Globetrotting

In addition to all the travelling, partying and immersion in Asian culture, I am actually studying (this blog might not fully reflect that fact) 🙂 On Friday, we already had our last classes for P1 (Period 1). The INSEAD MBA is divided in five two-month periods, and the last two months passed by like a stroke of lightning. I can’t believe that I have already finished 20% of my MBA program… On the other hand, it seems as if I know everyone already for years, and the welcome week seems ages ago.

Anyway, final exams are coming up next week (five exams in three days), so I might as well briefly summarize which classes I had in P1:

• Uncertainty, Data and Judgment is basically a statistics course, but probably the best one that you can imagine. In addition to the necessary maths, the professor Anil Gaba makes statistics tangible by betting against students (revealing fallacies such as overconfidence) or handing out M&Ms packs to all students to count the number of different colours in each pack.
• Prices & Markets is a microeconomics class, covering all necessary basics from demand and supply curves over pricing in a monopoly and under perfect competition, to game theory and decisions under incomplete information. Professor Pushan Dutt has very tangible examples for the concepts, and his dry sense of humour resonated well with most of the class.
• Financial Accounting – the class name speaks for itself. The most technical and sometimes a bitt dull class in the P1 curriculum, but obviously the necessary foundation to make sense out of financial statements and understand the economic and financial standing of companies. Professor Benjamin Segal makes the best out of this, stressing the relevance of understanding the underlying economics rather than blindly looking at numbers and ratios.
• Financial Markets and Valuation revolves around project and company valuation, and financial market instruments such as stocks and bonds. For my section, the class was taught by professor Pierre Hillion, who is probably the favorite professor of almost the whole section due to his unique teaching style (check out the impersonation of him performed by a student at the INSEAD cabaret, it comes pretty close to his actual teaching and speaking style 🙂 )
• Organisational Behaviour 1 is the “soft-skill” class, around teamwork, leadership, motivation, negotiation, and other things. It took me some time to get professor Allan Filipowicz‘s teaching style, but in a class in which we discussed the 1957 movie “12 Angry Men” and the various methods of persuasion and influence used in the movie, he managed to apply some of these techniques successfully on many of the students, and I started seeing the value of this course for myself. (You should check out the movie, it is available on YouTube and by the way rated top 6 movie of all time on IMDB)

So far, I loved almost every single session I attended, and I think the professors are all doing an outstanding job at bringing across their concepts, making their topics interesting and highlighting the relevance for the day-to-day work of management. I am already looking forward to what P2 will bring (but first I have to sit through these finals next week)…

Tags: Academics, Classes, Finals, INSEAD, MBA, P1

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2012 at 19:28.