Sunday, November 20, 2011

Mini 3 & 4 schedule

Pre-registration opened this last week for selecting classes for the next two minis. What one is supposed to do:
1. Look at the classes that are being offered, and the time slots they are being offered in. Spend some time in the system building a mock schedule to make sure everything fits and such.
2. Go into another system - a Tepper-only one - and find the course listings, then "Add to cart" the specific course and timeslot that you want. (The button for adding the course to your selection looks like a shopping cart)
3. Rank the courses by moving them up or down the list. Student Services recommends that the courses you desperately want to get into should be the top 3 with the courses you have to take at the bottom.

When the pre-registration time ends, Student Services will go through everyone's preferences and try to match them to the courses they put in their wish list. I've been told that you may get into a course, but at a different time than you wanted. For some really popular courses, you may just miss out - I'm not entirely sure how it is determined who deserves a spot in the class or not.

I'm aware that some other schools have a bidding process or something of the sort. We just have a wishlist.

So what was on my wishlist? I decided to be crazy and select five classes each mini. It's pure craziness because mini 3 is when the vast majority of consulting recruiting happens... and there's another statistics course we have to take (I didn't do so great in the first course; it took up a lot of my time). However, there are three required courses for mini 3 (Macroeconomics, Statistical Decision Making, and Managerial Accounting) and one required course for mini 4 (Business Law and Ethics). I'm hoping to test out of Macro and Business Law; I'm doing Microeconomics right now and I'm truly regretting that I didn't find the time to test out of it this mini. I also contemplated testing out of Managerial Accounting; I'm still on the fence for this one. I actually don't know if I could test out of two.
My two elective choices for Mini 3 were Negotiations (my No 1) and Finance II. Finance II is one of the only two courses that are considered "gateway" electives - if you want to go further down the Finance tree, you have to take this course first. Entrepreneurship is the second gateway. I'm taking it because I want to take the Venture Capital/Private Equity course later. If I do manage to exempt out of Macro, I'll replace it with Writing for Business.
My electives for Mini 4 are more expansive. Corporate Strategy, Pricing Strategy, Software Development for Technology Managers and Organizational Change.

I'm making sure that I have at least one Organizational Behaviour or Communication course a mini. From every MBA graduate I've talked to, and from results of alumni feedback in general to the school, there is a general agreement that the value of OB and Comm courses are only appreciated much later after school - i.e. when the person is in a managerial role and there is no need to crunch numbers any more. That's what I want to be, so I want to take advantage of their advice and do what they wished they had done.

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