3 weeks up in Hilary....

An eventful 2 weeks...First, a controversy surrounding electives necessary for the Trinity Term and second, RESULTS of Michelmas!!! To give you a bit of a background, SBS MBAs are supposed to choose 6 electives in the next term from an assortment of subjects including finance, social electives, marketing, retailing etc. Now Finance electives, being hot favourites for any self respecting MBA, are much sought after ( nope, sadly, no fisticuffs this time round!!!) and therefore have a condition of class size (being 100) imposed on them!! Now to put this in perspective , you have roughly 215 MBAs and approximately 70 MFEs trying to get the electives they want by BIDDING for the same [now each MBA has 120 points which have to be spread across 6 subjects based on what think YOU should bid, given 2 major considerations 1) your desire for an elective 2) members in class with the same $#%# desire and therefore bidding higher than you!!! You could choose to do this in the eenie, meenie, miny, moe way (arbit choices) or actually applying auction theory (too painful to discuss here!!!)]. Well anyway, to cut a long story short, Corporate Valuation had a number of pissed off oversubscribed students !!!Not because of the fact that they bid less than their classmates, BUT because of the fact that MFEs who have 90 points to play around with allotted 1 point each to courses that were open only to them (and so were sure to get it because of a small class size) and bidding roughly upwards of 40 to 45 points for those subjects they shared with MBAs.Essentially what that translates to is that any MFE who wanted to do a particular course definitely got the course (assuming they bid high) while many of the MBA's got left out...All in all there were interesting reactions around school addressing this topic. The Final Decision : Those who did not get Corp Valuation and Private Equity, sorry, you should have bid higher!!!!
Side note here: I did get all my electives..Basically my bidding went as follows..Corporate Valuation (35), Arbitrage Opportunities and Hedge Funds (28) , Capital Raising Techniques (25), Restructuring and Implementation(25) , Financial Risk Management (5) and Taxation,Finance and Business Strategy(2)....Finance heavy!!! So be it...
Second top news this week was that we finally got to see the results of our exams last terms and as expected I did pass comfortably in all subjects!! Lotsa cases of Arbit marking and me thinks I did deserve better in some papers but oh well, no time to dwell on a lost cause..Better to pull up your socks for Hilary term!!!Now trying to apply to a variety of companies apart from getting lost on the current set of assignments!!!
And oh yes, Financial Times ranking for the top MBA schools are out...We advanced one position!!!Could do better than that....Contacted the FT auditors on whether the audit year made any difference to the data supplied and here is the answer....

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Hello, All schools wishing to be a part of the Financial Times MBA rankings send data in each year, i.e. all data is current. All data used in the process is for the most current year. A school is only subject to the audit process on a sample basis as determined each fall. Typically a school's data is subject to the process every three years. I believe this should answer your questions below. The audit process does not affect the standings in the rankings. The ranking is based on the merits of the school's data.

Regards,

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Oh well....