Flag incorrectly displayed on 24

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF MONDAY’S EPISODE

Anyone who pays close attention to this blog should not have been surprised when Jack was ambushed on Monday’s episode of 24. As I predicted on an earlier post, everytime Jack walks into someone’s office to get information, there is an ambush. This happened on Seasons 4 and 5 and Season 6 is proving to be no different.

What I found much more surprising was the flag that was hanging on the wall in the office scene. This was first shown when Jack’s father walked into the room and stood in the doorway. If you look you will see that behind him is an American flag on the wall hung vertically. The flag was hung with the union (where the stars are) on the upper right. That is incorrect. According to Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Code, Old Glory should always be displayed with the union to the upper left of the observer, regardless of whether it is displayed horizontal or vertical. It’s a bit counterintuitive because when you display a flag vertically, most people assume this is done by rotating it 90 degrees clockwise, placing the union on the upper right corner of the vertically displayed flag.

Goes to show there are some things the show’s producers do not know.

Road trip to Beaufort and Greenville

Me and five other guys from my church’s young adults group went on a little retreat to Beaufort County, North Carolina this past weekend. We spent a good part of the time there playing ping pong, tossing the Frisbee, discussing about faith, relationships with women, and other very Godly topics.

 

The nearby historic town of Bath is known for having been the home of Blackbeard, one of the more notorious pirates in history. On the way back, we stopped by the city of Greenville for lunch where we eat at Buffalo Wild Wings located across the street from a rather odd-looking establishment with no windows. We asked the waitress to change the channel on the TV screens to WRAL where we caught the last minute of the Virginia Clemson game and got to see the Cavaliers take the lead with 15 seconds left in the game. Afterwards we drove through the campus of East Carolina University. Someone mentioned as we drove through the row of sorority houses that part of the movie Scream 2 (the part where Sarah Michelle Gellar was being slashed) was filmed there.

 

Got back to my apartment at 6pm Sunday just in time to respond to the mountain of emails that had piled up in the last 24 hours.

I am not that bad of a writer, am I?

My highest compliments to a Kenan-Flagler classmate of mine (who wishes to remain nameless) and to Dingproof for correctly spotting the error in the cover letter paragraph I posted on Friday.

 

“Working at AOL gave me the opportunity to learn about the unfolding changes in the media sector as customers began relying on the internet to perform their everyday routines. I came to business school to compliment my technical experience with the business skills necessary to play a bigger role in shaping the industry’s future. I got to apply these skills this summer at ABC Corporation where I authored a competitive analysis on the paid internet search industry by using my research and analytical skills to gather and digest large amounts of information. I consider your DEF position my top choice for employment opportunity because it will allow me to best use my skills and talents to advance the technologies that I am passionate about.”

 

com*pli*ment – an expression of praise, admiration, or congratulation.

 

com*ple*ment – something that completes, makes up a whole, or brings to perfection.

 

The two contestants above get an H (high pass) while everyone else gets a P (pass) for participating. While the three other contestants did not give me the answer I was looking for, they were helpful in pointing out some other parts of the paragraph that may be wrong or at the very least, can be improved. If I get around to it, I am going to show the career counselors at the Career Management Center this paragraph and see if they catch on to the error(s).

Cover letter contest

We are going to have a little contest here today to test the level of literacy among my audience members. This past week I returned to writing and perfecting my cover letters. While going through some of my past letters, a friend of mine pointed out a mistake in the last paragraph.

 

The following is the last paragraph from the cover letter. The error was so subtle that I have not noticed it even though it’s been in my cover letters for almost an entire year. I am betting that most of you won’t catch it neither. So look it over, if you think you know what it is email me (you can email me at buckyhoo at aol dot com for those of you who don’t know me in real life). Also include whether I have permission to name you in the next posting if you get right (in the event you don’t mention I can mention your name, I won’t). 

