she said for me to take the class, she would have to pair me up with another student who had also missed the first class and we would have to do the first negotiations exercise before the second class.

 

Doing the exercise is non-negotiable.

Cutting class

Now that I have attended a session of each of the seven classes I am currently signed up for, I should be able to easily figure out which two I want to drop. Between negotiations, fixed income, and derivatives, I have to drop at least one, preferably two. Yet the decision is not as simple as it sounds. 

 

I am pretty certain I will be dropping negotiations this Mod. I am currently on the wait list for this class in Mod II and if I don’t get a spot, I can always sign up for it again in Mods III and IV. The only reason that would propel me to take it now is that the class requires a minimum of work outside of the classroom. Fixed income is a pretty useful class and the professor knows his material very well. He also taught the derivatives class until this year. Derivatives is now taught by a young professor who just came to Kenan-Flagler from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. I am not sure how I like the material, the class, or his teaching style. He spent the first thirty minutes today telling us “the rules” of the class including his promise to fail anyone who opens a laptop during lecture. There is a graded assignment due every week and he cold calls students at every session on the reading material. The only reason I would have to go through with the course is once he began teaching the material, I actually found it quite interesting. Both derivatives and fixed income are introductory classes that build up to an optional advanced class in Mod II.

 

The classes that I know for certain I want to take are pretty descent. The marketing class has only eight students in it. It used to be offered every spring but the school has decided to change the schedule to every fall. Since it was most recently offered earlier this year, many of my classmates have already taken it. I will be spending my Tuesday and Thursday mornings with two professors who are both quite entertaining, one’s name is Bushman while the other’s is Landsman. One began class today by hooking his Mac laptop to the classroom’s sound system and playing his favorite Beatles songs from his iTunes. The other one …I am going to refrain from saying anything about him for the time being except that he has certain habits that are quite eccentric. Hopefully I will be able to blog more about him later on in the Mod when I can better articulate his characteristics to my readers. The mergers and acquisition class is pretty much what I expected. The professor said she appreciates clsas participation because “sometimes I get bored of my own voice.” I am going to try to sit on the right side of the room so that if I ever get bored I can look straight ahead out the window (the seating in most classrooms are in a U shaped arrangement) where I can see the top of the UNC Hospital where the emergency helicopter takes off and lands several times an hour.

 

And speaking of seating arrangements, I think it goes without saying that I am going to sit as far away as I can from any classmate who uses a Dell laptop.

Tags: MBA Experience, classes

Back with a vengeance!

My second year of classes begins today. My schedule is not set yet but so far it looks like Mondays and Wednesdays will be my easy days, I have mergers and acquisitions which meets at three different times and I can attend any section. I also signed up for fixed income and negotiations, which I may or may not go through with. I definitely want to take negotiations and the class is offered in both Mods I and II. The Mod II section is taught by a very popular professor and the class is extremely hard to get into, I am currently on the wait list for it. I may decide to take it now with the other professor, whom I have been told is just as good. Tuesdays and Thursdays are more packed. I have two accounting classes (complex deal and topics in advanced financial reporting), introduction to derivatives, and customer relation management. I may drop derivatives depending on how much I like it.

 

For the past week, I have been feeling pretty excited about the beginning of my second year. There’s a lot of stuff I want to learn and I want to fine tune a couple of studying techniques/work habits that I have been toying with in my head. I also like many of the first years I have met so far at the receptions I attended this past summer.

 

And for all you first years whom I walked by upstairs this morning, welcome to the show that never ends (a line I borrowed from the West Wing).

Tags: MBA Experience, classes

The economics and statistics of bombing an airplane

This past week’s foiled terrorist plot reminded me of two jokes that I heard in class when I was at UVA. The first was told by an engineering professor I had during my first year. A statistician was going on vacation and brought a bomb with him onto the airplane. He explained that his biggest fear about air travel was that a terrorist might detonate a bomb while the plane was in flight even though he realized that the odds of a bomb making its way onto an airplane were one in a million. By bringing a bomb onto the plane, and making sure it doesn’t detonate, in order for the plane to blow up, there would have to be a second bomb on the plane. And the odds of a second bomb making its way onto the airplane was one in a million raised to the second power.

 

The second joke was told by a former-Wall-Street-big-shot-turned-economics-professor I had during my fourth year. He said that his daughters were worried about him because he was always flying around the country on business trips. His standard response was “don’t worry, I have insurance.”

 

So did you like any of these two jokes? Or did they both ….. bomb?

Tags: Economics, UVA

Email hoarders versus deleters

Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article about how the way you handle your email inbox is a reflection on your personality.

 

"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"

 

I wonder what Greenfield would say if I were to tell him that I spent the last hours at my internship last week backing up my Outlook mailbox so I could take with me every email I have ever received or sent during the entire internship experience?

