The Business Foundations course starts tomorrow. This is meant for students who have no/little finance, accounting or quantitative background. I fit nicely into this category, being a law graduate, former dotcommer and social media practitioner.
Why the need for a Business Foundations course, on top of the existing course? INSEAD’s MBA programme is intense and accelerated. What other schools teach in 2 years, INSEAD teaches in 10 months. So it is particularly difficult for those who have no business backgrounds to hit the ground running.
The decision to take the extra course has been pretty subjective, at least for my batch. Some in Fonty have organised their own course package at a much cheaper price, because the official course costs €1,500. When you’re already paying €50,000 in fees, any additional cost must hurt.
We met up this Sunday evening for a short talk by our incoming Dean of the MBA Programme, Jake Cohen who was one of the top-rated professors at Harvard Business School. We learnt he was also the one who came up with the Business Foundations Course, as he empathised that it can be difficult to grasp concepts initially.
So from this Monday to Friday, lessons begin at 9am and end at 3pm. However there will be 5 hours of homework per day, which is an official estimation based on our seniors’ own experience.
It may be a little scary plunging into graphs, statistics, spreadsheets and piles of readings, but it’s exciting as well. I hope that my groupmates and I will work well together and don’t take more than 5 hours per day to resolve issues ;-)
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