It's Time for Updates: 1. Finals

I’ve been MIA for weeks so it’s time to update you on what’s been going on: finals, Sports Weekend, trip back home, and finally internships. I’ll post the entries separately though to be easier to find.

Finals

Yes, those tests, papers, and presentations that take over your life. Literally and completely! During finals week I’ve averaged 4 hours of sleep a night. By the end of the week, I was looking like I was auditioning for a scary movie role. Good thing girls have make up!

But let’s go back to finals. Monday I had my 4-hour final in finance followed by a treat: a final in QBA (quantitative business analysis)! I did it, but I really do not recommend taking two finals – especially these two – on the same day. Unless you’re a genius, which does not apply to me. The finance final was alright I thought, not too difficult, not too easy, but definitely long. Professor Harjoto is the best finance professor and one of my favorites. He goes above and beyond and wants to make sure you understand everything. He holds full-day (i.e. 8-hour) reviews before tests, something that’s really unheard of in b-school. He makes himself available in person and via e-mail for questions… he really is amazing! He and I disagree on one issue though and that is me changing my concentration from marketing to finance. He thinks I have it in my blood, I think I just have finance in my brain and marketing in my blood. Time will tell, I guess.

Professor Hahn, my QBA professor, is great too. He starts each lecture with a review of the previous lecture to make sure you understand the material. The review really helps and you almost don’t have to read anything for his class (if you repeat this to anybody, I’ll deny it.) :) Plus – and this is my personal favorite thing about his class - everything is applied and he uses examples you can relate to and will definitely use in the future. And in his final he just wants to see that you understand the output and can interpret the information. He is also C4C’s liaison with the school and supports our efforts to promote our activities.

The other and the most important class for me this session was Marketing. I think I got lucky and had truly amazing professors this session. Professor Rapier has over 20 years of experience both on the client and agency side and brings to class tons of examples from his work. Kotler’s book was a valuable resource and Professor Rapier encouraged us to question parts of it with real life exercises. One thing that everybody loved about Professor Rapier is that he was very hands off, which gave us the freedom to explore in our reports and projects, as long as we could back it up with evidence. If you take his class you’ll very quickly become familiar with three (well, four) words: relevance, authenticity and market research. ;-) And then there was our famous E2B (Education to Business) project, which provided plenty of real-life experience. I will write a separate entry about it because there is plenty to talk about, but I will just say that our marketing plan presentation in front of the company and our professors concluded the finals week for me.

I am officially done with my first year! I’m excited, nervous, and anxious that the second year is going to fly by as quickly as the first one.