| Heading to Cass |
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| Sunday, 25 May 2008 06:25 | |
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Many of you have emailed me to ask what academic life at Cass Business School is all about and I thought that rather than email all of you individually I shall write a blog post about it to answer some common questions. For me, the Cass MBA has been much more demanding than a job. The current class started out in September 2007 when we had two weeks of orientation. This included an introduction to team working in the MBA, an introductions to management concepts and a focus on leadership and personality skills. These two weeks were then topped off with a weekend on a Royal Navy ship in Portsmouth where we went through the sinking ship simulator exercise (something like this). Immediately after we got back, we dove into Block 1 that had Quantitative Methods, Accounting and Information Management. We had business skills week following that where we had a sports day, a teaching day and a consultancy day. The teaching day was quite exceptional as all of us "taught" a subject we knew about to interested classmates - stuff like Second Life (which I did), to DJing to language lessons. Block 2 followed with Finance, Marketing and Business Economics. Each block is topped off with an "Integration week" where we merge our knowledge of the 3 courses in the block and do on the spot presentations or do real time simulations. Block 2 integration week had its usual aspects but also ran a 2 day simlation of Markstrat - this was an absolutely fun experience! Revision week and exams followed, after which we were back to Block 3 and more lectures on Human Resource Management, Organisational Behaviour and Operations Management. The integration week for block 3 was at the KPMG London offices with the task being to present on a KPMG decided question (different for each team) to the top management. My team was tasked with presenting on the "Lisbon Agenda" and we came up with a video (that I will upload to youtube and place a link here!). Block 4, the last of the 4 core blocks, was Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and Strategy. Since then, we"ve had exams for Blocks 3 & 4, been to Poland for Emerging Market consultancy week where my team helped come up with a strategy for a Polish company, visited HEC for the annual MBA Tournament (the MBAT) and now are doing electives. For electives, some of us have chosen to go to a combination of India, China, Thailand and South Africa. The India trip has already happened and the China trip is in 2 weeks. A small team from Cass, also visited San Diego to present at an Entrepreneurship conference - and next week, I am in Brussels to attend the Interstate program that discusses the transatlantic relationship in an EU context. Of course, in the middle of all this, we also have to look for a project to do starting June and job hunting has been on now for some time as well! The electives calendar keeps is busy as well and we"re doing things as diverse as Innovation, Strategic Change, Private Equity and Finance. Hopefully, I"ll get intermittent breaks so I can keep posting on this blog. Meanwhile, it helps if you post comments on these posts so I can answer any questions to a more general audience. |