Summer Term: Weeks One and Two (summer electives)
As mentioned earlier, I decided to stay back in Oxford to work on a strategic consulting project (SCP). However my team and I decided to take a week off before starting the project so that we could recover from the end of the Trinity term. There is still quite a bit of activity at the business school as the first of the two elective sessions took place during the first two weeks of the summer term (The second session will take place during the last two weeks). Some interesting electives were being offered and I decided to audit a couple of the courses. The electives are taken along with the executive MBA’s and it is an interesting experience. In keeping with the theme of my last two posts, I am including my impressions of the two electives.
Private Equity: Private Equity was also offered as an elective during the Trinity term. The course takes place over the first two weeks and the content is identical to the one in the regular term. The only difference is in the assignments, which are slightly less rigorous. Hence if you are interested in learning about Private Equity but are not a quant, taking the course in summer may be worth considering. T Be warned that the professor is quite a critic of the business practices in the PE industry and if you are looking for cheerleading of the industry, you will be disappointed. On the other hand, there is quite a lot to be critical of and even though I have no interest in doing PE, I found the course to be quite informative. The professor is excellent and the guest speakers were quite good. Highly Recommended.
Business in Africa: Business in Africa is a summer only elective. I decided to audit the course as I had heard many excellent reviews of the Business in China elective that ran in the Trinity term. This course was not as well received. Though we had an expert on the subject, the course needs more work. The first few lectures were good, but each subsequent lecture declined in quality. Since it is the first year this course is being run, I am hopeful that it will be improved upon. One interesting point in the course was that there were certain moments at which I felt that the knowledge I had acquired in other courses was coming together nicely during this course. For instance, we had a lecture on the private equity industry in Africa and I found the concepts learned in the PE elective to be quite useful. Another lecture involved looking at Walmart’s expansion in Africa, and we used frameworks from the Strategy core course to analyze the case.
