This Regression Stuff is Great! Gimme More!

This Regression Stuff is Great! Gimme More!
-Just one of the many priceless quotes from our Quant professor.

Others:
I want to be invited to parties!
Come to papa!
Oh yes, give me something good baby!
I'm obsessed with lines!

This trimester is shaping up to be something great. I actually follow all of the classes, I speak more intelligently in class (avoiding the COW comments), I'm not obsessed with banking, I understand all the cases, and I actually have time to breathe!!! In the beginning of the week, I was sick, and I actually had time to sleep 12 hours hoping to recover, which basically was the equivalent of having the entire afternoon off!!! That is unreal!

So I decided to actually get involved in some clubs this year. (Besides just the Finance Club). Wednesday night I sent out to the group the Managerial Accounting case (heh, I always volunteer to do those cases because I am quite fond of the... class.) before heading out to the Responsible Business Club dinner. Learned something key about Banking's role in society. The day after that, I still managed to follow the classes enough to be able to go on our Team dinner to Baltazar, then to the BOW after. Socially, I was getting more.

Classes I was getting more. My favorite class is Managerial Communications, because it comes so easily for me, and I love being in front of an audience. Quant methods, presumably the most quant class of the group, is all about statistics, one of my best subjects in college (actually, it was econometrics, but same thing). Managerial Accounting is much more interesting and intuitive than Financial Accounting, and the professor is top notch. Perhaps the hardest class I have is Operations, but Alejandro Lago is an excellent teacher; I can always count on coming to him with questions.

So I figured out why I was having so much trouble last year. After doing some reading for Communications class, I realized that much of the classes last trimester had used the Indirect Method, that is to say, discussion first, answer at the end. Many of the classes we just talked about the case and I had no idea what learning point the case was supposed to represent until the end wrap-up, if there even was a wrap-up at all, and by then, the answer already lost most of its value. Tulane University was so easy for me because we had great professors who used the Direct Method, which is to say, they outlined the class first, defined all the important topics, and highlighted them as they went along with lectures and cases.

Perfect point here is our Strategy class. We had the Cola Wars case. Since I was familiar with Strategy before, I knew that Porter's 5 Forces would be key to solve the case, so I found a great lesson on it, then printed it out for the group. Plus, I had talked to some friends at Section C to get the main focus points of the case, the bottlers vs the concentrate, for which we could base our analysis. The point is, for the class, our professor mainly wrote down random headings on the board as the class brought them up that seemed to have no order. It was only AT THE END that he introduced Porter's 5 Forces. Geez. I cannot describe this feeling I had. I guess it would be akin to being a child and your parents saying you could go to the mall after it had already closed. But my secret was that I had already snuck out to the mall earlier that day... and learned about the 5 Forces myself.

Sometimes I think I would get a whole lot more out of this program if professors would introduce the main topics in a lecture first, defining them, telling us what to look for, and THEN giving us cases to illustrate this topic, rather than cases after cases indirectly teaching us as we come up with it. But this trimester, the professors are doing a much better job with this. Managerial Accounting is great. Quant Methods... I wish he would use the words "statistically significant" instead of "the variable matters" and "multicollinearity" instead of "redundant variable". Maybe it is because I am a statistics nerd that I like that. All I can say is Gimme More!