Mark and Jie's Journey to B-School

I’ve been sitting in a Spangler study room for the last three hours now working on Career Teams and International Financial Management.  I had to allocate all of the RC’s to their various Career Teams, which was a surprisingly painful process.  We wanted to make sure we didn’t have too many/too few people on any one team with any of the following in common: finance or consulting backgrounds, gender, section, or international experience.  While balancing three of the four seemed straightforward, once there were four factors to consider it started to get pretty irritating.  I’d think I was all done and then I’d realize I had a team with 3 people from Section I.  I’d try and swap one of them, but I had to find a team where I could swap woman-woman or Finance-Finance or something like that.  In the end, though, I think every team has no more than three finance people or two people in the same section, and no fewer than 3 women or 2 people with international experience.

My IFM assignment has been even more complicated.  1/3rd of the semester grade is based on a case write-up for one of about 4 cases scattered through the term.  I chose this one because it is based on international diversification, which I am moderately experienced with due to the CFA.  This is a serious data crunching case, including calculating annualized returns, standard deviations, and correlations in native and USD currencies for multiple time periods.  I don’t mind figuring this stuff out, in fact it’s kind of interesting, but the repetitive nature of the assignment is really getting to me.  Worst of all, that’s only parts 1 & 2 of 4…