Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted on my journey to a Kellogg MBA. I could make a million excuses why, none of them would matter 
This was a great quarter. As I posted earlier, I took two core courses this past quarter, Accounting and Strategy. Overall I’m pretty darn happy with the results so far. I don’t have my grades yet, but I feel like we learned quite a bit in both of these classes.
Here is my quick recap:
Accounting –
Overall impression of this class was very positive. My Professor did a fantastic job making sense of all of the accounting terminology and the bits and pieces that we covered. I’ll be honest here, I was not looking forward to this class; however, I did enjoy it. We covered the basics of accounting, major financial reports (balance sheets, statements of cashflow, income statements etc…), leasing, inventory, basic securities accounting and a few other topics. I dont’ think that I’ll be taking too many more of these accounting courses, but this was a good overview and will serve me well going forward. I even got a copy of the annual report for a REIT that I have a HUGE position on in one of my retirement accounts… I read through all 150 pages of the stuipd thing and acutally understood most of the mumbo jumbo that they had in there. Not too shabby!
Strategy –
Overall impression of the proffessor was mixed. He appeared to me to have a really great grasp of the economics of strategy, he just had a really hard time expressing it and with time management. We spent a whole lot of time in this class in discussion, which was good; however, I personally would have preferred a little more time teaching the frameworks etc… I’d estimate that over the last 5 courses we had discussions for at least 2-2.5 hours each night, class is only three hours long, so we didn’t average a lot of lecture time after the midterm, when the topics became a little more exapansive… We covered the basics of strategy including Porters Five Forces and moved into some more interesting topics such as Game Theory and differentiation models. The class materials provided a good amount of details; I just felt we were missing some of the lecture instruction that would have been very beneficial. This course really focused on Case work, and I had a strong group to work with. Thankfully my classmates had some very interesting views on each of the subjects and we were able to have a robust discussion that aided in the learning process.
Generally, the first quarter of Kellogg was a great one. This is a lot of work and requires a lot of commitment, but the benefits seem to be pretty strong. I spent quite a bit of time each week working through the reading material and assigned work, but it seems manageable.
Anyhow, for those of you currently attending, feel free to add your thoughts… Until then, I have a few weeks off and I play to take advantage of them!