 

Here it is:

 

“Working at AOL gave me the opportunity to learn about the unfolding changes in the media sector as customers began relying on the internet to perform their everyday routines. I came to business school to compliment my technical experience with the business skills necessary to play a bigger role in shaping the industry’s future. I got to apply these skills this summer at ABC Corporation where I authored a competitive analysis on the paid internet search industry by using my research and analytical skills to gather and digest large amounts of information. I consider your DEF position my top choice for employment opportunity because it will allow me to best use my skills and talents to advance the technologies that I am passionate about.”

 

As Gordon Gekko said to Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street, “get to work!” Since this is Friday, I doubt any of you are doing any real work anyway.

The agony and the ecstasy

“Hey how are your six classes coming along?”

Why, I am glad you asked. It’s been rough and also pretty exciting. The pricing class meets at 8am and there has not been a single Monday or Wednesday morning in the past two weeks that I have not said to myself, as I am dragging myself out of bed at 7:25am, just what did I get myself into. But then an hour later when I am listening to the professor talk about how companies should price their products, I realize that having gotten up early was worth it.

This pretty much sums up this Mod so far, I do not regret taking any one of the six classes I have signed up for. The one class that I was considering dropping was strategic innovation and I am so glad I kept it. A lot of the topics we talk about is really interesting and applies to the industries I want to work in. Just the other day we were talking about online publishing and one student said “I am amazed at much many people reads blogs and find interest in all this self-generated content.” To which another student said “I don’t believe anything I read on blogs.”

The biggest challenge to not allowing these classes to bury me has been to keep myself fired up and focused. It’s pretty easy to do the former when your classes are on interesting topics. The latter is much more challenging. On Tuesday night after I wrote our last blog posting, I received an email which made it substantially more difficult for me to concentrate on school for the next two weeks (and possibly beyond). I wasn’t going to write about this just yet because it’s one of those things ….. like getting pregnant where you want to get past the first trimester and feel comfortable that it’s going to happen before you tell the whole world about it. But I think to not mention it would be to do the audience an injustice because it would be the equivalent to ignoring the giant elephant that’s just walked into the room and sucked up all the oxygen.

The email came from a recruiter asking to schedule a phone interview. I am not going to use my words to hint the identity of this company, except to say that it’s a media company that I very much want to work for. I am really psyched that I have an interview but it worries me. I worry that I will be eliminated after the phone interview, I worry that I will get invited to a second round but won’t receive an offer. I also worry that if my classmates may judge that “I am hitting out of my league.” I was feeling the exact same way last March when I had a phone interview with the world’s largest software company. I was excited and yet I was embarrassed to tell people and actually worried about how they might react if I had gotten the internship. One day I told a classmate I had to prepare for a phone interview and when he asked what company it was, I lied told him it was another company. I am feeling very much the same way now. So far I have only told one classmate, and I told him only because he had told me about the position last week during our MBA bible study. I think that at the very least, keeping this to myself (for now) will save me (in a secular sense) from having to field constant questions from well meaning classmates over the next two weeks about how the interview went.

After dinner last night, I got home, napped for two hours (I never get enough sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays) and when I woke up I decided to get my work done after failing to find the UVA versus NC State basketball game on TV. When I saw the 33 pages I had to read for today’s strategic innovation class, I paused and momentarily wished I had dropped the class. But when I saw what company the reading was about, I laughed. It may not be a sign or omen from God Almighty but it shows He has a good sense of humor and impeccable timing.

The secrets behind 24

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE.

Last night’s episode 5 shows that there are some things that the writers and producers of 24 do very well and there other areas where they can improve on. The show has been hinting since last week that last night we were going to see Jack interrogate and torture one of the villains from last season. This would be the bald guy with glasses who spent the entire previous season in a windowless room with three unidentified men, constantly getting updates, and at times giving orders to President Logan. Last night he was identified as Grahem Bauer, Jack Bauer’s brother.

I thought the introduction of Jack’s brother and father into the plot was pure genius, especially as possible villains. It was a twist I never anticipated. But I have two problems with what I saw last night. First, Grahem looks nothing like Jack. Are we going to find out later in the season that one was adopted? Second, Grahem's wife Marilyn looks way too hot for her to be married to him.

