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Learn what truly sets the UC Riverside MBA apart and how it helps in your professional growth
sheiquiroga
Joined: 29 Jun 2016
Last visit: 06 Jan 2021
Posts: 103
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 16
Location: Philippines
Schools: Mendoza '19 (A$) Rotman '19 (A$)
GMAT 1: 660 Q47 V34
GPA: 3.46
Products:
14 Jul 2018, 06:02
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| FROM Sheiquiroga - Current Student: Rotman Term 2 - Academics |
 Term 2 is what I would call the: "Winter Blues + Fear of Internship + What is Happening in Operations Class = Everyone's Depressed Term" Okay, if you are not yet getting interviews in January, please do not panic. Yes, you probably have very tiny chance of getting into the "big" consulting firms. However, it's not the end of the world. There are still a lot of opportunities that will come. For now, continue doing coffee chats and networking! Do not lose hope. It's okay to take a break from writing cover letters, but please do not entirely give up.  Statistics Management Professor Chay Ornthanalai Business Statistics by Sharpe, De Veaux, and Velleman In this course, we covered basic statistics lessons and focused on doing different kinds of regressions. The discussions covered statistical inference, correlation, dummy variables, time series data, discrete dependent variables, etc. I found that the book was not that helpful for me and started searching online for clarity instead. However, my friends and I actually like the PowerPoint slides that the professors uploaded because of the detailed explanations and step-by-step approach. Deliverables: > 3 Individual Assignments - These actually helped us become up to speed since they forced us to comprehend the lessons each time. These assignments were not as hard as the ones given in the Foundations Term, but some questions might be tricky though. > Project Topic Preference - The professor gave us a list of topics with some information and they asked us to rank the topics according to our group's preference. Most of them were either about marketing analytics or financial modelling cases. > Group Project Written Report and Presentation - The professor asked us to examine the data given and apply most of our learnings. My groupmate generated several regressions to analyze the problem. If your group feels stuck, the professors welcome students to visit them for guidance, which our group found very helpful. Next, we just had to present the findings in front of the class and our classmates had the chance to ask questions about the analysis. > Final Exam - Is it true that you need to have Windows for this class? Yes. This class is the sole reason why Rotman was asking us to buy a good Windows laptop. They want you to install StatTools that only runs on Windows. It was a good software, but you might want to consider just installing Parallel Desktop or Bootcamp on your Macbook instead of buying it. The final exam was actually kind of a disaster in my case because even if I borrowed a new Dell XPS, I still encountered problems and my computer just decided to lag on that day. They had to transfer me to the Finance Lab to finish my work. They will only give you additional 15 minutes (for the transition period from your original classroom to the Finance Lab) even if you wasted one hour waiting for your professor to solve your problem. Thus, my advice going forward is that once you encounter a problem, save it in your USB, and ask the proctor to bring you straight to the Finance Lab immediately, so you will not have to waste time stressing out. I also have to mention that the exam is open book, but there's not much value added to it. The reason is that you have to be extremely fast in using Excel (so work on your Excel skills) and be fast in being organized and copy pasting (I'm not kidding. You can verify it with my batch). Thus, you have to really know how to do things by heart. The professor will grade you according to your analysis and interpretation of data. Scholar Sessions I only went to one or two scholar sessions because I heard that the person teaching it was really amazing. However, I think I learned my lesson that I am better off studying by myself to manage my limited time well. It was vital for me to review the slides before I do the individual assignments and I reviewed them again and again as the course progressed. That helped me understand the whole concept much more easier.  Operations Management Professor Gerhard Trippen Matching Supply and Demand by Cachon and Terwiesch Almost everyone was so confused in this class. Although I admit that I was one of those people, I was actually really interested in this course. I never had an actual operations course in my undergrad, so I was so excited to learn about this that I even registered for the KPMG Lean Six Sigma Training. I will discuss more about this in another article. The book was helpful to some extent in my case especially at the very beginning of the course. In the end, I depended much more on the slides and all the practice problems given to study for this.  