Stage 1 of the company project was completed by delivering a presentation on the Post-secondary Education Industry to our assigned company, along with a 37-page report on the industry. There's nothing like meeting the senior executives at a company for the first time and delivering a presentation on the industry their company operates in - and hope to God you didn't screw the presentation up. Seeing as they had practical experience in the industry and all... It was another successful presentation though, and the company seemed to be very engaged with the project, hoping to actually get some useful help out of the 8-month project.
Then there was the Strategic Human Resources Management assignment. The assignment was to do a comprehensive HR review of any company we wished - preferably one with which someone from our group had experience. Laura on our team was spearheading this project, and because our team is once again ambitious, we did the report on the organisation she had previously worked for - the Government of Canada. I mean, why do something easy when there is something massive out there? Haha, once again we got ourselves in over our head. Granted, we didn't do the report on the whole government - just the Aerospace, Defence & Marine Department - but still.
That report was only 47 pages.
Oh, and I can't forget the Organisational Behavior assignment. This was to pick a chapter of our textbook and supplement the topic through analysis of 5 NEW peer-reviewed journal articles on the matter. 3 of them had to be empirical articles (full of lovely statistical analysis of experiments). Talk about fun (not). Thankfully this was only a 15 page report.
All those projects were in addition to our 6 classes, each with a 3.5 hour lecture each week, and additional 'personal development' classes that filled up seemingly every free half day.
Finally, February came to a close, bringing with it the start of study week for exams. Thank goodness for this week, because with all the projects going on there was never time to do all the assigned reading. At least this time I was better at strategically studying for exams and knew how to focus my efforts towards just the subjects that would be covered in the exams. Still, 6 exams is a lot to study for!
The week of exams brought plenty of stress and lack of sleep (naturally), but I survived. My favorite exam was the International Financial Statement exam. The structure of this exam involved receiving the annual report for a publicly-listed company an hour before the start of the exam. We had that hour to pour over the statement and do any preparation we wanted prior to starting the exam and seeing the question. Our instructor said he tries to select a company in an industry which no one in the class has had in-depth experience in, preventing someone from having a leg up on the exam.
He picked a winery. In Oregon. And then proceeded to ask banking-related type questions. Apparently he hadn't looked at my CV which indicated I had commercial banking experience on a wine-lending team. Let's just say I got an A+ =)
The night before our Corporate Finance II exam, a few people asked me to go over how to do a company valuation - something we figured was bound to come up on the exam seeing as we did one every week in class. The problem was that our lecturer for Corporate Finance 1 during the first term was not good, and those people without prior finance experience came out of that class still not understanding the material. So, the night before the exam I found myself facilitating a review session on valuation. Pretty soon our group's study office was filled with people as I went through the step-by-step process to do a simplified business valuation. I have to say, it was the most fun I've had studying for an exam. Everyone was in a good mood, especially as this was going to be our last exam and it was going to be another case study based exam where we would get to go over the case study for an hour before the exam started. After the exam the following morning, it was great to have one of my classmates come up to me afterwards saying 'I just did my first ever valuation and understood it - so thanks for the tutorial last night!' - it hadn't even ended up being a requirement to do a valuation on the exam. I later found out this person got an A as well on the test and I got a chocolate easter lamb as a 'thank you' gift later - one of the best feelings I've had all year =) Here's the chocolate lamb:
While I didn't repeat my straight-A performance from the first term, I did manage to walk away with all A's and B's, achieving above-average grades. Hooray!
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