After the episode, I went to IMDB to try to find the name of the actors who play Grahem and Marilyn Bauer and could not find them. I also looked at the listing for James Cromwell, the well known actor who was shown on last night’s sneak preview as Jack’s father Phillip. There was no mention of 24 showing up on his profile. No doubt the show’s producers purposely kept this information from appearing on IMDB to keep from spoiling the twist for us.

In other news, there are speculations that Jack and Chloe will show up on the 400th episode of The Simpsons, to air in May, the same month 24 will wrap up the current season. I also found a very good article in the current issue of Time Magazine about how people on different ends of the political spectrum reacts to the show.

Jam packed Monday

Today felt like the longest day. My alarm went off at 7:05 this morning and I managed to stall for an additional 15 minutes before I rolled out of bed. Mondays and Wednesdays are the roughest because my pricing class meets at 8am. My car left my apartment complex at 7:50, making me five minutes later than I had hoped. One problem that I have with 8am class is that the left turn onto the main road that leads to the university always clogs up starting at around 7:45 and today was no different. So instead of making the usual left turn, I went straight and proceeded to make an illegal (at least legally questionable) U-turn before making a right turn onto the main road. Another decision I made was instead of taking Fordham Boulevard (better know as 15-501) I took an alternate route that took me through the UNC main campus. This route takes a bit longer but is more scenic and does a great job at placing me in the mood of a full time student. By the time I drove into the Kenan-Flagler garage, I looked at the clock and felt pretty smart at having arrived earlier than I had expected. I thought it must have been the result of cheating that red light. That was until I saw that the SUV in front of me was the same one that I was following when I drove out of my apartment complex.

 

The pricing class was pretty interesting. So was decisions, data, and tools where the professor was putting SPSS on the projector and had trouble getting her laptop to show up on the projection screen. She asked for help and I offered my, ahem, expertise. Turns out her problem was she was hitting SHIFT + F7 instead of Fn + F7, which explains why nothing was happening. The next class was financing deals where I learned the only two credit cards accepted by Neiman Marcus are the American Express card and its own store brand credit card. Originally this class was supposed to meet at lunch where we would hear from a guest speaker from a large global conglomerate firm. But he was sent to Europe at the last minute and we ended up having class at the normal time of 11am, which workedout really well because there was a company presentation at lunch that I wanted to go to. The presentation was given by a firm that specializes in renting construction equipment and its chief financial officer came down to meet with students. Before it began I introduced myself to him and told him I recognized his picture from the annual report, which I read last night. He later said during the presentation that his son is a student in the MBA program. By the time 2pm class came along, I was completely drained and the entrepreneurial marketing class which followed was downright agonizing. The class is co-taught by two professors, the professor of record and an instructor who is a marketing consultant for a local company. Today was the first time the class was taught by the other instructor and I was bored out of my mind. Between her soft voice and the case we were discussing (it was about educational software, and was so boring I purposely chose to not write it up), I decided I had to seriously reconsider telling people that this is one of my favorite class.

 

After my last class, I would normally go to the gym to get my energy level up but because I was dressed up (for the company presentation) and did not bring my gym clothes, I went home instead. I took a two hour nap, woke up to have dinner, and wrote today’s blog entry. I know my day is not nearly as exciting as that of Jack Bauer’s but I figured since it was so drawn out and agonizing, I was going to make my blog posting drawn out and agonizing as well.

 

Speaking of Jack Bauer, what time is it?

Full throttle

I blogged earlier that this is a four day weekend. That’s not completely true. For my sales class, there is a two day workshop on something called SPIN selling that meets Friday and Saturday of this weekend. The workshop is pretty well known among people who work in sales, I first heard about it when I worked at AOL and the folks from the interactive marketing had to take it. I would be pretty upset at having my four day weekend cut in half, except that I feel pretty fortunate because Kenan-Flagler probably shelled out “an arm and a leg” to have someone from the company come down here to teach it.