The professor we had was really nice and enthusiastic about the course. He covered the following topics and much more: Little’s Law Capacity Analysis Periodic Supply and Demand Mismatch Operational Friction Measuring Variability The Queueing Formula Safety capacity Sequential servers Supply chains Economies of scale I normally do not participate in class that much, but I was really interested in this course and studied the cases well in advance. Professor Trippen always put in extra effort to make the class interesting through various exercises that you can see in the photo on the right side. There was even one time that they had to wear garbage bags! LOL. Deliverables: > 4 case analysis Do not take these cases for granted. They will be a great basis for your scores because the final exam will be so hard. Thus, you have to ensure that you get the highest score possible in these cases. However, note that they all took so much work and time to crack the case. We covered the following cases which are all pretty interesting:
Read the cases beforehand and the professor will give you (at least) one session, in which people could just start blurting out case facts. It was really easy to do this, so do not miss your chance since there will be less opportunities for class participations afterwards. In addition, the contents are much easier in the first part of the course. > Final Exam All second year students warned us how brutal operations exam was during their time. They said that this exam was far worse than the Finance I exam, which, you know, was also brutal. If you do not know one question, you would normally skip to the next question to save time, right? But with this exam, they just continued skipping and skipping until the last question. So yeah, that's how crazy the exam was. But thankfully, I feel that our batch got a more decent set of questions and they were not as hard as how they were described by the upper years. My advice is to always listen during the class, but start doing the practice questions if you do not have enough time, rather than spending longer time mastering the theories. You will learn much more on how to crack questions. Scholar Sessions I attended the scholar session once, but they were mainly covering the practice questions when I went there. I was not able to drastically improve my operations skills in that session, but it was a great nudge that I should start cracking those practice questions since they were a bit complicated and connected to each other. Athletic Knit Factory Tour What particularly was interesting in this course is that when the professor offered Section 5 to go visit the factory of Athletic Knit. (Yes, it was only offered to section 5. Don't ask me why. Maybe ask our academic director, Artem, who was doing a great job for his position.) The CEO of Athletic Knit himself gave us a tour around the facility and he was so generous in sharing his knowledge about operations to us!    Leading People in Organization Professor John Oesch No book required. Readings were all uploaded by professor. I found that this course was also pretty interesting and I think that it helped me become better in analyzing the work environment and people, and in having a good perspective on how to be in a leadership role, particularly of a CEO position. Some people did not actually like this course, but I think that you should try to spend more time in reading the cases for you to actually enjoy it. I figured that when I skipped reading one case before class, it was really not that much enjoyable unlike the times that I did spend energy understanding the case facts. Deliverables: > Class Contribution It is important to really speak up in this class and share valuable contributions. The professor will give some discussion questions before you tackle the case. Please do read them as they will be great guidance in reading the case. Most of the questions in class will be coming from the case facts too, so be sure to highlight the important details! > Social Style Analysis The professor will ask you to ask your groupmates in the previous term to answer multiple questions about you as a leader and as a teammate. Then, this website will help generate results and categorize you into either a Driver, Amiable, Expressive or Analytical. Beware to not immediately categorize your peers as one of them because the result is not 100% accurate and is only reflective of your performance in those group projects (or it might also be the case that the people who answered were too lazy to take all the questions seriously). Afterwards, we then had to discuss our result with our team and create action plans going forward. > Change Management Analysis In this deliverable, we had to use a simulation software/website of trying to convince people in an organization to push for an initiative. (Our group was really bad at this software, so I won't share anything further. Just ask the other second years about this. LOL.) Then, we had to share our results to the class. >Final Paper During class discussions, do not forget to take down notes! The final paper will require you to analyze your previous boss and also include your learning from the class at the same time. Be sure to spend more time analyzing your boss himself and not telling too much story about yourself. Nonetheless, do not use this paper to rant about how awful your previous boss was! Also, do not leave writing this paper last minute! Start planning out how you are going to do it in the middle of the course.  