Week 1 Hilary

Week 1, and I am back into it. Its funny, I was expecting a slow ramp up period, but I just seemed to to have reestablished the work rate from last term without too much distress.

As to the lectures, some are a continuation from last term, where others, like marketing, are completely new and involve a whole other set of skills. One thing that is common across all subjects is the vast quantity of reading that one must get through every single week.

As I wrote last week, I have to submit my elective choices for Trinity (summer) term by tomorrow. They use a bidding system here (due to capacity on class size) involving each student being able to use a maximum of 120 points with which to bid for 6 subjects. I hope my spread of bids is successful in securing the subjects that I want - which are as follows:

• Private Equity
• Restructuring and Implementation
• Business in China
• Media Strategies for a Networked World
• Real Estate
• Fixed Income

My idea is to have 3 finance modules, and 3 strategy modules and from the presentations it seems that the 6 above will challenge both my quantitative and qualitative capabilities and also be very interesting.

In addition to the lectures, the Trinity decisions, the EP meetings and the Oxford Business Network (OBN) meetings, I managed to complete 3 assignments this week and so unfortunately there was no partying. There were, however, a series of extra curricular events as follows:

Panel Discussion with Recruiters
On Tuesday we had a 7 people from different recruitment agencies come to attend a panel discussion. During the session they all agreed on the buoyancy of the employment market at the moment and that we were much more fortunate that our predecessors. They did however, reiterate the same as has been coming from the careers service; no matter how good the market is there is still no substitution for a good CV and plenty of research to get the good jobs

Dr Roger Cliffe, Quality Director Vodafone
As part of our Operations Management module, Dr Cliffe came in to present about his transformation of the Vodafone way of thinking about quality. He began by explaining the youth of the mobile telecommunications market (apparently the first mobile phone call took place on 1st January 1985) as a reason for the lack of inherent quality (plenty of money, no need to worry about waste). He then went on to explain the effects of the introduction of 6 Sigma into Vodafone and the new emphasis on quality. It was an interesting talk.

Booz Allen Hamilton
On Wednesday Booz Allen Hamilton, strategy consultants, came in to teach us how to 'crack a case'. For many consultancies, the job interview contain a case study where the candidate is posed a problem and asked how they would go about breaking it down in order to offer a solution. Booz Allen has recruited from the Oxford MBA before and wanted to make sure that we were as well prepared as we could be for their 2007 interview round. The evening went well, with over 100 people turning up to hear the presenters and witness the roll play.

Anniversary
Yesterday was Namiko and my 2 year anniversary. We spent a lovely day together rounded off with a good meal at Quod in Oxford.

It would also seem that I have been made captain of the MBA rowing team for this year with the target of winning the MBA Olympics in France hosted by HEC during May. Luckily (this being Oxford) there is no shortage of rowers and so from now the training must begin...

I must admit that I feel that this week has been all work and no play. Maybe because it is week 1 and I was unsure what to expect. I will attempt to re-address the balance next week