Trinity Term: Week Nine
With the final classes of the Trinity term finishing this week, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the electives that I took this term. Please note that these are my personal opinions and may not reflect those of the class. Remember, I am looking at these electives from the perspective of an engineer who wants to return to the technology sector.
Entrepreneurial Finance: The objective of this course is to develop an understanding of how early stage ventures get financed. This course looks at the deal through the eyes of the VC rather than the entrepreneur. Students taking this course are more likely to become entrepreneurs rather than VC’s and its a good way to understand what the other side is thinking. The course is did not go into as much detail as I would have liked, however the professor did a good job of drilling the most important concepts into our heads. The focus here is entirely financial i.e. there is nothing on identifying a good business opportunity although you should get that from your core courses. The assignment involved valuing an entrepreneurial venture and structuring a funding deal and was probably the most practical assignment in the Trinity term. Recommended.
Digital Marketing: This course aims to teach the skills of digital marketing, and to describe the disruptive effects of big data, digital media, and digital distribution channels on the practice of marketing. If you enjoy the marketing core course, you may want to consider this elective. I enjoyed most of the lectures in this course and the “Digital Marketing Ecosystem” module was particularly eye opening. All cases feature companies in the technology sector, we looked at companies such as Twitter, YouTube, Hubspot, Adobe, and AliBaba. The assignment involved setting up a Google AdWords account and spending 250USD on ads to promote a company of your choice and was quite interesting. Recommended.
Negotiations: Course objective is self explanatory. In my view this is a must do if you have not previously taken a negotiations class. Through a series of eight mock negotiations with your classmates, you become aware of your negotiating style and learn how to improve. I entered this course as someone who hated negotiating and exited with a very different perspective. You do need to prepare in advance for each class in order to get anything out of it. Highly Recommended.
Social Networks: This course seeks to prepare students for a career in leveraging social media platforms to build and sustain competitive advantage for established firms. This was the most fun course in the Trinity term. Cases featured popular and well known social networks such as FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Meetup, and Zynga. An added bonus was that the lecturer had written all the cases himself and thus the case discussion was very insightful. The assignments were not as much fun as the lectures, but overall it was a great class. Sadly, the lecturer was only visiting for the summer and hence it is unlikely to be offered again. Highly Recommended.
Corporate Turnaround: This course considers the ways in which corporations and public sector organisations attempt to change when they hit trouble, looking at both successful and unsuccessful cases. The course sounded good in theory but was poorly executed. One of the lectures has a dreary and rambling style of teaching and I ended up skipping most of his four lectures. There were a couple of lectures that were interesting, but if I had to do it again, I would give this one a miss. It may be worth taking this one if you want a light workload as there is only one 3000 word assignment to submit and you don’t need to attend class to gain the knowledge to write this paper. Not Recommended.
Reputation and Leadership (Audited): This sounded like an interesting class and I ended up auditing the class. While there were a few interesting concepts, I did not feel like this class was worth taking. This sentiment was shared by most of those who took this class. Not Recommended.
All in all, I’m quite happy with the courses that I selected. With a one year MBA, you have to make all your courses count and four out of five is quite good. If you are reading this post and are looking for advice on picking electives, a good rule of thumb is to choose courses that you have an interest in as long as the professor teaching the course is well regarded. In some cases it is well worth picking a course that you have a passing interest in if the professor is excellent. For example, professors such as Ludovic Phalippou (Asset Management and Private Equity) and Owen Darbshire (Negotiations) get rave reviews every year. There is also a sizeable percentage of the class who will pick courses based on timetable (no Friday classes) or on workload (number of assignments and when they are due). If you have been allocated a mentor, definitely ask them for advice via email or through the Facebook group. There is also an excel spreadsheet with the opinions of previous years batches floating around that you should be able to locate.
