Lemoine Point Walk

The fall season here in Canada is a nice time to go out for a walk in the woods. The colours of the leaves turning are pretty vibrant. They usually only last for a couple of weeks before the leaves fall due to wind and rain.

I organized a little outing a couple of weekends ago to the Lemoine Point Conservation Area near here. About 20 of us went. It's a short 20 minute drive from downtown Kingston.

I've been luck with the weather for the events I organized. It was a beautiful fall day. Here are some pictures:















You can have a look at the rest of the album here.

MBA: Module 5, Functions of Management

Module 5 ended last week with a couple of exams and was pretty challenging from a time management standpoint. We're now on a week long break and courses start up again on Oct 14th.

The campus recruiting season was in full swing and we had to balance team meetings and projects with information sessions. People had to write cover letters and customized resumes pretty regularly. I decided to bypass the campus recruitment period...partly out of laziness and partly because I wasn't looking for just another job with another big company. I did keep an eye out for interesting consulting opportunities and applied to a strategy and operations consulting position with Deloitte. I managed to get an initial interview with them. They called me a couple of days later to tell me that I wasn't going on to the second round of interviews. The interview was at 8:30am and I'm not the sharpest tool in the box that early in the morning. There are a lot of good candidates in our class so I wasn't too disappointed when I found out that I wasn't getting the job.

Anyways, the module consisted of five courses: Business Communications, Finance Fundamentals, Marketing Fundamentals, Business Decision Modelling, and Operations Management.

Business Communications
For the premium tuition that we're paying at Queen's, I kind of expect a certain level of organization. The program structure should be all figured out and things should run like clockwork...that's what I think in any case. This business communications course kind of got lost in the shuffle. It seemed like it was a bit of an afterthought and the lack of coordination between the mba office and the course lecturers was obvious. The lecturers were two guys who used to work for CTV and are now doing consulting and teaching executives how to give presentations. The course was meant to teach us what constitutes an effective business presentation and how we can be effective presenters. There wasn't much information that I didn't already hear before except for a tip to use a web cam to record the presentation practise sessions. I remember taking a presentation undergrad course at U of Waterloo for clean technologies that covered the same material. This course itself would have been more useful at the beginning of the program before we went did several presentations over 5 months. Since we didn't know what the course was going to be about and there were no instructions given to us to put together material, some of us ended up presenting material that we already presented in previous courses. So it two days of repeat material...pretty boring. It was a bit of a waste of time in my opinion, especially since we had a ton of other work to do.

Finance Fundamentals
This was another funny quirk in the organization of the program. The professor who was scheduled to teach this course ended up going away on paternity leave. Another professor who was asked to teach this course declined since it was a 6 week period...too short for her course structure. So we ended up getting a professor from RMC to teach one of the most fundamental courses of any business program. They guy was a terrible lecturer and his style and course structure was very confusing. I resorted to learning straight from the textbook. I don't know how well I did with the theoretical portions of the exams, but I think I did well on the calculations.
The course itself dealt with the financial tools used to make business decision. We covered time value of money concepts like annuities, perpetuities, and bonds. We also learnt how to evaluate potential projects based on initial investments and projected future cash flows to decided if it was good to invest in a given project or not. These decisions used net present value, payback period, IRR, AAR, and other tools. Although the concepts didn't seem that hard, this was a tough course for me since it involved more memorization than application of concepts. I also can't really visualize interest rates and money moving around.

Marketing Fundamentals
Grooaaaan! Marketing...maybe it's my engineering background but I didn't enjoy this course at all. It seemed to touch on concepts we already covered in previous courses for strategy and positioning. The topic seemed pretty straightforward to me: know your company, know your product, distinguish yourself from your competitors by meeting you target market's needs. I found that there were too many frameworks that made it seem that there was a lot more to marketingk: 4 P's, 5 C's, 6 M's. I know I'm not cut out for a marketing career...I'm too direct and logical.

Business Decision Modelling
I really liked this course. It was about developing tools to help you make business decisions. Applied stuff like figuring out what the optimal product mix to produce to maximize your profits. Or how many maintenance bays a mechanics garage should have to maximize profits and meet the local demand. The course dealt with linear programming, integer programming, decision trees, and AHP. Professor Yuri Levin was pretty effective in teaching this course. He kept the classroom atmosphere pretty light and was readily available outside the class hours. His course notes were also pretty detailed and provided a lot of practise problems for people to work on. People who didn't really know MS Excell were at a real disadvantage in this course.
Part of this course was a project where we had to apply the concepts directly. My team did an optimization of a machining process from one of the small projects that I worked on when I was at Aero-Safe Technologies.

Operations Management
Another really good course. Professor Paul Roman was really good. He grabbed everyone's attention right away and kept the class engaged. His course was mainly case based. For every class each team had to deliver a brief where we had to review a case study, select 3 main issues, and provided 3 recommendations to help the business featured in the case. Paul would then break down the class in terms of their decisions, have an in-class debate, and then show what each company ended up doing so we can compare our business decisions to their's. Another part of the course involved a field trip to a company where we had to select a company and then arrange a tour of one of their processes and report on it with possible recommendations. Our team did a tour of Metal Craft Marine. It was a bit of a challenge for us since there was no steady manufacturing process for us to observe. Metal Craft is more of a job shop for boats and the guy we dealt with had a lot to say about marketing and not much to say about their process. We did our best and I think we did ok on the report and presentation. For people in future years, I don't recommend going to Metal Craft for this project...too difficult to pin down process inefficiencies.

I was really glad when this module ended. It took a lot out of me in terms of dealing with team dynamics. I've recharged the batteries over this past week. All set to start the next module...looks like it'll be pretty challenging as well.