The AIM Blogger

I read in an Asia Inc . article about the good prospects for MBA graduates and AIM was mentioned as having improved its placement for its students, thanks to the efforts of the Career Management Services (CMS). Staying true to its mission, the CMS has already lined up several career talks and recruitment events for graduating MBA students and internship opportunities for us MBA first years. Some of the companies that have presented and will present in the next month include: IBM Johnson & Johnson (India) Jollibee Citibank Qtel Contact Singapore Britannia Industries Ltd Aditya Birla With all that's going on in the placements, I personally hope that the perception of AIM of being bad is placements is going to change.

Is it an easy week for our MBA class? Apparently, it is. We have two full days of classes plus a business game this Wednesday for Operation Management (OM). We won't have classes this November 1-2, in observance of Philippine holidays. That means we won't have a WAC for the second straight week. However, in our Management of Cost and Profit (MCP) class earlier, I got another cold call (a call from the professor without the student raising his/her hand) and while I fared better than my first cold call at MCP , I still did not satisfactorily answer most of Prof. Mau Bolante's questions on cost allocation. Well, just like what people say: you win some and you lose some.

It's Friday and I'm thankful for two things: We do not have a Written Analysis of Cases (WAC) today and the schedule for next week is very light. But between last Monday and today, our class had three exams: two for Financial Management (FM) and one for Quantitative Analysis (QA). We had the FM pair last Tuesday and thanks to Prof. Larry Tan , as I write this post, I already know my exam scores. The exams had 20 points each and the passing grade was 12 for each exam. I got 13 and 10 on the first and second exams respectively so I'm still in the red, so to speak. What did I learn from the FM quizzes? I'm able to appreciate the financial ratios more and evaluating the financial position of companies/organizations in a systematic way. However, for the following topic, financial forecasting, I'm still a bit iffy (thus the exam scores). For the QA quiz, I found it disappointing because you spent a great deal of your time creating charts, rather than doing the analysis a...

In any school, you only need three essential elements: the building, the students and the teachers. And one thing that makes AIM a world-class institution is its roster of experienced faculty. However, amidst the PHD's and professional accolades, there's one thing I have come to appreciate: Teacher's in AIM are funny in their own little way. In the three months I've been here, I can classify the teacher humor in two schools: The Witty school and The Mau Bolante school. The Witty school is the type of humor that picks its spots. Prof. Larry Tan and Prof. Ricky Lim actually belong to this school, as with most of the faculty. This picks the class up as it combines sarcasm, deadpan jokes and wordplay to build up a humorous situation. However, this humor requires good execution and a good sense to avoid green jokes. Thankfully most faculty pull this off with a good rate of success. The Mau Bolante school is a category on its own: his Management of Cost and Profit (MCP) class...

I was thinking of possible titles for this post and what I came up with were "All That Work for What?" and "MBA: Where Weekends go to Die," (I'll use those titles later) but I was a feeling a bit nice so I'll just cite the latest object of my consternation: our Economics Research Report. Our class spent this last weekend to work on the assigned work for our Economics class. Prof. Patt Lontoc gave us a briefing about it last Friday and the project is the Economic Research Report, a paper based on a specific analytical framework for assessing the financial and economic feasibility of a case. This report was manageable on its own, but given how we have been grappling with our subjects like Financial Management (FM), Management of Cost and Profit (MCP) and Quantitative Analysis (QA), this report was a back breaker. Another thing that raised the complexity of this project was the fact we were given new groupings, very different from our usual CAN groups. This mov...

Man, Mondays like these make me want to wish it was Friday already. The culprits: the result of my Management of Cost and Profit (MCP) quiz and the class we had today in MCP. (Hmmm... is MCP a new nemesis for me in my quest for MBA glory?) First, the exam. I had probably the lowest exam in my stay here in AIM to the tune of 2.5/25 or a meager 10%! I saw this coming as soon as I finished the exam last week. I really felt I wanted to request for a do-over of the exam since it wasn't that hard (at least mathematically) but I wasn't able to study. (OK fine, I admit it.) The last week was such a doozy that all aspects of my life (personal, blogging, etc.) took a hit from my school-related activities. The MCP quiz was really a casualty of my inability to manage my time better and desire to maintain a life. (Yes, I do desire that.) The more frustrating of the duo was the class we had earlier. I got a cold call form the indefatigable Prof. Mau Bolante and I practically clammed up. Well...

