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.