We covered interesting work-related topics, such as becoming the boss and understanding the boss, the Work Group Model, leading diverse talent, building effective teams, the leadership triangle model, and social styles and versatility. We discussed several cases and I found the "Erik Peterson at Biometra" case pretty interesting. Do not open this link until you finish discussing this case: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-peterson-33b384115/. This link was pretty funny! I also heard from my friend in Harvard that they discussed this case too! Other cases included "Leslie Brinkman at Versutia Capital", "Taran Swan at Nickelodeon Latin America", and much more! I really hope that you will take them seriously! The professor also asked us to do more kinds of activities, such as the Lego Person and the Subarctic Survival. However, I will not discuss them, so you will still get some element of surprise. I guarantee you that they will be interesting! Scholar Sessions Not much scholar sessions for this course. If you really do not have enough time, I think it's okay to skip these sessions and just read from the slides.   Update: I'm doing my internship right now, but I still plan to upload my articles for my extra-curricular activities for both Term 1 and 2. Stay tuned! Love, Wondersuite |
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sheiquiroga
Joined: 29 Jun 2016
Last visit: 06 Jan 2021
Posts: 103
Own Kudos:
Given Kudos: 16
Location: Philippines
Schools: Mendoza '19 (A$) Rotman '19 (A$)
GMAT 1: 660 Q47 V34
GPA: 3.46
Products:
19 Aug 2018, 13:02
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| FROM Sheiquiroga - Current Student: Term 1 - Extra-curricular Activities and Career |
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This article will go through the different activities we had while studying for our Term 1 courses. We had to attend various club activities, conduct coffee chats and attend multiple networking and party events! We also were able to visit the office spaces of different companies and join lots of case competitions. However, do not join case competitions if you cannot give your full 100% either because your team will be spending so much time and effort to win while you just spend 50% of your time, and that is just not fair. A. Case Competitions My classmate, Gabby, will always call me the case comp queen, not because I always win, but because I joined a lot! The primary reason is that I feel that I learn so much more joining case competition than being stuck in class because case comps allow me to have a space to unleash my creativity and also become better in time management at the same time. There were hundreds of case competitions that happened, but I'll only cover the ones that I joined and some of the interesting competitions that my friends joined. a. REVCA: Startup Strategy Case Competition  Congratulations to these winners!We formed a group of 5 students and solved an interesting strategic problem for a startup company. They initially gave a workshop and then a kick-off to prepare the participants about the challenge and the expectations for the presentations. This was my first case competition and it was a great warm-up for me. I learned how judges think and what they would like to see from the presentation. b. Business Design Sprint  This one was not exactly a case competition, but it was a series of workshops once a week for 4 weeks, in which Mark Leung taught us how to practice design thinking. We had to solve a problem about how to make the job search of Rotman students better. They gave us lots of post-it notes and colorful pens to do the process of design thinking. Finally, we had to present our ideas to an industry panel who were so generous of their time to hear from MBA students and to give their own advice at the same time.     As a side note, some second-year students were trying to find volunteers for their project and they were also doing design thinking. It was a good experience to know what it feels like to be on the other side as the interviewee. c. Kellogg Design Challenge  My friends joined this competition that was hosted by Kellogg Innovation and Design Association at the Northwestern University. They developed a really cool idea for P&G! Congratulations Team LOREM IPSUM! d. Tableau + Toronto Police Case Competition by RBAC and ROMA  My friend mentioned that she really enjoyed this case competition because it allowed her to explore the Tableau software more, which allowed them to leverage data visualization and using dashboard to solve a problem in Toronto. This software is useful for financial reporting, for summarizing performance metrics, and for communicating data analysis to managers and VPs. My friends won this case competitions and they had the opportunity to present their solution at the police headquarters. e. Venture Capital Investment Competition  I joined this competition because I was an entrepreneur