 

I spent the entire day yesterday in class and later today I will have class from 9 to 4. So you would assume that tonight I did what I would normally do, eat dinner at home and then go to sleep early. But no I didn’t do that. Instead I went out to Buffalo Wild Wings for the MBA Student Association trivia night, then went with a bunch of classmates to the opposite end of Franklin Street to the Martini Bar, where we quickly left to go downstairs to Deep End to have the twenty-five cent beer (the bar apparently reversed the recent price increase), and then ended the night at a happy hour at Jack Sprat sponsored by the Graduate and Professional Student Federation.

 

Since this is my last semester as a full time student, I am going to beat the heck out of it and squeeze every possible drop of life out of this experience. And the best part is you will get to read all about it on this blog.

Snowy start to yet another four day weekend

Between last weekend when we had Monday off for Dr. King and this weekend when we have today and tomorrow off so that first year students can concentrate on their internship search efforts, I have two four day weekends back and back. And I am going to need them because of the six classes I signed up for. Three of these classes have assignments where you are required to do a set number of write ups but get to choose which cases to write up. So far this past week and last week, I have been cranking out these deliverables as fast as I can, often trying to force myself to not agonize over every single word and to sacrifice quality for quantity.

When I woke up this morning I was surprised to see a covering of snow on the ground. From looking at the weather forecast, it look like this weekend will not be nearly as warm and summer-like as last weekend was. And that’s perfectly okay with me because when I am at the House Undergrad Library I need to concentrate on getting work done and not staring at the nice scenery outside like I was doing on Monday.

Biting off more than I can chew

Throughout last week I worked to cut back the number of classes I had signed up for from eight down to four or five. But an unexpected thing happened as the week progressed toward the drop deadline on Friday, I ended up liking the six remaining classes that I decided to take all six of them.

 

By Friday morning, I pretty much knew that I was going to keep five of my six classes. The one that I was considering dropping was strategic innovation. It deals with changes in different industries and how companies respond to them. As much as I didn’t want to take six classes (the average among seconds years for this Mod is around four), I could not get myself to drop it. I then wrote down on a Word document all the six classes that I had signed up for and all the assignments and deliverables for them and realized that the amount of work the other five classes required was not so much that it would preclude me from taking a sixth.

 

This reminds me of Mod IV of my first year when I dropped taxes in finance. At that time, I felt it was better to drop it and take it during my second year (I am signed up to take that next Mod) so I could spend more time on job my internship search. I also rationalized that the remaining three classes and their 7.5 credits would give me more than enough work to keep me busy. What ended up transpiring was an extremely unproductive semester. I had no classes on Tuesdays and most Thursdays (very much like last Mod) and every day felt like a Friday.

So for the next six weeks I am going to juggle my six classes (9.5 credits), not miss an episode of my favorite TV show, update this blog frequently, continue the full time job search on the side, and hopefully come up with ways to improve my time management skills. There is a saying that if you want something done quickly, find the busiest person in the room. Together, we are going to attempt to prove the veracity of that statement.

Strap yourself in for a bumpy ride

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE.

Two things I noticed right away about last night’s Part I premier of 24. First, Chloe has gotten significantly more attractive, thus well earning the “hottie” comment from Morris. Second the scene and the circumstances surrounding the Chinese giving up Jack to the Americans reminded me of the beginning of Die Another Day when James Bond, after having spent three years imprisoned and tortured by the North Koreans, was returned to the British. After the handoff, M told Bond that “your freedom came at too high of a price.” Sound familiar?

My favorite line was when the President told Jack “this is a desperate measure but also a measure of our desperation.” The shot of the phone conversation between Buchanan and Karen Hayes where the camera zoomed in on Karen's wedding ring reminded me of the first episode of Season 3 where we learned that Tony and Michelle were married. I was beginning to think that Jack had lost his touch when he failed to efficiently coerce the information from that guy (the Assad’s associate with the transponder in his pocket). But he proved his worth once again when he ejected the suicide bomber from the subway train and prevented the would-be martyr from earning his seventy-two virgins.

