Barilla pasta and a large Coke, delivered on a Honda while reading Stephen King, before deciding between Nintendo Wii or PlayStation! Who knew the EMBA would be so much fun? On the other side of life, no more Netflix, Champion’s League, weekly five aside or Saturday morning lie in. Although the benefits of the experience curve should see weekly 5 aside reintroduced before long. After 6 weeks now, a good routine and an addiction to Costa coffee have taken hold. I think the secret lies in getting a good start to the week and taking advantage of whatever few free moments arise in the day to think through the weekly case work. Like Tesco, every little helps. Although Financial Reporting class suggests Tesco used a little extra help.
I begin to wonder what I actually did with my free time before September, probably not as much as I should! Joking aside, I have been impressed not just by the quality of the class learning experience but also by the balance in module delivery. Personally, I look forward to CS on a Friday afternoon, the class has changed how I look at the most basic everyday products and now I look around at cans of coke and 7 Up and wonder who really extracts the value from their existence. Life was so simple before!
The first few weeks are a shock to the system but slowly you find your feet. The team based nature of assignments helps you to realise everyone is in the same boat and before long you establish some momentum. It’s hard to believe we’re just at the half way point of Semester 1 or as I like to think of it as one eighth of the way through the entire program. Week 7 sees delivery of two of the main group assignments and I’m looking forward to our well-deserved break week. Unfortunately, I am still awaiting that Satori moment but I have had a few others, regret, fear and dreaming about IFRS but all that has dissipated now. Overall, the experience is different to what I expected but I am very, very happy with it so far. The focus on team work adds a lot of value, before beginning, I naively thought I’d mastered time management, I know now I hadn’t. Hopefully with some of the big assignments out of the way, we’ll get some time to think about the exams, that long Christmas break and maybe even a holiday in January.
So far so good.
Terence Dunne ~ Executive MBA Year 1