Calling Chicago GSB 2008 applicants

I am sorry to report that the new ibid system sucks... the old system was really complicated -- the possibilities you could end up with could be real complex, but the new system just doesn't work as well. LAME.

Taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadaa.........

Feb 06 - quit my horrible job
Summer 06 - Take the gmat three fricking times, find a new job.
Autumn 06 - Apply to schools, go completely insane waiting to hear back from people.
December 06 - get in to the GSB, make my decision
Spring 07 - quit smoking (1 year, 3 months and 2 weeks, saving 9,414.66 cigarettes and $3,765.86)
August 07 - quit work again
Sept 08 - Start @ the gsb
March 08 - Start VC job
June 13, 2008 - Finish 1st year of school.

Its been a long road but wow has it FLOWN BY!

Rhyme you will have to give us an explanation of what you do at VC...a lot of us really dont know what it entails.

time does fly eh?

yeah, maybe a "Rhyme's Guide to what entry-level VC is" would be great in the B-School Life section.

Gimme a little time... I'll start one up

you're awesome rhyme (then again, you probably hear that all the time )

That's why I chose him as my Mentor

Changing the subject, I'm very happy with rent prices in Chicago, I was talking to some friends heading to NYC and Boston and the rents are just nuts (well NYC more than Boston, off course). I'll pay for a 700 sq ft 1 Bedroom, as much as my friend pays for a 400sq ft studio near Columbia, and $400 less then a guy who's going to Kennedy School (Harvard).

BTW we've decided where to live, it's option 3.

Can you expand on this ibid and why it sucks?

Sorry if it has been explained before.

It has not. It doesnt suck really.... i was just being pissy....

The old system had you bidding on a schedule or courses combined with alternates. That made things a bit complicated, but if you knew how to use it, it was pretty powerful.

If you are curious....under the old bid system, you might put in a bid that looks like this:



The way you read this is as follows: (warning, this might get hard to follow)

I'm bidding 2732 points on a SCHEDULE of courses that includes: 37000-01 (or 37000-02) and 35005-05 and 30000-01. The system will try to get me 37000-01, 35005-05 and 30000-01 for up to 2732 points per class. If 37000-01 costs more than 2732 points, then itll try to put me in 37000-02. If it can't put me in 37000-01, 35005-05 and 30000-01 OR into 37000-02, 35005-05 and 30000-01 then it moves to schedule 2.

In other words - the system tries to get me this COMBINED SCHEDULE:

37000-01, 35005-05, 30000-01
OR
37000-02, 35005-05, 30000-01

The "tricky" thing about bidding in the old system is that if ANY of the schedule combinations in a schedule cost more than your bid, you get nothing - its not like it will say "well, you get 37000-01 but I couldnt put you in 35005-05." If it can't put you in 35005-01, even if it can put you in 30000-01, it just throws out the whole schedule. That means you have to bid smart -- effectively bidding as to what you think the most expensive class in the schedule is. If it cant get schedule 1, it goes to 2.

Schedule 2 becomes a bit more complex to read, its saying that for 2544.. I'll take any combination of:

37001-01 OR 02
AND 38002-02 OR 81
AND 30000-01 OR 81

So in this case the system will try to get me into:

370001-01, 38002-02, 30000-01
OR
370001-01, 38002-02, 30000-81
OR
370001-01, 38002-81, 30000-81
OR
370001-02, 38002-02, 30000-01
OR
370001-02, 38002-02, 30000-81

you get the idea...

What that means in practice is that you have to think about all the permutations possible with this combination - its kind of messy, and it can get a little mind numbing to make sure that a crappy schedule can't be made from those combinations, but .... the flipside is that it gives you an awful lot of flexibility. You can theoretically create cross-class combinations like schedule 3 - where I'm saying "ok im not getting the classes I wanted in schedules 1 and 2, so lets try for a more complex list"...

If you are wondering why the same courses are listed in schedule 1 and schedule 2 and schedule 3... since, after all, if you didnt get them in schedule 1 for 2800 points, why even try for them in schedule 3 for 23? The reason is that you dont know what failed in schedule 1. It could be that I could get 37000-01 for 15 points, but 35005-05 costs 10,000... no point in giving up on 37000-01... of course you dont know that until later, but thats why they repeat.