Tonight’s Part II is going to be interesting. Drudge mentioned on the radio last night that tonight’s episode will go opposite the Golden Globe Awards on NBC where 24 is nominated for best television series and Keifer Sutherland for best performance by an actor in a television series. The Drudge Report also has a story about an internal debate among the writers of 24 as to how far they want the terrorists to go without alarming the viewing public.

Jack is back!

My favorite show returns tomorrow night and Monday night with a four hour premier. I heard Rush Limbaugh talk about it last week; he’s seen the first eight hours of the new season and said the show is “simply amazing.” I won’t repeat his exact words but the gist of what he was saying was that there will be a lot of destruction, especially in the first half an hour.

Here’s my predictions about what you expect to see in the next 24 episodes:

• each time Jack or a CTU agent shows up in someone’s office to talk to someone or retrieve information from a computer, there will be an ambush.
• someone will ask for immunity.
• whenever Jack uses a computer anywhere on the planet Chloe will be able to pipe into the computer to see what he’s doing, copy the information, or look at the contents of the hard drive.
• Jack’s cell phone will continue to not run out of batteries.
• there will be heated arguments over who’s in charge over at CTU.
• Jack will torture a suspect.
• CTU will have the resources to contact anyone on the planet, from the pilot of a passenger airplane (Season 5) to the pilots of a fighter jetthat gets called in to blow up a helicopter that the bad guy is trying to escape with (Season 2).

Carolina 79, Virginia 69

I think my sales professor summed it up best this morning when he described last night’s game as (paraphrasing) “Carolina played horrible but Virginia played worst.” So far this year, I have only attended one other basketball game and that was when UNC played an opponent I have never heard of before, but I can tell you the team I saw playing at the Dean E. Smith Center last night cannot qualify as the number one basketball team in the country. Cannot.

The game started out in the right direction (remember I am retelling this from the UVA perspective) with Virginia scoring the first basket and later scoring the first three-pointer of the evening. We were in the lead for the first twelve minutes of the game until UNC scored its first three-pointer of the evening. That was followed quickly by another basket and yet another three-pointer and within two minutes, Virginia’s seven point lead vanished and UNC took the lead for the first time of the evening. The remainder of the first half had the lead going back and forth between the two teams, with an average of 2-4 points separating them. The biggest cheer from the UNC crowd came in the last two seconds of the first half when UNC scored putting the team ahead by one point.

The second half was not nearly as exciting. We spent the first ten minutes mostly with UNC in the lead. At around seven minutes left on the clock it appeared that UNC was beginning to pull away but Virginia quickly brought it back to a five point deficit. It wasn’t until the last five minutes that UNC really began to “put it away.”

I remember noticing during last year’s game that UNC’s three-point shots were one of the things that put them over Virginia but those fantastic shooting skills were not evident last night. Virginia scored many more three-pointers than UNC did. The seats last night were in the upper level Row Y, which is the uppermost row of the entire stadium. Even though we were literally at sitting at the very top (the wall was behind me), I had no trouble seeing each and every play. Looking around the stadium, I saw insurgent groups of Virginia fans wearing our trademark orange embedded within the sea of Carolina blue.

As I was leaving the stadium last night with my tail between my legs, I couldn’t help thinking how great it would have been if Virginia had won. But hey, 79-69 is not bad. At least I didn't walking out of there feeling half as embarassed in my UVA jacket as I did last year.

Daring to be bold

On The Apprentice L.A. last night (yes, I know the show came out on Sunday but I didn’t get to watch it until last night), I couldn’t help noticing that the team that lost kept arguing about two things; pricing and sales.  It just happens that these are two of the classes I have decided to keep for this Mod. The other class that I also decided to keep is entrepreneurial marketing, which is about how to market a product when you have a budget of under $100,000.

