Picking your electives

It is so important to plan ahead for your electives.  We have three this year, and I think one may be replaced by a required class next year.  In any event, our schedule is such that you can currently take electives only in the spring term.  I agonized over what to take.  At this point I am pretty tired of group projects.  I prefer non-esoteric classes (i.e. not organizational behavior-type classes) and I like writing papers.  With those constraints I set out to pick classes from among the MBA offerings.

The beautiful thing about those classes is they are only 10 weeks long!  There are two required full-term classes, so you have to choose whether you want to load up by taking 5 classes the first half of the semester and then have only two for the second half or whether you want one of the electives to be a full-term class.

One of the electives I chose is Real Estate Law which is a full semester.  It is normally not offered, but there was enough demand that it was added and it is a GREAT class!!  It's one of those classes you will use and use in your everyday life.  It overlaps somewhat with Business Law II, but reinforcement can never be bad!

The two 10-week classes I chose are both in the first half of the semester, so they will be over in two more weeks.  One is Investment Analysis.  I guess I missed the "Analysis" part of the description, so I was not pleased to find it has a lot of statistics (which I haven't studied in 35 years!).  It has proven really hard for me, but it is a valuable class to take if you ever plan to invest your money.  And you get to play this really awesome stock investment game.  It is the ONLY time in your life that you will have $1,000,000 to invest (at least the only time for me).

My last elective is Entrepreneurship which I tried really hard not to take.  My impression was that you HAD to participate in the Holloway presentation in May which is a pretty big deal.  As it turns out (thank goodness!) the Holloway competition is optional.  Basically you develop a business plan for a new venture-from start to finish.  Each week is a mini-presentation which made me uncomfortable at first.  It was the best thing I could have taken!  I am no longer nervous about presenting in public.  I actually submitted our plan for the Holloway, but I doubt that it is what they are looking for (they emphasize technology and our plan is a consulting company).

The one thing I would STRONGLY recommend about this class is that you have an idea for a company going into the first class; if you don't, you will work on someone else's idea.  That is fine, but it may not be something you believe in.  Believing in the company makes it EASY, which I found out when I did research on the market opportunities for our company.

Anyway, my advice is to plan ahead so you can take classes you are interested in; that fit in with the type of learning and work you prefer to do; and if there is a class you want to take that is not offered, ASK--it may be possible!