Blog on in and out of class experience of part-time MBA student at GWU School of Business
From the monthly archives:
This week it was my wife’s birthday. Fortunately for me, it fell on the day when I had no classes in the evening, so we could enjoy our family time uninterrupted.
As has been our tradition for the last few years, I took the family to a sushi place
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Today I had my first class in Business Ethics in this half-term. The class is shaping up to be a pretty soft one compared to the other two. One thing which is different about this class from any other I have taken so far is that it has no in-class final exam. Actually I take it back, Judgment and Decisions course has final exam online, but it is still in some form of exam.
60% of the grade in Business Ethics class will be based on the research paper we will have to write in groups of three people. The rest is derived from class participation-30%, and a short paper, two pages-10%, in a couple of weeks from now.
From other people, who took unrelated to my MBA program classes, I heard that they would prefer to have a final exam, one shot thing, instead of toiling on the paper for extended period of time. I am not sure yet what is better, until I will have gone through it.
The lecturer is an adjunct professor who works in some federal government agency in the commodities fraud department. From his words, he is investigating and building cases for civil prosecution of fraudsters dealing with commodities. We have already had, and I guess there will be more, actual cases from his practice – all anonymous of course. Based on this description you might have guessed that he is a lawyer by education and occupation.
Other then a few stories that he shared, including one ordeal dealing with moral issues from his own life, we were introduced to various ethical theories and their general implications. The book we are using in the course is Case Studies in Business Ethics (6th Edition) ISBN-10: 0132424320 ISBN-13: 978-0132424325. I got it new from amazon for $53 instead of $76 – list price.
We already discussed one case from the book, this is when I got a chance to look into it for the first time, seems to be quite entertaining and can be read as a novel with parables and stories interspersed throughout the text. That will be a welcome break from very dense reading on Financial Accounting, and Judgment and Decisions classes.
My only pet peeve about the book is that it’s a paperback. But since it’s not too thick, just 456 pages, I hope it will last through the next seven to eight weeks.
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Today I had my first class in Financial Accounting II. I have different professor from my previous Fin Accounting course. And she is really very different: very sharp, to the point, very well organized. Her lecture, like the whole course, was very well prepared and laid out. And she was giving clear explanation to the concepts, as well as to the specifics that we were working on in the class.
As she stated in the class, she would not try to teach us how to do book-keeping, leaving that domain to accountants, but rather help us become intelligent readers/users of prepared financial statement. That’s exactly what I would expect from the MBA program: practical application and integration of diverse domains with respect to doing business.
On the Blackboard she already has almost all materials we will need in the course: lecture slides, lecture notes (expanded explanation of the subject matter covered during the lecture, which may, to a degree, serve almost as a substitute to chapters in the textbook), articles from magazines and newspapers for supplemental reading on every topic covered during the course, cases, practice problems, sample quiz from the past, and even solutions to the problems in the textbook.
I am really amazed by how much thought and work she has put into this class. I have great expectation for this course, just like for the Judgment & Decisions. Of course, it is obvious that this half-term of my MBA program will be much more demanding in terms of time and effort. I will definitely have to make more substantial sacrifices than in the previous half-term. Especially because of one more class that I am taking this time. OK, let the full immersion into part-time MBA program begin 
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