 

I still have not decided on what to do with the three other classes. They are financial deals, strategic innovation, and decisions, tools, and data. I have, however, decided to drop no more than one. I am tempted to get creative and maybe strike a deal with a professor where I will drop the class but will continue to attend and do the reading and get cold called just like anyone else in the class. The benefit to this is that I would have the benefit of learning the material but also the option of missing class in the event I get significantly behind on any of the other classes that I am actually on the hook for.

 

At around 8:30 tonight I am going to take a break from what I am doing and walk five minutes from McColl to the Dean E. Smith Center and watch the Virginia Cavaliers take on the number one basketball team in the country all decked out in my Virginia gear. Earlier this afternoon when I was at the lunch line a first year student saw the Virginia sweatshirt that I am wearing and commented “that’s a bold shirt you’re wearing.”

 

Wait until he sees me tonight.

Last semester ever

The last semester of my academic career began yesterday. I had signed up for eight classes and expect that number to fall to four or five by the drop/add deadline at noon on Friday.

 

Yesterday was a first in other ways as well, it was the first time I had classes all day from 8am until 5 (except for the lunch “hour” from 12:30 to 2). The pricing and entrepreneurial marketing classes are both excellent and I expect to keep them. They both cover topics I had yet to learn in the MBA program. I am not too thrilled about decisions, data, and tools but I will probably end up taking it because it’s required for a marketing concentration. Financing deals is a good class and is taught by a very popular finance professor. I ended the day with global financial market. I wasn’t planning on taking the class and attending the first session confirmed my intentions. The only thing that kept me from getting up half an hour into the class and leaving was not wanting to come across as rude to the others in the room.

 

The sales class this morning was very interesting. When the professor got through introducing himself and giving us an overview of the material, he jokingly said “if this doesn’t work for you, this would be a good time to leave the room.” Later on during the day, I wished we had the same option in the investments class because I realized about twenty minutes into it that most of the material was based on material I have already had, but on a much more detailed level. If there is one thing I have learned about choosing classes, it is to not repeat anything you have already learned and to avoid classes (fixed income class is a good example) that teach you technical details of concepts unless you have reasons to believe you will need to use that knowledge on the job. At this point, I would rather take classes to broaden my knowledge than to waste fourteen weeks (this is a two Mod class) on something I know I am not interested in even if it means not finishing the finance concentration.

Signaling toward market efficiency

Today’s WSJ had a great article about new methods being tested by economists to enhance market efficiency via the introduction of new mechanisms into the marketplace.

 

“Profs. Roth and Niederle belong to a growing field of economics known as market design, which is rooted in the idea that markets, if left to develop on their own, often get into trouble and need to be fixed.”

 

An example of this inefficient market is a dating website where because men employ a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” approach. As a result, women are inundated with electronic “winks” (as they are called on Match.com) from men who send them to multiple women. One way to curb this behavior is to limit men to a fixed number of “winks” per month/week, hence giving them an incentive to only send “winks” to women they are truly interested in.

 

 “At this past weekend's annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which hosts a vast job market for aspiring professors, academics tested a technique -- borrowed from online dating -- to more efficiently match job candidates and potential employers. It is called "signaling," and it is designed to reduce the time and cost of hiring professors by weeding out those who aren't serious prospects and homing in on those who are.

 

Signaling depends on a centralized system through which each job seeker sends signals -- essentially electronic pings -- to two potential employers. With a limited number of signals to send, the logic goes, candidates will send them only to schools where they really want to work.

 

Job candidates were warned not to waste signals on schools that should already know they are interested or are out of their range, but instead aim at schools that wouldn't otherwise be aware of their special interest. Schools also were told not to take the absence of a signal as a brush-off.”

