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.