Who am I and What am I doing here?

2009-01-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

15/01/2009

I thought I should start writing some of my MBA study experience. Mainly for one good reason, I couldn't find any information or experience of anybody who have been through the same journey as me.

About me in short:

Work Experience: Working as a Business consultant for a firm which is one of the top 100 consulting firms in the world as per FTSE.

Years of Experience: 5-6 Yrs.

My previous education background: Masters in Engineering

University: Melbourne Business School (MBS), Australia.

Study Mode: Part - Time Study and working Full-Time.

Age: 28

so where am I at the course: The course starts on the Monday the 19th of Jan 2009. I had the Course orientation yesterday arvo. Pretty good session

Pre- Prep study:

Trust me guys, Human mind has to get used to doing certain things. So this pre-prep study is very important. I will tell you why. But before that I should tell you guys about the materials I used. MBS is very good at providing pre-prep work materials. They actually registered me into the MBAMATH.com website. This site has a very good MBA preparation pack. I just believe every penny you spend in this site is worth your money, remember you are investing in your MBA and you want to be up to speed when you are there than just trying to get to speed. MBS also did provide me with a few more info on the books that I could use as a pre – read and an info pack on accounting (which were pretty much covered in MBAMATH.com). Okay in detail about each section.

Mathematics and Quantitative Skills:

I was always an above average student in mathematics during my school days and also coming from an engineering background, I thought my maths and quans abilities should be pretty good. So thought would just try a few things to refresh my memory. Now, this is where things started walking away from me. I know I would have been able to get to the solution of the same question in about ¼ of the time that I took to solve if I was in my 8^th grade of my schooldays (especially with Fractions and logarithms).

But it did not take me long to get me back to speed. About 2-3 hours of work in the basics took me somewhere close to where I was.

Excel Skill:

MBS have been stressing a lot about Excel Skills. Me being a Business Analyst, I have been through loads of excel stuff in recent day and my skills are pretty advanced. So I didn’t spend a lot of time in this area.

Statistics:

Now this is another area where I had to put in more work. Cause again, it’s been ages that I have done statics about 10 years nearly. But believe this is one place where I think I should work more. So guys be careful here, don’t under – estimate this area. That’s the mistake I did.

Accounting:

This is one area where my knowledge was very limited in all of the prep work. So, I purposely put this for the last minute as I wanted to get through the easy ones first and also to keep my energy level and confidence high as well. I haven’t gone through the whole lot with the course starting next week. But I don’t have an accounting class till the second week of February. So believe I should be able to manage this to an extent.

So my advice if you don’t have an accounting background, then just hit this area straight away. It does have loads of info and I don’t think it’s easy to pick them all in a night.

Outcome so far: I am a pretty organised person myself, wouldn’t call myself the best in this area. But I have definitely learnt to manage my time quite efficiently from my work experience I must say. But this prep work has definitely made me more efficient. I have so far been able to manage my time pretty well with all the commitment I have. But this is all that I am really worried about going forward, finding a right balance between work, study and personal life. I am pretty confident that I will get there.

Anyways this is where I am so far, I have a crash course on World of Management starting next week the 19^th of Jan. This course is a fulltime one week crash course. I have a few things that I have to prepare as well for the class starting on Monday. So will definitely update you guys with how things looked as soon as I can.

MBA - My Experience

Who am I and What am I doing here?