in my past life and I wanted to learn more about how VCs think when they value companies. At first, I was so scared to join this because I had zero knowledge of the terms used by venture capitalists. However, I learned so much from my groupmates who were really good in doing financial modelling and valuations. We, as a team, learned that it was really important to build a connection and a rapport between the VC and the entrepreneur. Our team had to interview real start-up founders, defend our investment decision and negotiate a term sheet. Those who won this case competition got the opportunity to represent Rotman at the Canadian VCIC Finals in Halifax! During my internship, I joined OBIO and it helps health science start-up companies become successful in their business. We launched several valuable workshops. I just want to share with you the two blogs that I help them write. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and venture capitalism, you might find them helpful: How VCs Value Health Science Companies? Building Your Early-Stage Strategy Toolbox f. RMA's Kraft-Heinz Case Competition  I have mixed feelings with this case competition because it was a bit too long, but it was also fun and challenging at the same time. We had to present marketing plan for Kraft-Heinz within 10 days. It was tiring because we had a lot of things going on during that week and it was just hard to squeeze those creative juice at the moment. However, my awesome team and I were able to pull it off. Everybody in the team were so creative and we eventually won 2nd place and Kraft's new campaign was definitely inspired by our idea and they got 3.9M views for this campaign. Check this link: https://www.facebook.com/KraftPeanutButter/videos/1571257452897599/    My team and I spending the night until 2AM in Rotman. And also my team eating delicious GB Pulled Noodles as our teambuilding activity! B. Mentors  I was so delighted to have been chosen by Mr. Ivan Yuen, the founder of Wattpad. He offered me several advices based on his experience as an entrepreneur. He also kept his line open whenever I need help for my career track or whenever I just needed a general advice. He then generously organized a lunch with all his mentees and even introduced us to the recruiters who offered views on what they look for when they search for interns. I am truly grateful to have this opportunity and I look forward to helping Mr. Ivan back in the future.  Another helpful person who deserves a recognition is my BDC mentor, Caton Lai, who continuously supported me and has been available whenever I needed advice and guidance for the case competitions and projects that I had. He was the first person who enlightened me of what business design is, and he can think in another perspective that normal people would not immediately see. I'd like to formally thank him for sharing his time and knowledge to me! C. Workshops MCA Case Prep  The Case Prep Sessions held by MCA are one of the most important workshops that you would need to attend whether you are targetting consulting, finance or any other function because they are a good preparatory work for your interview. Most of the interviews in Canada will have some cases prepared for you to solve. MCA prepared files and case book that you can access as its member. Doblin Storytelling Workshop  BDC and REVCA were able to invite practitioners from Doblin, a global design consultancy, to conduct a workshop on visual storytelling that will be useful for presentation decks, portfolios, etc. Marketing Workshop  RMA was able to get Prof. Dilip Soman to conduct a workshop on acing a marketing interview. I think it was pretty good because he offered tips and tricks in how to conduct yourself and how to answer questions that would allow the interviewee to look better. Panel, Data and Innovation  RBAC and BTA conducted a panel discussion with guest speakers from Uber, Slalom, League and Scotiabank. They provided powerful insights about analytics on technology-driven companies. D. Headshot  Rotman offered free headshot photos that was conducted by volunteers. I heard that some people were not really happy with their photos and had to ask Nick Fang to retake them. I like what I got and grateful for it. E. Coffee chat  As most of you have heard, it is very important to widen your network in the business world especially in Canada. I heard from a finance-pursuing classmate of mine that they have to network with at least 70 people in the first years. Those who got several interviews networked with companies before the MBA program started. If you are not used to this culture, the upper years will always lend their time to help train you prepare for them, so network with upper years a lot too!F. Career Centre  I would compare career centre into a medicine that you do not like as a child, but you have to take it in anyways for your own good. Even if we did not have time with our courses, we still had to attend those mandatory career centre workshops. There are a lot of deliverables happening on the side as well. You will have to craft your cover letters, only to find that your coach will cut half of the things you diligently wrote. My personal tip is that have someone with a good job review your cover letter. I got more interviews after someone helped me revised my cover letter after the one I had in the career centre. G. Scholarship  Rotman hosted a breakfast to recognize the Dean's List for the second years and also to recognize those who got fellowships, entrance scholarship, and other awards! H. Offices Design Trek to Steelcase   After applying to secure a spot, I was one of the lucky people who got the chance to visit Steelcase's Worklife Centre, who works with leading organizations. They shared amazing and cool presentations on how they approach innovation through human-centered design.   