Anyway, so thats basically the old system. Theres a bit more to it (like how to arb the system, which you can do, with almost no risk... thats going away)...but thats basically it.

The good thing about this old system:
* You could game the system and make points if you knew how. Thats great for the winner.
* It was complex, but you could be very very specific about your schedule while also offering up a LOT of alternates so that you would be sure to get something you wanted.
* You could bid on both evening and day classes.

The bad about the old system:
* Its complex and really really confusing at first.
* People try to game it, and that sucks for the losers.
* Since people bid on a SCHEDULE - prices are hard to estimate... did class X go for 10,000 points because its really that popular or because a lot of people bid on Y as well, which is popular, and X is just common in that schedule? (If you dont get that, dont worry)
* The evening / part time folks could bid on our class schedules at the same time we did, which raised our prices.

So.............

The new system works a bit different. Its simpler.

You bid by class. So I say "I'll pay 1000 for X and 5000 for Y". The benefit of course is that you get a bit more granularity in your bidding strategy. (One thing that can happen in the old system is that you bid 2500 for classes X,Y and Z - because you want class X, you get X for 0 points but it turns out Z, which you really didnt care about and wouldn't want to have paid for, goes for 2400...so you get hte class you wanted, but you could have had it for free). So, the new system is a lot easier to understand. Bid X on class A, bid Y on class B, bid Z on class C. If X costs less than A, you get it. If Y costs less than B, you get it. .... In the old system, if X or Y or Z cost more than whatever your bid was, you didnt get anything. So thats good.

The new system does away with arb. Thats either good or bad depending on who you are. (in my case, i arb'd each round and made points, so it hurts me)

Full time students cant bid on evening courses until AFTER the evening students bid. A lot of people are bitching about this, but frankly, the opposite is also true - and thats going to lower the prices of classes at Hyde Park and probably raise prices at gleacher, which I personally think is a good thing.

The new system however has one flaw that pisses me off. In the old system I could tell it specifically I want to take 30000-01 or 30000-02 but not 30000-03 or -04 or -81. In other words I could say "I'm willing to do accounting on monday mornings with prof X or tuesday afternoon with prof Z, but I'm not willing to do it Thursday with prof Z or Friday with prof Y". Note how I can say yes to one section with prof Z, and no to another. The new system only lets you say: Give me any lecture of accounting at this time (with any prof) , or give me any lecture with this prof (at any time), or give me any lecture period (any prof/any period).

Thats not quite the same - if you are paying close attention, you will notice theres no way for me to say accounting with prof Z on Tuesday but NOT on Thursday with Z. Thats not a big deal always, but is a huge !@(#! deal if Prof ABC teaches Thursday afternoon, Tuesday Morning and say, Saturday Morning. I might be indifferent between Tuesday and Thursday - but I'm certainly not indifferent between say Tuesday Thursday and Saturday - even if professor ABC is good!!

I've figured out a workaround for it, but you can really only use the workaround one on class in your schedule. Better than nothing.

The new system also just has some bugs - you cant sort classes by quarter, you really cant filter search results, insanely stupid: you can sort course seat limits on any field except
the most important one: remaining seats!, etc.

So the new system:
+ easier to understand
+ no arb
+ all those part timers who think they are slick by enrolling part time and just taking a full time course load are gonna be really pissed
+ you cant get charged points for a class you wouldnt have wanted to pay for

but.........
- flexibility is a little bit more limited, impossible to construct a complex permutation of schedules
- no arb
- you cant bid on evening courses during rounds 1-3, and they will almost certainly fill up
- there is NO point history for the new system

I just realized, that is probably the most poorly written post ever. Its been a long day at work. My apologies.

my brain just exploded from reading that post, rhyme.

Actually, it is a rather straightforward post. Seriously. It is just that the bidding itself is so complex, that you can't talk simple about it. It is also the first explanation of the bidding system, that I came upon. In all other cases students just said: Oh, it's complex, but don't sweat about it. You'll get the hang of it once you are in school So, thanks a lot for taking time to explain things. Kudos to you.

Also, how did you manage to arb?

Yea Rhyme, how do you manage to arb?

