B-school Is Speaking My Language!

First week of school! Lots of familiar faces and some new ones, but more important, lots of readings and work. Yes, I have to remember I signed up for this. This is my full-time job. And seriously, in this economy, I am lucky I have this job.

School is finally speaking my language: marketing. I just had my first marketing class this week and I love it. By now you probably noticed that I either love something or I hate it. There's no middle ground. And yes, I love my marketing class and my marketing professor. It's a new professor, so I took a chance signing up for his class, but it's already starting to pay off. I might have not taken a marketing class before, but I knew what I didn't want in one and that was a researcher. I wanted somebody with experience and this professor has lots of it. He uses a lot of examples from projects he worked on that sometimes contradict Kottler's "Bible" and that's exactly what I was looking for. I don't care that much about books, I need to know how theory translates into the real world. So far, so good! I love it and I thank my marketing fairy for inspiring me to sign up for this class!

The part that I'm looking forward to in this class - but that also makes me nervous - is the E2B project. This means that we have a real company coming to us with a real problem and we are supposed to offer them a real solution using real money. The details of the projects are unfortunately confidential, but all I can say is that we have a certain budget to market a new product. The five teams in our class have 14 weeks to come up with a marketing strategy that will be presented on our last day of class. The best strategy obviously wins and the company will implement it. Pretty exciting!

I promised an update on my finance class. Don't be jealous, but I got lucky again. My finance professor is amazing. I couldn't go to the makeup class on Friday and he allowed me to take the quiz (yes, we have quizzes every week) during his office hours. Then he said I could ask him questions during the quiz. Initially, I wasn't sure I understood what he meant as I've never had a professor say that. I was thinking "a quiz is a quiz, you either know the answer or you don't", but then I got stuck on one of the problems. So I said to him that I was 100% sure I had the right logic, but didn't seem to get the right answer. I explained my thought process, he nodded then asked me if my NOPAT was for 2007 or 2008. Ohhhhhhh! I was calculating the 2008 NOPAT with my 2007 numbers. Good one, Simona! And then I got why he allows questions. He wants to make sure you get the concepts and the logic. And if you're a distracted student with the attention span of a 2 year-old like I am, then you might lose precious points on a test. Who would have thought I'd like finance?! That is when I understand the concepts and I'm looking at the right numbers.