Tonight marks the end of another quarter at Kellogg.  This was a great 10 weeks with two very interesting courses.

Management Communications – Just a fantastic course.  Professor Van Camp is top notch!  Communication and the ability to present effectively is a critical skill in any profession.  This course provides and opportunity to learn experientially by preparing and delivering a speech every week.  The course culminated with two progressively more difficult speeches and some great tools to complete them.  I really, really enjoyed this one!

Bargaining - It’s not just saving a few bucks when you are working over your landscaper, this was a great scientific and experiential look into the world of bargaining.  We played different games each and every week actively participating in pre-configured bargaining situations that really highlighted different aspects of human behavior.  The course finished with a two week collective bargaining exercise that was extremely interesting. After spending 8 weeks bargaining away, we all felt like experts; boy were we wrong!  The collective bargaining exercise was very eye opening and quite challenging.

Next quater will bring Operations and Decision Analysis.  Both of these courses should be quite interesting, I am particularly looking forward to the Decision Analysis course as the professor is simply fantastic.

The entire Kellogg experience has just been fantastic. I’m on the home stretch now with only three quarters left, and I’m already getting a  little sad that it is going to end.  If you have aspirations to go to business school, I cannot recommend Kellogg highly enough!  The program is challenging, but it is worth every bit of time, effort and money you will put into it!

I have one final left, so I guess this post is a bit premature.

This quarter was filled with a lot of math.  I great way to spend a summer if I do say so myself (sarcasm is dripping in that statement).  Statistics and microeconomics.

This evening was my micro final.  It wasn’t horribly difficult.  I did spent most of the day yesterday working through the homework from the quarter and making sure I was ready to go.  Lots of derivatives, and way more algebra than I was expecting at the start of the quarter.  Tomorrow night I’ll hammer out my statistics final and call it good.

Earlier this summer I headed out to the links with some folks from Booth during the 1st annual Kellogg / Booth scramble.  That was really a great time!  I’m hoping that schedules work out so that I can hit the Alumni tournament in just a few weeks as well. Work will dictate that one a bit.

Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to a few weeks off.  I have a few ideas on how to keep posts a little more consistent for next quarter.  I don’t know if any of them are realistic, so we’ll see how it all plays out.

Life remains hectic with in the part-time program.  Work and school take a good bit of time, couple that with a growing family and some semblance of a social life and you get a very full schedule.  Anyhow, that is was I signed up for – as of yet, it hasn’t let me down

Wow, time has been flying bye!  I’m almost finished with my fourth Quarter @ Kellogg.  I haven’t written about the experience nearly as much as I should have.  I could pin this on a multitude of reasons, but it comes down to the fact that I am a fairly inconsistent blogger

I’m going to try and catch things up quickly, very quickly.

First off, Kellogg is awesome.  The students are great, the workload is manageable and the education is first rate.  This quarter, I’m taking the second of two core statistics courses and microeconomics.  Both of these courses leverage students abilities to work together as the majority of the course work has been team based.  These aren’t exactly what you’d typically consider a shoe-in for team work, but it has actually worked out pretty well.

I’ve found that my classmates are all top notch and that we all work together really well.  In the part-time program, we are all swamped with school, work and some semblance of a life outside of that so we are all in the same boat.  This provides an interesting dynamic as schedules and workloads adjust in each of the different parts of our lives; somehow, we all seem to make it work every time.

For the upcoming quarter, I’m jumping head first into two of my focus areas.  I’ll be taking a course known by the students simply as turbo.  It is a two for one finance course that knocks out two quarters of work in a single quarter.  This of course means lots of work, reading, projects and the like.  I’ll be complimenting the craziness of turbo with a very interesting course on Leading the Strategic Change Process.  This should be a really fun course, and something that is very interesting to me.  I’m looking forward to both of these!

Okay… that is my quick update for now.

They are the classes I started last night @ Kellogg.

Macro was very interesting.  Given the current climate, it must be a tough subject to teach as you almost need to throw the text out the windows.  We are going to focus on the frameworks, bringing in some current events and concepts.  It should be a great class.

I’m not quite sure what the stats course is going to be like.  It is a VERY small class, with only 7 people registered right now.  I received the materials from the professor this morning and have class tonight, so we’ll see how it goes.

So, my second quarter of a Kellogg MBA is getting close to an end.  I’ve titled the post as a mid-term update, but we are actually about 75% done with the Quarter.

This term has been filled with Marketing Management and Organizational Leadership.  Two very interesting courses.  The Organizational Leadership course has been fascinating.  Our professor is a very, very interesting individual and simply loves the topic.  We have been covering social influence, biases, social networking theory and will be touching on negotiations soon.  The workload has been as expected, and seems to be pretty manageable.

Marketing Management has been another very interesting course.  The workload here has been a bit heavier, but again seems managable.  We are doing quite a bit of reading, along with a lot of case work.  The cases have spanned a very wide array of organizations and cover the topics we are studying nicely.

I’ve been very please with the quarter so far.  We had our mid-term “managers pub” where Kellogg picks up the pizza and beer after class.  That was a nice chance to catch up with some folks from the prior quarter.  I’ve been a little light on the out of class events with Ryder growing up so fast and getting pretty involved locally at our church.

Anyhow, that’s the update.  I’ll post more as time allows.

Well, quarter one is in the books and it was a great one.  For quarter two, I’m taking Leadership in Organizations and Marketing Management.  Both courses seem like they are going to be great.

The first session for both of these courses was fantastic.  In our Leadership class we did an interesting social experiment regarding a  $20 bill auction – you’ll have to experience it yourself.  After that we started to discuss escalation of commitment and the social issues regarding ethical behaviors in organizations.

Marketing was a great overview of the topic in general.  We talked about the key principals for the quarter and reviewed a ton of material.  There will be a lot of ground to cover in this class, so I’ll be doing a ton of reading!

After class I headed up to the fourth floor to socialize with my fellow classmates.  This is a great tradition each quarter and something to look forward to!  I was able to catch up with quite a few folks from last quarter and a few of the people I met at registration.  Anyhow, good times.

I’m looking forward to another solid quarter!

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!

Just in case you missed it, the NBER decided today that we’ve been in a recession since Dec 2007.  Really?  Is that was it was? 

Thanks for pointing out the obvious

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/081201/business_us_usa_economy_recession.html

Over at The Big Picture, Barry has posted an article from James Quinn  from the Wharton School of Business.  You can find the article here http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/the-shallowest-generation/.

My favorite quote, and something I’ve been saying for a while now:

No one in Washington has shown an ounce of leadership in decades. True
leadership requires strength of character, clear vision to see the
future as it is, the bravery to make unpopular decisions, and the
honesty to tell the public the unvarnished truth based on the facts.

Take a few minutes to head over to Barry’s blog, it is a great place and this is a fantastic article.

Everyone, please vote today.  Exercise your constitutional rights and VOTE.