A Hectic Week

The end of first semester is approaching faster than expected at LBS EMBA28. Time is moving and chapters are piling with a lot of backlogs to summaries and master them. Planning to spare time for intensive personal sessions to review those chapters. Time management is essential to overcome the loads related to work duties and courses preparations.

An intensive week was just concluded. Preparations for this week assignments already started end of last week. Reviews and optimizations continued till late evening throughout the week. It was overwhelming considering the pressure and responsibilities in hands. Glory to all classmates’ mothers.

Starting the week with our first course “Data Analytics”. Our facilitator Dr. Francis Okoye took over the course and heading to Linear Programming and Regression. Titles looks difficult to understand, slides showing formulas came out of nowhere. Once simplified and explained, then applied on excel in parallel with the facilitator became more realistic and comprehensive. Using business examples shed more lights to the reasons behind those functions. Finding the correlation, intercept and slope were our target in this session. For example, having the records of sales, we were able to find the relation between the sale and advertising and plan our forecast. Inserting the values on a chart was known. However, extracting the formula from the trending line was total knew. It cleared our vision for the source of data seeing in graphs for proper interpretation.

Another interesting topic in this course was the linear programming. Understanding the context, build the formulas from the illustration, then apply it on excel. Interesting examples from real life were really helpful to understand the principles of maximizing the profit or minimizing the cost. Once the data were tabulated on excel, go to “Solver”, assign the parameters and without worrying about the backend processing, Solver will get the answer.

To continue with the second course of Corporate Financial Accounting, our Professor Chiemeka Ojiabo is taking the lead in this course. Up till date, we are struggling to input the financial entries into the Balance Sheet with all the confusions related to Debit an account and credit another. Is this activity a fixed or current asst? Liability or Equity? Is it cash or on credit? As long as your sheet is not balanced, then definitely an entry is wrong. Once balanced, you can go to sleep. Kudos to our accounting members in our group spending their time explaining and putting all their efforts to keep everyone understand the transaction before moving to another.

Days and nights were spent on Analyzing Business Problems, multiple group assignments were given ahead of time to prepare and submit. The facilitator Dr. Segun Shogbanmu is very serious. Attending the class unprepared is not an option. This course combines both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Reaching the conclusion and recommendation for each business had to go through multiple stages. Analyzing numbers became a mandate. Yet numbers alone were not sufficient; it should be merged and weighted equally with the criteria and alternatives for the correct decision. Dealing with uncertainty was very challenging. The Role Play was a simulation of real case whereby the groups’ members hold a different position than others and we should challenge each department’s decision to agree on an action plan for our business. It would have been more interactive and effective if it was given physically in-class.

The intensive week was not going to be more nervous without Management Communication given by Dr. Eugene Ohu. Preparing the outlines and present live in front of everyone and give the feedback to each other is the real learning. Constructive comments and respects to each other opinion was a mandate. You feel relaxed taking comments until your name is called to present, this time standing for body language assessment. Waiting my turn to be called was not an option this time. I could not wait for a sudden call, being prepared, I took the third position to present and sat down watching others presenting while writing my comments and learning from others’ observations.

Meeting today with our MBA Director was a window to express our concerns and challenges we are facing in the program. With hope that it will be taken into consideration for the benefit of our class executives.