The AIM Blogger

The article I mentioned a few months back is finally out! I contributed an article to the AIM Alumni Leadership Magazine (or AIM Leader) entitled "Confessions of an MBA Blogger" and it's about The AIM Blogger . I wrote about this blog's roots and directions in the future. I shared how this blog was able to help me cope during my MBA studying days and now in my MBA teaching days. If you get a chance to grab the magazine, please do so because apart from my contributed article, there are also contributions from Fidel V. Ramos (former Philippine president), Maj. Gen Roland Detabali (MDM 2004), and Jerry Quibilan (MM 1976). Feedback is always welcome. :) BTW, another contribution of mine will appear in the next issue of AIM Leader. For the next article, I'm focusing on Social Media. :D

The first day of another 3 day long weekend for MBA cohort 5 students has started! I for one am looking forward to it. DVDs at home, some more quality time with family, going out and not worrying too much about the time! Even hanging out at home without any readings to worry about! (Well, I have readings and will still read up hahaha!) Something is strange about next week's schedule though, the school seemed to have heard our silent plea for lighter loads and now we just have 4 subjects for the coming week... I even have 2 half days this week....Hmm Ideally, we should be taking advantage of this short break. As to what kind of advantage it is for, it depends on each person I guess. As for me, I'd try to read some more and practice some cases maybe.(just maybe) But I will also have time to walk more in the mall tomorrow. I'm visiting my grandma on Monday too! Maybe on the half-day schedules I'll also visit my former officemates and have a quick lunch somewhere...

One of the things I've been doing to get involved with AIM MBA cohorts is playing basketball with them regularly. Since the "easy" fourth and final term started, we played almost weekly. We usually play at the AFP Army Gymnasium and the Power Plant Basketball Court. Majority of players come from MBA Cohort 3, although there are folks from Cohorts 2, 4, and 5 who have played. Basketball games have ranged from friendly to overly competitive. I remember one game where my body ached like hell after a hyper-competitive game. The game we last played could be the last for the group since the graduation for Cohort 3 is coming up. Here's a photo tribute to the men and women who run, jump, and shoot every Tuesday/Thursday for the last few months. (Thanks to Laurice Alaan for the photos!):

1030 was the time that we ended our learning team meeting last night. Slowly but surely, we are getting into that pace wherein we now spend less time working with our assignments as a group. I'm not really sure if it is an improvement in time-efficiency, or some other productivity thing, but from what I can initially observe is that people are working faster when they know that they have a lot of work left to do for the following day of which the odds of successfully finishing them all are low. In short, once people know that it is almost an impossibility to finish everything in one night, people start going against those odds. Which comes to this entry I'm writing here. It's about good things. About how some people and organizations, despite the odds, still strive to go about creating and contributing positive changes to our societies. Among these things that we can probably brag about as authentic human beings is the recognition of one of the Philippine's own, ...

Great news! The AIM Blogger is chosen one of the 100 Best Blogs for International Business Students by Online Colleges.net . The list is a selection of blogs that  provide an excellent opportunity for students to find out first-hand about doing business in countries around the world, hear from other b-school students living and studying abroad, find out what professors have to say, and even explore the developing field of micro-financing. I'm sure recognitions like these will motivate us, The AIM Blogger team, to write better stuff for the global business school/MBA community. (BTW, Chino has been coming up with mighty great contributions . Check them out!) BTW, this is the second recognition the blog has received-- the blog was selected as one of the 100 Best Blogs for MBA Students early this year.

Finished taking the Macroeconomics Midterms a few hours ago. After taking the test, I found a new found respect for economists and the training that they go through. While I'm quite sure none of us will be expecting a perfect score, I am sure that at least I got maybe 4 points right. It is true I guess, what the upperclassmen said about how hard it was. But it turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Whatever score we get, I know how much effort the professor put into that exam, and how much important it really was for us to have as complete an understanding as possible of economic theories and principles. It really helps if we know more about how economics work. Anyway I still hope I get a good mark. They gave us a time extension earlier, but I don't think it helped out that much, hahaha. One midterm done, more to go! =) On a side note, today is the start of this year's World Pyrolympics event. Check out Anton Diaz' blog here. Chino

DO I SLEEP OR DO I NOT SLEEP? Just got home after meeting up with friends. After the hopefully going-to-be regular habit of jogging with some of my classmates (no group name yet), I proceeded to Glorietta on foot to meet up with them. We had dinner at HG Rockstar, the former Heaven and Eggs "breakfast restaurant". Strange to eat breakfast food of toast, sausage and egg during dinner. But it wouldn't seem that odd if I considered the fact that we were going to have our Macroeconomics Midterms tomorrow at the 9 in the morning. Something, which some of the upperclassmen even advised us, to just relax and go watch a movie instead of spending the whole night and morning reviewing. It seems that our professor, had very high expectation which no one actually had a chance to even reach a break-even point. Anyhow, I'm sure everyone is spending the night reviewing alone, or in a group and I hope we all get good grades. As for me, I did some reviewing last night thank...

