Have not been posting for almost a month. Now I am kind of have been missing blogging and ready to post some updates. The two main reasons for my extended silence are the preparation for the professional certification exam that I took in two weeks after the end of the summer module, and the family vacation trip to Barbados. I hope I will have motivation and energy to put some posts with pictures and videos or may be a separate website dedicated to this vacation, as it was really quite interesting and a lot of fun to share.
But first I need to put closure to my first year of part-time MBA program at GWU. As I was writing in my last post in June I was not expecting any surprises with the grades, but I actually was nicely surprised. Based on my grades for intermediate assignments throughout both classes I had in the module I was expecting an A in Business and Public Policy, but the Nature of Markets was a bit murkier. Nevertheless I got A’s in both classes! For the first time in my MBA terms I became a straight A student 
. Admittedly, I had only two classes in the term, and they both were not quantitative courses. But still it feels really nice. So I got my closure for the first year.
Now that I had my vacation I almost feel like I would be ready to continue with the MBA classes right away. But there are no classes I could sign up for right now. So I have another month to chill out. I am planning to use this time to do some reading to prepare for the fall term and just to read some of the books I had to put on hold during the year, my personal MBA summer reading list: Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, The Tipping Point by Gladwell, and surprise-surprise! – Basic Statistics: Tales of Distributions (with CD-ROM)
Even though I got my B and B+ in two statistics courses during the first year, I know I need to get a better grasp of the subject and solidify everything I learned in a hurry. I stumbled upon this book while looking for an easier introduction to statistics. I wrote about this briefly in my April 5 post . Eventually I found Basic Statistics: Tales of Distributions (with CD-ROM)
and I really look forward to pouring over it in the next month. I will write a more detailed review once I finish it. But from other reviews on Amazon.com and my reading through the first 30 or so pages, I can tell that this is the must book for all of us who have stats anxiety. If you are preparing for MBA stats classes in advance or even take them at the time you read this post, I recommend to grab this book and start reading it ASAP. Statistics is not an easy subject for most students, but this book will make your experience with the stats as painless as humanly possible. I bought the eighth edition of this book
Enough blogging for the day. Hopeful to continue posting regularly in the time before the second year of my MBA studies starts.
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I wish I also had a better grasp on it.
. I admit, it has a huge advantage, about 30% advantage to be more precise: it has only about 800 pages vs almost 1100 pages in our required textbook for this statistics course. I actually read side by side a few definitions from both books, just to see if it is really better/easier explained in my new acquisition. I can not tell. I think that some stuff is explained a bit clearer in one, whereas other explanations are a bit more conceivable in the other book. On the right, by the way, is the new book I am talking about. 
