Currently Ms. Duncan is in the third week of school and the second week of classes. Thus, a post on classes is in order but not before we present a general introduction to the program.
In the words of the immortal bob slydell - What would you say ya do here?
Yours truly has been somewhat skeptical of business school in the past partly because of a lack of understanding for what they actually do at business school.*
In regards to this misunderstanding, I present the following dialogue:
Me: Hello Good Sir, off to where are you?***
MBA student: Good Morrow old chap, why I'm off to get an MBA.
Me: An MBA dear sir, at a business school I presume ... what would you say ya do there?
MBA student: Why I suppose I learn about business
Me: Yes, yes, of course, but what do you actually learn
And that's where I get stuck as I don't know how the MBA student responds and as I had a sour opinion of some of my undergraduate friends who got undergraduate business degrees I've always been doubtful that the true answer is anything more than 'buy low, sell high' and 2 years of thinking of other ways to say it.
That skepticism is certainly overly broad and uncalled for - Ms. Duncan is learning some 'rules and tools' of general business here (i don't know exactly what they are yet but I imagine I will over time ... something to do with flow charts i'm sure) - and I do in general respect the case study method (the method generally used for teaching those rules and tools at business schools) something i'll be commenting on later so I will attempt to withold judgement, give benefits of doubt where necessary and to be generally more credulous than sceptic and I advise my skeptical brethren to adopt similar attitudes as we follow our fair friend through her educational journey. Besides which, its not like she went to Harvard business school like our late president (late not as in dead but as in dethroned) - that would just be extraordinarily mockable.
Furthermore Ms. Duncan is not just attending business school but is instead part of the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program - which bestows both an MBA and Master's of Engineering (in Ms. Duncan's case, in Civil Engineering) - a sort of Navy SEALs of the business school world if you will (and I will). This pleases yours truly immensely as yours truly has never had any disdain for engineering degrees and indeed is quite fond of them and might have gotten one himself if it weren't for the fact that there apparently is some kind of pre-requisite that one be a bore of a writer (I jest ... sort of) or at least not so long-winded as I am accustomed to being.
The current summer session is almost entirely independent of the general MBA courses (which begin in the fall). A brief rundown of the program is in order
Summer 2009 - introductory LGO classes (more on these shortly)
Fall 2009 - MBA intro classes taken with Sloan students (Sloan is the MIT Business school) and some LGO/engineering electives
Spring 2010 - MBA and Engineering electives
Summer and Fall 2010 - Internship (almost certainly unpaid) with LGO program sponsors (Ms. Duncan is hoping for somewhere abroad)
Spring 2011 - MBA and Engineering electives and writing LGO thesis and graduation in May
Voila
As for the current session, it is most deranged. All 47 LGO students take the same 5 classes (Operations Management, Probability and Statistics, High Velocity Organizations, System Optimization and Analysis, and Leadership) which are taught in the same classroom. Since all the students take all the same classes in the same classroom, scheduling these classes is incredibly easy and seems to have been done to please various professors' schedules - as far as I can tell, the classes seem to change times every week depending upon which professor is going to a conference (i'm only slightly exagerrating) - my old profs would be enormously jealous.
We'll try to give each class its own post later (although we'll have to do so in a way that no criticisms can be linked back to Ms. Duncan) but a general note on their operation is in order. Each class is graded on homework (of which their is quite a bit), tests (of which we have yet to be acquainted) and participation. I taught before and I gave participation grades and I can't say that I really treated it that seriously - 80% of the people got a B for participation and 10% who I really noticed got an A and 10% who I didn't notice at all got a C or D. I didn't have a teaching assistant.
In these classes a TA is documenting how many times each person speaks in class and whether or not their comments were cogent or vacuous. This to me seems like a good intention leading to a bad conclusion. They already have 47 highly ambitious type A personalities - do you really need to incentivize speaking up? One wonders how the classes ever end.
But then again, the kettle must not degrade the pot.****
Currently, Ms. Duncan spends most mornings in these classes (9ish-12ish) participating to various degrees of success***** and most afternoons in meetings with her El Giocho comrades discussing the various cases and problems given to them and most evenings doing homework and reading while yours truly is stuck doing the dishes.
*Also for shock at the exorbitant salaries demanded by business school grads and also due to the lack of recognition for luck**. I had my own personal theory related to the salaries that I'm hoping will not come true (as I stand to benefit from said exorbitance) - basically that there was/is a business school graduate bubble powered forward by increasing returns effects and incestuous relationships between the top schools and the top financial companies - basically I was thinking that the eventually the bubble would pop and business school grads were start to be valued at a more realistic level - you know what helps a bubble pop - an economic collapse maybe? - hopefully this isn't going to happen, or at least not for MIT LGO grads. I could expound on this theory (and its many holes) but it would take an article of its own.
**I think of luck as one part tenor of the times and one part RightPlaceRightTime-ness. As proof of the tenor of the times point I offer the current times - a preposterous number of incompetents were wildly successful during the latest bubble - it had nothing to do with their MBAs or their education or experience or keen insight or business acumen and everything to do with temporary collective insanity. As for the other part of luck ... being a student of the economics of science and technology has made me intimately familiar with the importance of advancement in S&T for general societal economic advance and for the success of individual business ... but no amount of technological ingenuity or business intuition can substitute for Being in the Right Place at the Right Time - Bill Gates might be a technical genius and a business mastermind but if IBM had called someone else (as they easily might have) in their search for an early OS neither of these great skills would have led to the mammoth monopoly we see today ... and rest assured, there is always someone else lurking in the shadows with the same basic technology that suffered from a deficient quantity of RightPlaceRightTime-orade - see this 1922 paper on the number of inventions which have been independently invented at the same time
***I had enormous trouble with this sentence - first it was 'where are you off to' but that ended in a preposition and that would not be Proper, so I changed to 'to where are you off', when to my surprise, what should I find at the end of the sentence but another preposition! So I finally changed it to the above formation which I think we can all agree is just stupid.
****One wonders how these posts ever end.
*****If you're not called on, are you supposed to inform the TA that you had your hand up, that you were trying to participate but for reasons outside of your control were prevented from doing so?
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