Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Mixed feelings

This quarter is weird. I have two  core courses each of 2 credits and one 4-credit elective. The core courses are Marketing for the first 5 weeks and then Financial Markets for the next 5 weeks.

A different professor is teaching the marketing class each week and in the 5th week we'll be tested on all of them. Kinda silly if you ask me 'coz there's no continuity at all. Granted, this course is just an introduction to marketing, but I think I'd rather have the same professor and have a method to the teaching. Also, there's very little reading for the classes. I like this subject so I'd like to read more. Only if it's interesting of course. We had some readings about Disney (something about associating pictures with happy memories) which put me to sleep but another about brand management that was pretty cool. The professor who taught the brand class was great. He had excellent examples, engaged the class in discussion and showed us some awesome videos. I wish he taught us all the marketing classes. Here's my favorite video from that lecture:


My other class is the 4-credit elective on international business negotiations. I don't know what I feel about it. The professor is funny, keeps us engaged, and the reading is interesting (when we bother to read them) but the negotiation exercises are..um weird. This week I'm the President of a Munich based company that wants to cut costs by moving all R&D employees to the manufacturing location at a not-so-hot place. My executive team (study group) and I are negotiating with the R&D scientists (other classmates) via EMAIL all week. Umm okay. We'll see how that works out.

After statistics, economics and accounting this quarter seems like a lot of fluff. I have no idea why I'm complaining - I should be celebrating the lighter workload. But somehow it feels like less bang for the buck.