https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nBAGD87KxOg/WjbsaUXUXUI/AAAAAAAACPM/2Li3ynj_e4IXMI8zr5qwFIizyXbszFufwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/IMG_8155.jpg Wattpad Mr. Yuen's nice office!    Jackman Reinvents This is one of my dream workplace, not only because of how creative this company is, but also because they have a dog inside their office!!! I. Info Sessions For visualization purposes, I posted the photos below that shows some of the info sessions I attended. As you can see there a LOT of info sessions and people expect you to join them not only to know the company, but also to network and to show interest to the companies. However, I would advice people to come prepared and be ready for some case works because companies are starting to incorporate doing group case problems and judging who stands out during the sessions. I heard that some people even got selected for interviews just because of these sessions. So come prepared!!           J. Careers Over Beers  As you can see, we've been through a lot in our first year. I feel so proud when we finally finished this term and felt like gods and goddesses of time management. We then had our first inter-class socials, in which our batch had the opportunity to network with the upper years and alumni and talked about careers. It just so happened that Section 5 also organized a party just a bar below the the bar where this was conducted. Thus, this party was extended further!    Stay tuned for the next extra-curricular activities blog in Term 2! Love, Wondersuite |
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sheiquiroga
Joined: 29 Jun 2016
Last visit: 06 Jan 2021
Posts: 103
Given Kudos: 16
Location: Philippines
Schools: Mendoza '19 (A$) Rotman '19 (A$)
GMAT 1: 660 Q47 V34
GPA: 3.46
Products:
02 Sep 2018, 12:02
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Bookmarks
| FROM Sheiquiroga - Current Student: Rotman Term 2 - Social |
|
I did not participate in a lot of social events in Term 2 mainly because of the weather. We were also too stressed out finding an internship for the summer at this time. However, some interesting things still happened: a. Valentine's Day - Candygram and Songgram  To celebrate heart's month, we had Rotman-wide activities, such as candygram and songgram. You can request a song for a small fee to be sung to someone during class. You can even dedicate a song to your professors. Singers included people from both first years and upper years! b. 90s party   This was one of the most fun parties we attended in Rotman. We are not getting any younger but why stress out with that when you can celebrate being 90s kids (most awesome generation  ).  c. Culture Eats https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TwZTWrd0-go/WucbQENZNmI/AAAAAAAAC9Y/5BzE7YlAwWUeKcM0ZJGc80-FTumuhHyFgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/46130ebf-6f9c-41b4-8015-e51c664098fa.jpg  There were several culture eats that happened, but I only joined the last one for South Asia. I regret being too busy and not joining the other ones because of conflict with my schedule. Be sure to enjoy tasty food of the world next year and learn more about various countries' culture. d. Chinese New Year  My section's social reps, Rex and Rosemary, decorated our classroom once again to celebrate Chinese New Year. Our classmates got the chance to eat tasty Chinese snacks and learned some stories about Chinese New Year through the video that was presented. e. Karaoke  I've been organizing karaoke sessions with my awesome singer batchmates. It was always good to sing out loud and release all your stress! We went to two different bars, but I would recommend the Bar + Karaoke since they have better room and technology though they are on the pricier side. f. Rotman Ladies  Women in Rotman will constantly organize some gatherings for our Rotman Ladies. https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-boCwqPjVEiw/WucaFxACaRI/AAAAAAAAC8c/5yvZv9IMglIk8b7Bl2nhFZyL5S0WgRUCgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/9f65eb1f-278e-4500-8b1e-a9622500e5f8.jpg g. Birthday Celebration   It was my birthday last February 5th. I did not host a party, but I just wanted to thank all my friends in Rotman who greeted me and prepared cakes for me. I also went to Ontario Science Centre with my partner to celebrate my birthday. For some reason, I've been celebrating my birthday every year in science museum. Is this the inner nerd calling?  Love, Wondersuite |
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