After you have your schedule, do you sell classes or is there a period where you play around buying different schedules?

arb was simple. There are (were) four bidding phases. In the first phase you get the courses you want. In the second phase, there was a way to say "give me ANY of these courses" for X points. So I could get my 3 or 4 classes in phase 1, then bid on a list of 30 courses for 1 point each - since the max # of courses you can have is 5 - I'd almost certainly end up with one of the 30 courses, basically for free (1 point). I don't care what the 5th course I end up with is, just as long as its something cheap.

Then, knowing that prices tend to increase in each bid phase -- because people get more desperate and classes start to fill up - odds are, dropping that class I got for 1 point in the final round of bidding will net me more than 1 point. Thats because I get back whatever the price in that round is - not the price I paid.

So to recap:
You bid on the classes you want in round 1.
In round 2 you bid on "give me any of these X classes for one point"
You do nothing in round 3, and just watch as more classes fill up and options start to get more limited
In round 4, when the most desperate of people are making last minute changes, you drop the class you got for 1 point, knowing that, by now, odds are, it'll be worth well more than 1 point.

Similarly, an old trick that was for 2nd years to bid on marketing strategy with mcgill before the 1st years do in the fall (2nd years bid before 1st years in the fall quarter) - pick it up for a couple thousand points, knowing that first years clamor for the class and raise the price to 8000 every year. If you pick the right classes and are a bit lucky you can really make a killing.

Technically, its not truly arb because there is a downside risk of 1 point... but really, its arb.

Just so we are clear: you can't arb anymore. Now you get back whatever you paid when dropping a class.

I thought there is a database with the descriptions of courses (including their rankings among students, statistical bidding information) What's the function of the number of remaining seats? Does the bidding price depend on it?

There are a few databases including one for course evaluations and one for descriptions ...and of course as well one for historical bids (though those values are basically meaningless now).
In the simplest form, the number of remaining seats matters because the fewer seats left, the less likely you are to get one.

But if you really want to get into the details, you want to know because it might impact your bidding strategy. Basically, a course price is defined as the bid at which the last person who didn't get it bid. The concept is that this fairly compensates the person who didn't get it by charging everyone else a "fair" price. In other words, you might bid 5000 points for a class, but the lowest successful bid, called the LSB, might be 900 -- and the next lowest might be 700 - in which case you pay 700, not 5000. So, when bidding first opens, basically, the 66th lowest bid is the one that sets the price (assuming 65 total seats and that at least 66 people bid). If the class doesn't close -- that is, seats remain -- then the price is just 0 (that is, everyone who wanted the class got it).

The reason you want to know how many seats are left in a class is thus simple: its going to impact the price. Imagine that in round 1 60 out of 65 seats get taken. Those 60 people all got the class for 0. Now imagine that in round 2 -- 10 people want to take the class. 5 of them won't get it, and the class will go for some amount of money. If you just looked at the results of round 1, without looking at how many seats were left, you might say "wow, the class went for 0 points, I'll just bid 100 points for it.", but if you knew that there were only 5 seats left, you'd probably realize that 100 points isn't going to be enough to get one of the remaining 5 seats.

Although that class might have gone for 0 points in round 1, it might go for 500 or 1000 or more in round 2 if there are few seats left. I've seen classes go from 0 in round 1 to 5000 points in round 4. (which is exactly why the arb thing worked, and although you cant arb anymore, you still want to know how much it goes for).

A good example is what happened to me this summer. I was thinking of taking a course, lets call it course A, and if I couldn't take that I'd take course B. Course A was a class taught both at gleacher and at hyde park during the year, so I couldn't bid on Course A until round 3. Part of the new rules. (Course A and B were evening courses this summer). Course B however was a special one-time course that was only being taught this summer, so it was open to me to bid on immediately. (Again, part of the new rules)

I chose not to bid on course B immediately, but rather just wait and bid course A thinking that I'd likely be able to get it. After round 1, I saw that A almost filled up - 44 out of 45 seats full. Course B had 42 out of 45 filled. Had I bid on course B immediately in round 1 - which I could have -- I would have got it for free. Now in round 2, I realized that I couldn't get course A -- or at least, it was really unlikely -- so I bid on course B. Realizing that there were only 3 seats left, I bid almost 2000 points, but I wasn't successful... and thats why you want to know how many seats are left.

To be clear, the new system tells you how many are left, but you can't filter or sort your searches by remaining seats which would be helpful.