Air America to move to the right?

The New York Post reports that starting September 1, the liberal talk radio network will switch its affiliate in the number one radio market from WLIB 1190 to WWRL 1600 on the AM dial.

 

Am I the only one who catches the cruel irony in this? That to tune in to their favorite talk shows, lefties will have to set their radio dials as far to the right as they can possibly go.

Tags: Media industry, talk radio

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …..

I have one more hour until my internship comes to an end. It feels just like yesterday that I was sitting in front of Panera Bread waiting for my car to get worked on when I received the phone call with the offer and agreed to start the next day. I realized recently that one unintentional outcome of me having agreed to start so early is since my first day was May 31, when I update my resume I get to write down that I worked from May to August even though I was only here for under eleven weeks.

 

And what a quick ten and a half weeks it’s been. I have trouble believing that the time has gone by already, especially when you realize that an entire Mod at Kenan-Flagler lasts only a little bit more than seven weeks. For a good part of the last ten weeks I was a bit worried about a project I had to work on but I gave the presentation to my vice president on Wednesday and he liked it so much he asked me to give it again to his boss and to some members of the sales team. It’s pretty cool when you give recommendations that people actually listen to. I gave the presentation again earlier this afternoon and … let’s just say one particular sales executive was so impressed with it that he looked like he was either going to die of boredom of or fall asleep on the spot.

 

Consistent with my experience of being an MBA student, no sooner does one responsibility end does another one begin. Twenty minutes ago I received an email from an accounting professor informing us that we have reading to do for the first class. Actually, let me take that back. I should not say that he was “informing us” of our assignment because his exact words were “A reminder that there is a reading assignment for the first class.” Since he is an accounting professor and you all know how much attention accounting professors pay to detail, the fact that he was giving us a “reminder” must mean that he has given us this information before and that … well .. I must have been too busy drinking at the Martini Bar to notice it.

 

I am going to spend the next hour archiving my company Outlook mailbox so I will have it as a souvenir of my summer here.

Tags: Internship, MBA Experience, Martini Bar

And now the times are changing ….

A couple of interesting developments this past week at AOL. As many of you are either aware of or have been expecting, yesterday the company flipped the switch to change AOL into a free service for members who already have existing internet access. New members who join now get to choose between the free plan and an unlimited dialup plan that costs $9.99 per month.

 

What interest me are two things that have not been addressed by any of the articles I have read. First, will existing dialup customers who previously were paying $23.95 per month have their rates automatically discounted to $9.99 per month? Second, will AOL members who qualify for the free plan but are currently on a prepaid plan get the unused portion of their money back? But wait a minute, as I am typing this it dawned on me there is a third (and much more interesting) issue that has yet to be addressed. When AOL launched Netscape Online, Netscape Online was positioned as “the fighting brand” where the traditional AOL service remained as the premium brand. Now that the prices of the two services are at parity, does this spell the end of Netscape Online?

 

Hopefully this is a sign that AOL is finally beginning to make its decisions based on anticipating where the internet industry is heading. I was delighted to read that starting September, AIM and AOL members will get 5GB of free online storage at Xdrive, an online storage company AOL purchased last year. I remember when I worked at AOL I heard about a project called A-Disk, which I assumed was an online file storage system. I am curious as to what type of discussion took place that resulted in the decision to purchase the technology instead of developing it internally. One of the things that technology companies have to constantly deliberate is whether it’s best to acquire a technology by developing it internally from scratch, purchasing a company that already has it, or hiring the services of another company. Hopefully these are issues I will get to learn about at Kenan-Flagler next year because I am sure it’s something I have to deal with at some point in my career.

Tags: Media Industry, AOL

Walking tour of Kenan-Flagler, via YouTube

There is someone out there who obviously has way too much time on his hands. He has been making videos of the Kenan-Flagler facilities and uploading them onto YouTube. The videos are without narration and they actually make the McColl building pretty nice. I am going to link them at the bottom and include my comments.

Make the turn onto Skipper Bowles, see Dean Dome in the background (at around 0:20) and the final left turn onto Kenan Drive brings you right up onto the Kenan-Flagler garage.

 

 

From the garage, walk up the steps between McColl and the Kenan Center and find yourself at the courtyard.

The view from the opposite end of the same courtyard.

 

From the courtyard, walk into the second floor of McColl and you will find the main lobby and the grand circular staircase (first 4 seconds of clip).

 

 

Go down onto the first floor and find Café McColl, my least favorite part of the building.

Go up onto the fourth floor and find my favorite hiding spot in the entire building, the faculty study lounge. Outside is a balcony where you can see the top of the UNC Hospital (at about 41 seconds into the clip) where there a helicopter landing pad and in the last 4 seconds, you can actually see how close Kenan-Flagler is to the Dean Dome.