There are many things to be afraid of, and for an MBA student, one of these fears is to be the lowest of the low in the batch, to be the outlier among outliers, to be the cream of the crap, and to fail when others have high probabilities to succeed. We all probably have this fear. Despite our best efforts, we might not be getting the ideal results that we wanted to. Despite the best learning team composition, the smartest geniuses, the best team effort, the best school, the best mentors, sometimes some people just have greater propensities for failure. A few weeks ago, I was worrying about my Language of Business (Accounting) and my Quantitative Analysis classes. Nowadays, LOB has been reduced to a sunk cost in some ways, and QA, while hope is still there, is seen as something salvageable. From these two subjects, new anxieties arise in the form of FM1 (Financial management 1) and in some ways MCP or our Management of Costs and Profits Class. Sounds similar to accounting? In so...

The Mozilla Philippines Community, Globe Telecom , and the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) will be hosting the Five Years of Firefox in Manila! event this coming November 21, 2009 (3pm-5pm) at the Fuller Hall of AIM in Makati City. This event is a get-together of Mozilla Firefox and web enthusiasts in the Philippines. This is the third web-related event held at AIM this year. First was the Form Function & Class Web Design Conference , next was the WordCamp Philippines event, and now it's the Mozilla Firefox event. AIM is making an effort to diversify its presence into the web-savvy crowd by supporting community events like these. By reaching out to web professionals, bloggers, and netizens, these events are really a part of a "Geek Series" the institute is trying to string together. With the support of W. SyCip GSB Associate Dean Prof. Ricky Lim and the institute's marketing team, people should expect more events like these in the future.

The Asian Institute of Management recently launched a new look for its website! The design is quite special to me because I was  responsible for creating the design where the final template design was based. I was inspired by the "maximal" photos incorporated in nice sites today, like the website of MIT . The good thing about this design is that the photo can be changed easily to suit the season. So we may see a new photo at the site's home page by the end of the year. What do you think of the website? Feel free to give feedback without fear. :P -- Trivia: The new design features a photo of students from the outgoing cohort of the MBA program. :)

If you've noticed that I haven't been blogging here as much I used to, you're spot on. But there's a pretty good reason for that. I'm working on a free book project about my experiences in studying and teaching at the Asian Institute of Management 's MBA program. The free book is called " Did You Read The Case? - 25 Tips on How to Survive the Case Method MBA and the Asian Institute of Management " The book is meant to be a pocket guide to folks who are interested in taking the MBA at AIM and a source of inspiration to MBA students who are cursing the high heavens during their Financial Management exams. Here's a draft of the cover: The book is still in its early stages and I've gotten Prof. Ricky Lim to write the foreword. Included in the book are tips on how to get admitted into the MBA program, how to make the perfect class participation (CP), and how to work with Filipinos and Indians without going crazy. But I promise it will be ...

I was reading news about the NBA when I read about an issue about Allen Iverson of the Memphis Grizzlies. For a good portion of the decade, Iverson was the leading scorer the team he played in. He was a gutsy player who played with much heart and even won the league's Most Valuable Player award once. He was admired of his style of play that defined the play of his team. However, when age started to rob Iverson of his athleticism, he was expected to take on a reserve role and play less time to give his body more rest. At the same time, the less playing time meant that his younger teammates would get more exposure and experience playing at a high level. Iverson resented his new role to the team. When he was not leading the team's efforts, he was a distraction to the team and disrupted the flow of the game. But when he was given the chance to start when another player was injured, he excelled and led the team like he used to. This behavior from Iverson led him to be traded...

Brought a Statistics book today, only realizing that the authors of the book entitled "Even YOU Can Learn Statistics: A Guide for Everyone Who Has Ever Been Afraid of Statistics", are the same as the authors of the textbook that we use in class (2 of them are)... So, what do I do with this book? Well, I have to look at it in a more positive way I guess. For one, the book is way thinner than the textbook that we use, which admittedly, I did not really read much. Maybe in a few days I can finally understand statistics and actually apply it to cases with more confidence and less confusion. So far I have 3 subjects which I feel that I am lacking in terms of marks. One is QA (statistics), another is OM (because I don't really know what my standing is there, and there is little chance for CP in class), and of course LOB. Some of my classmates have given up, or are almost about to give up on LOB. Me, I've always known it was going to be really hard. I guess I should...