Archive for September, 2008

A little about the academics part of the first year.

Our first semester is split into two 7-week quartiles (so we have Fall A and Fall B). On each such quartile we have 4 courses, so by the end of the first semester, we’re past 8 courses.

The first semester is comprised of core classes, which means that we don’t choose our classes but rather the entire class is assigned to the same core courses so that all of us have the same business fundamentals.

This semester we take
- Data and Decisions (also known as Statistics)
- Economics for Business Decision Making (aka micro economics)
- Organizational Behavior (which I find fascinating)
- Leadership Communication (learn how to speak in front of people)

Each of these is taken twice a week and is tightly crammed into a dense period of 7 weeks.
Now, unlike in Israel, the American high education system is based on a unique assumption that students actually prepare stuff for class. This means that before each of those classes we have cases to read, which can take from 30 minutes to 3 hours per class.

In addition, the first two classes on the above list also require us to hand in a weekly problem set, which take about 1/2 a day each. Doing the math, this sums up to quite a lot of work, and that’s before mentioning the extra-curriculum activities (on which I’ll write in a separate post).

Since it’s a seven week period, we already had our mid-terms (the mid-course tests) a week ago, and finals are approaching in two weeks. Believe me when I say, this is intense. But it’s also really interesting and exciting, and we do learn lots of material in a short period of time, which brings a great feeling of progress and satisfaction. Just remember that if it’s the easy life you’re looking for, an MBA here is probably not for you.

And so, after more than 6 weeks of male bonding (between me and our two cats Nimitz and Fry), the girls (Daphny, my wife and Noozie, our dog) joined us boys here at Berkeley. Yay!

This is definitely a day for celebration, and the girls found the perfect way to do so together.

Now let the real fun begin!

After 6.5 years working for SAP I was quite sure no amount of work overload can catch me unprepared. After all, I was getting hundreds of mails per day, working crazy hours and facing unrealistic deadlines as my daily routine.

I was caught unprepared.

There are several categories of activities that fill our days: academics, career-related and social activities. And I’m only taking the personal/family category out of this list since Daphny is not here yet. Looking at each of these separately looks quite OK - each can easily fill a tight working week. But combining them together - we’re talking real challenge here.

Our days are filled with cases to read and analyze for each class, tons of long problem sets to solve, study-group projects (including observation of a real company of our choice in Organizational Behavior course), mid-terms that are approaching REALLY quickly, Speaker Series where people from different industries come to speak on their daily work (some examples include Product Mgmt, Consulting, Corporate Strategy, Entrepreneurship, real-estate and many more), brown bag introductory sessions to various professional industries, company presentations (starting next week!), club activities, football games, bar-of-the-week night outs, theme costume parties and that’s really only a partial list.

(my calendar for next week - not final)

So I sleep very little, trying to catch up on all these activities while not missing any of the opportunities that really matter to me and still stay sane, but it is so exciting and full of promise that I couldn’t be more happy with the choice I made of coming here and doing this.