Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Electives for next year - Finance, Finance and more Finance

It's time to choose electives for next year, there are many great ones so the choice is not easy. In the end, it turns out my elective portfolio will be very finance focused, which I didn't necessarily plan, but most of the top teachers here happen to be the finance or economics guys, and I cannot risk taking a class in which I don't learn anything. Based on my background in psychology, there is not much I can learn from Organisational Behaviour or Marketing classes, or even Decision Sciences, so I feel like Finance & Economics is the way to go. These are my preferences as I have submitted them:

Autumn 2007:
- Global Capital Markets and Currencies (Economics)
- Options & Futures (Finance)
- Mergers, LBOs and other Corporate Reorganisations (Finance)
- Managing Corporate Turnarounds (Strategy)

Spring 2008 - University of Chicago GSB
- Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity (Entrepreneurship)
- Cases in Financial Management (Finance)
- Cases in Financial Risk Management (Finance)
- Time Series Analysis for Forecasting and Modelling (Statistics)

Summer 2008:
- Credit Risk (Finance)
- Financial Engineering & Risk Management*
- Equity Investment*

I will probably replace the latter two with the Creativity and Personal Mastery (CPM) course, but I'm unsure about it. I'm not sure if I should work on my personality or on my technical skills. If I look at the times I am unhappy (which are the times one might choose to take philosophical courses), it is usually because sometimes I feel like I haven't lived up to my aspirations or worse, that I will not live up to my aspirations. But somehow I feel that if I spend my time working on achieving my aspirations, rather than questioning them or agonizing about them, I will be happier in the end. It is a very weird decision to make, and I wish I could postpone it till next year, which I can't. I should probably go for CPM, because the other two courses won't add that much to what I will learn in other electives, particularly after doing some hardcore finance at Chicago GSB. Let's see.

Yesterday I handed back my laptop and blackberry to McKinsey so I am officially part of the alumni now. It is weird not to have a blackberry after 3 years!!! I did not write a good bye email in the end. I guess I would have done it if I had resigned in a normal fashion, but because I mainly resigned because they wouldn't let me do anything else but work for them over the summer of the MBA, and because that they said if I want to come back after the summer to just call them, I would have found it weird to send an official "I'm leaving"-Email. So I left in silence, though I called some people who were closest. Luckily, the person I got on best and worked with the most during my time with McKinsey was elected partner last week, so I still heard about it before leaving. I really wanted him to become partner of the Firm, so I was happy it happened before I left.

Funnily enough, whenever I thought of writing a good bye email, or whenever I thought of how I feel while working there, all I could think of was this Charles Dickens quote from "A Tale of Two Cities". It would have been wholly inappropriate to write such negative thoughts in my farewell, but in actual fact it sums up quite well the contradictory feelings I had. So if I had written an honest goodbye, it would have been this:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness;
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity;
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness;
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair;
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us;
we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi angel angie,

great blog, I hope I'll have the opportunity to write about my own MBA experience in the future. I'm considering LBS for some time now, and I have even moved to London to get closer. :)

By reading your blog I came across the sentence "I went for a birthday party of a Croatian classmate.". As I'm coming from Croatia too, I'm interested to get in contact with your friend to get first hand experience. I would appreciate if you can pass my e-mail to your friend: igorhrelja@yahoo.com.

Thanks and keep writing!

Best regards,
Igor