The Last Day of Classes

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November 20, 2008 will go down in history as the last day of classes for the Asian Institute of Management's first 16-month Master in Business Administration class. We are now officially done with the cases, CP, WAC's, presentations and projects.

One year, five months and fourteen days after the day I took the very first case assigned to us (the already classic "Impasse in Pandacan"), I had my last classes for the electives Brand Equity Management (BEM) and Entrepreneurial Finance (EF), ironically with no cases.

In BEM, we had a double session wherein each of the groups in the class presented their "brand diagnosis" of various brands in different product segments. Our group chose to do Banco De Oro, one of the "Big Three" in the Philippine banking industry (with Metrobank and the Bank of the Philippine Islands being the other two).

Our presentation was very much like the major presentation we had for Marketing Management (MM) under the same professor for BEM, Prof. Joe Miranda. The main difference was that the presentation was more focused on the brand component of the product/service, and we were to provide our analysis and recommendations for that brand. I recommended BDO to go into the gift certificate market. (If you want to know why, comment on this blog post. If the comments reach 10, then I'll post my reasons.)

For EF, We had a lecture, but it wasn't a lecture of the normal sort. We did not focus solely on specific topic in finance, it was an integration lecture about professionalism in any enterprise (corporate or entrepreneurial), stewardship and leadership. Prof. Richard Cruz shared a lot of insights about what to do and what mindset to have now that we are about step out of school and go back into the real world. As if going into full circle, we finished the term in the SGV case room, the very first room we got to love (or hate) because of the Pre-MBA program.

Some of us are already finished with our respective MRR's and are set to go back home in the next week. A lot more of us will be finished with our MRR defenses in the coming days and, hopefully, we will be marching to the tune of graduation hymns this December.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hi .. Enjoy your time till the grad ceremony .. Best of Luck for the future ... Atul
November 20, 2008 at 9:18 PM
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