 

The exercise at the American Economic Association holds huge implications for the business community. I can tell you that the “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” approach is not used only by men on dating websites but by MBA students as well. When I was at the “black MBA” and the National Society of Hispanic MBA (pronounced nar-shim-BAAAARRRR) job fairs, my primary goal was to visit all the booths of the companies I truly was interested in working for. After that was accomplished, I went to booths of other companies to get free stuff, make small talk, and waste the time of the recruiters to shoot for the off chance they would have something I would want. If I had been limited to visiting only a certain number of booths, then I might have made my choices differently and the recruiters at some of these booths may have had the opportunity to better spend their time by talking to those who were more likely to be interested in the company and not there merely to get a free digital alarm clock.

What goes around comes around

One of the things I thought about yesterday during my drive back to North Carolina was how I was going to get my hands on a ticket to the basketball game against UVA on Wednesday. I thought about a couple of innovation options such as offering money, giving away a used textbook that I was going to sell, exchanging with a bottle of Everclear, even considered sending a sarcastic message to the student announcement board suggesting that anyone I have ever offended in the past can gets his revenge by giving me a ticket so I can get to see my team get its arse kicked.

 

But fortunately I don’t have to resort of any of the above tactics because an hour ago I got an email from a friend of mine, an exchange student who was at Kenan-Flagler this past fall, offering to give me her two tickets to the game. Goes to show doing good deeds for other people does have its privileges.

Concentrating on a concentration

When classes begin next week, I will have to make an important decision about what classes I am going to take. One of the things that makes this decision more unusual than the ones I normally make concerning classes is that it will determine what concentration I graduate with from Kenan-Flagler.

 

I started out in the MBA program planning to do a concentration in finance. In the almost eighteen months since I have been here, I decided that I don’t like finance enough to make a career out of it but I still would like to finish my concentration in the area. Meanwhile I took a couple of marketing classes in the last two Mods and found the classes and the professors to be so interesting that I can easily take enough classes to have a concentration in marketing. Ideally I would like to finish with a concentration in both marketing and finance but logistically there are some challenges to this.

 

For reasons I don’t understand, the fixed income class that I took during Mod I does not count toward a finance concentration. This means that in addition to the two finance classes that I plan to take between now and graduation, I need to take two more to complete the concentration. The first problem with this is I really don’t want to take any more finance classes. The second problem is I already have found the four classes that I want to take for Mod III and taking more will push my schedule into five classes, which is one more than I would like to ideally have. The third problem is the only finance class that I can take that does not overlap with what I have already learned is a class called investments, which meets over Mod III and IV and counts as two classes. While taking investments will give me enough credits to complete the concentration, I don’t know if I will find the material interesting enough to keep me motivated for the entire semester.

 

The real irony of all this is that because the requirements for a marketing concentration are so much lower than those for a finance concentration, at this point I am more certain that I will be able to complete the concentration in marketing than in finance.

Skyrocketing MBA tuition

When I went to Atlanta in September for the “black MBA” job fair, I attended the Kenan-Flagler alumni reception where the Dean gave an update on the progresses the school’s been making over the past years. These include the renovations on the first and second floors of McColl, the fifth floor that’s being build to allow for more study space in the rest of the building, and a new merit based fellowship for outstanding applicants. He jokingly told the alums present that what they were hearing was the equivalent to having bought a television set and then finding out later about the improvements made in the subsequent models.

 

While I am sure many Kenan-Flagler alums are envious of the improvements that have been added to the MBA program over the years, one thing I am sure they don’t care much for is the skyrocketing tuition. The tuition for the current school year is more than 6% higher than that of the past school year and, according to the Kenan-Flagler web site, the estimated tuition for next school year will be almost 7% higher than that of the current year.

 

2005-2006       $32,749

2006-2007       $34,749

2007-2008       $37,149

 

There are several justifications for raising tuition rates. The most obvious one is to keep up with the rising cost of running the program. But I suspect there are also less obvious justifications involved. There was an article in the New York Times last month about how several colleges have made themselves more popular with applicants by raising their tuition rates. The logic being that since many students perceive the quality of an education by the price, raising a school’s tuition will have the effect of enhancing its perceived value.

 

I personally think the main reason for the increased tuition is to be consistent with UNC’s policy of maximization its profit from its students.