Quarter 11 - Week 4

For the first time in three years, New Years was not ruined. Yes, I understand that education is a very important of life, but in my perspective so is the concept of starting afresh, after a night of frivolity! And the events should never meet... NOBODY, atleast no sane person, likes to spend New Year's in college, no matter how insightful the day's classes are. And so, for the first time in my life at PGSEM, New Years was spared. And I spent it the way any normal person would... sleeping.

New Enterprise Financing

Man, we were still on that damn Vegetron case. I thought we'd done and dusted it, but apparently not. Luckily though, we actually finished it halfway into the first session and then we moved on to Adjusted Present Value, where we describe the effects of the various sources of funding on the enterprise. We did quite a bit of glancing over the different types of funds and the math of it all. The Corp Fin textbook actually describes the entire funda quite well. Finally, we're ready to tackle the case of Cartographics Online next week.

Reinvention through Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Learning

So we were supposed to read a couple of intrapreneurship cases for the day. And apparently there were a few cases from a couple of weeks back which the prof wanted us to go through. He kindly sent a reminder on the day before classes, so that we'd be prepared. The day of the class, he walks in with full enthu, gets us warmed up and starts discussing the case. After around fifteen minutes, he makes a reference to one of the cases and goes.. "Do you see it?" with all the expectation in his eyes. 10 seconds of pindrop silence. And he asks "Didn't you read?"... 10 seconds of pindrop silence. So he ignores that, and goes to the next point. Within a couple of minutes, he asks "Get the connection?", and when the same thing happens, there's this incredulous look on his face. "Has none of you done the readings for today? Those of you who did, raise your hands!". Surprisingly, for a class consisting of PGSEM and PGP, five-six feeble hands go up, out of over seventy. For the first time during my PGSEM journey, I heard a prof admonish the hell out of us. This guy was furious! Doesn't raise his voice beyond an acceptable limit, but his anger is evident. He explains how REIL is not a subject where you can just sit there, you get to take a lot away from each story he brings forward, provided you read the case. Each reading, each case is picked after strong deliberation on whether it brings out a key value, and if we don't read it... it's as good as doing nothing. He continues the class, every once in a while sighing when we don't get it, shakes his head and moves on. Towards the end of the session, he calmly tells us not to bother coming the next day if we don't read the cases for it. He ends by saying that if we continue not to read, he'll just sit back and make us do presentations in each session while he grades them. It's not something anyone of us wants...

The next session obviously has a marked difference. Everyone's commenting, bringing out points and the prof's keeping up with the pace by jotting them down and adding some refinements of his own. I know that most of us consider this elective to hold some deep content, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for us to keep up with his requirements if we're to unearth it.