The Asian Institute of Management is known to utilize the Case Method pioneered by the Harvard Business School . Here's a snippet of how HBS describes this method: The case method creates a classroom in which students succeed not by simply absorbing facts and theories, but also by exercising the skills of leadership and teamwork in the face of real problems. Sounds exciting, huh? Here's a Harvard article that elaborates more on the Case Method . The AIM version of the Case Method is very dynamic and very different from the traditional learning frameworks I've gone through. However, I've come to the realization that the foil to the Case Method is sleep deprivation, en masse. It happened a two days ago in our Economics class. We had our dreaded Marketing Management (MM) market research project presentation that day and the whole MBA first years were working practically till 5 to 6 o'clock in the morning to finalize and perfect the presentations. The presentations w...

It was a close good, close fight indeed. And in the end the better politician won. With a tally of 89-85-80, I came second in the election for the Asian Institute of Management Student Association. Yes, I lost by a very small margin (so small that a five vote swing from the trailing candidates will affect the outcome) and I have nothing to be ashamed of-- the school-wide elections were fair and I feel I lost in my own terms. I would like to thank this opportunity to thank those who supported me during the campaign. Seeing people wearing blue as a sign of support last election day was reward enough for me. I am humbled really by the number of the people who voted and believed in what I could bring to the Student Association. Congratulations to the newly elected officers! -- The very short campaign period was something I enjoyed. I really liked strategizing and applying the some of the stuff I learned in Marketing Management (MM). From designing my campaign poster to the little flyers I ...

As you can see from the poster, I am in the running for the Vice-Chair post of the Asian Institute of Management Student Association. (You'll also notice I used the same picture I have for this blog for the campaign poster). The elections will be on October 15, 2007, Monday next week. So why did I decide to run? I am facing tough odds, to be honest-- Schoolwork is getting harder, my opponents (classmates Harneet Baweja and Kshitij Shrivastava) are more well-known by the student body and I don't have the political machinery (I'm running as an independent). I filed my candidacy because I felt I could share the experience I had from running the Adobe User Group - Philippines and the World Usability Day - Manila events in to the AIM Student Association. I believe I can make a difference. My gravitation towards this type of leadership stems from a sense of social consciousness. On a Emotional Intelligence assessment AIM had for us students, one of my strengths was my high so...

After the loaded day last Wednesday, we had a loaded weekend with the Economics Midterms Exams. It was an exam of two parts: a 2-hour "open books" exam and a 5-hour sit-down exam. The latter was also doubled as a Written Analysis of Cases (WAC) paper, which is a first for our batch. The first part of the midterms was very, very, and I mean, very difficult. The exam had everything on it-- multiple choice (there was a question with 16 choices), reading comprehension, essay and fill in the blanks/multiple choice hybrid. Any exam where I answer "financial chaos" on a monetary policy question is bad news and it didn't help me that some questions had vague instructions. As far as topics covered are concerned, it was everything we tackled plus more. The class was practically stupefied as the exam ended. Looks of discombobulation and "What was THAT?!?" expressions littered everyone's faces. A lot of people felt their study was rendered useless by that ex...

We had probably one of the most intensive class days yesterday when we had three straight classes then followed by the Language of Business (LOB) Final Exam for the coup de grace. This loaded day was heavy with quant subjects: Quantitative Analysis (QA), Financial Management 1 (FM1) and the Operations Management (OM). Incidentally, this was our first session for OM. We met our teacher for this class, Prof. Fernando Roxas , for the first time. The OM session was an introduction and we didn't discuss a case (thank goodness). The LOB final exam was a difficult case and we were given four hours to analyze and answer the questions relating to it. After the exam, I overhead the finance folks in the class discussing the answers and realizing that I totally missed some of the items in the exam. Don't you just hate it when that happens? You pour your heart and soul in an exam and you feel a sense of achievement as you pass you paper only have your hopes crumpled in an instant? Yesterday...

The break is over and I think I'm still in the non-MBA world-- a place where sleep exists, where not speaking up is actually an option and the word "case" denotes a container. Good thing the AIM MBA program folks were kind enough to schedule only two classes for today. We had our first shot at Financial Management 1 (FM1) under the indefatigable Prof. Larry Tan and a Statistics session in Quantitative Analysis (QA) under Prof. Ricky Lim . I think most of us in class has yet to get back in MBA form. The classes earlier were a bit sluggish, not because of the lack of energy most of us were experiencing before the break, but because of rust. I'm pretty sure we'll be up to speed soon as we will be facing the Language of Business (LOB) finals this Wednesday and our Economics midterms this Friday and Saturday. -- I was talking to a classmate earlier and one of the topics we briefly touched on was the ISEP or the International School Exchange Program. For those unfamili...