vantan: December 2008 Archives

Right after the last exam, we headed to the bar, and were greeted by a lovely ice sculpture shaped in the words “INSEAD” and “A1 A2” which are the names of the two sections in Singapore. You pour vodka on the ice and drink at one end of the sculpture. It was very impressive. And lots of free champagne, funded by our champagne fines. Our social reps did an amazing job!

At the bar, the Zero Coupon band gave what was perhaps its finale performance. I also “guest-starred” by playing one song, and was pleasantly surprised at receiving lots of cheers and praise from classmates. I am feeling the love!!! :) It was great to play in a band where there’s lots of spontaneous teamwork - especially in my case as I didn’t rehearse with them before that. It went well enough.

Our MBA Dean Jake Cohen even joined us at the bar for a while. Later, one classmate (who was a bit tipsy) saw our INSEAD Dean, Frank Brown, walking out of the back of the building and called after him, “Mr Brown!”. Frank Brown actually popped back to ask him what’s up… it was hilarious.

Another classmate barged into the P1 Business Foundations class and popped a bottle of champagne, welcoming the participants to INSEAD and probably stunning them. He later got dunked into the fish pond.

We left for dinner at Cicada and had a great time, then headed to Oosh! at Dempsey for drinks. Met RT after that for and we caught up over ice cream. It was a great night!

My tasks for the next few days:

Sort out INSEAD High-Tech club rebranding… Seems we may have to split up the Fonty and Singapore clubs if the direction is different. Have yet to hear back from Fonty and do a teleconference to sort things out. So we will miss the first round of club presentations to the new P1s and will aim for the second round. In the meantime, there are other new interesting clubs for you guys to check out. For those of you with media, telecoms and tech experience and interest, do save a bit of time for us, OK? ;-)

I am also in charge of putting together the Dash video, which I’ll work on during my holidays, so watch out for it!

Also, I will be going on two holidays: a cruise to Penang, then back home for Christmas, then to Dalat in Vietnam to play golf. Yesss….

My holiday reading will be a new book on Social Networking written by a professor and a senior research fellow at INSEAD. It’s called Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom. I am considering doing an independent project on social networks if it’s feasible and there aren’t other electives I want to take. Or at the least, getting in touch with the authors because it is an area of high interest to me, as many of you know.

Also, the job market is pretty tight and our Alums who graduated in the last difficult period (post-dotcom boom) have sent us advice via Career Services. Some say we should just go back to our old job/company and hang in there, gain more experience and then when times are better, move on to what we were planning to do. This is a bad time for aspiring career switchers. So we’re grouping ourselves according to experience, expertise and region and leveraging more on our networks there.

Oh well. We’ll see how things pan out. They can’t get much worse than they already are, or so I hope.

Exams could’ve gone better, but this time there seemed to be more people with similar sentiments. Overall I am sure I’ll do better than in P1. Heard from another classmate-blogger that our seniors’ average grade for Finance (a really, really tough paper) was 17%! One finance-savvy classmate told me we should pray for the standard deviation to also be 17, so even if you get 0 you will be only 1 standard deviation away, and pass. Which sounds pretty ridiculous but that’s how the Z-curve works.

Also in P1 I didn’t get any negatives (a negative score means you’ve failed and definitely need to resit), though I may have to resit something anyway to pull up the average. If so, it will likely be the paper(s) I took while suffering from food poisoning…

I actually like our Finance professors and wish it didn’t always have to end this way, especially as I learnt so much from this class. Prior to INSEAD my knowledge of Finance was zero (not counting knowing how to manage my bank accounts, buy and sell shares, fund my projects).

Since then, my finance knowledge has moved up to, say, 50% or 60% and for the sciency/engineering types who grasp quantitative concepts faster, say it’s 70% or more. However compare that to classmates who have worked in Finance all/most of their lives, have a Masters or other qualification in Finance and gets full marks the P1 Finance quiz. There’s a bunch of them asking questions so advanced that the professors say it’s beyond the syllabus. Let’s say that at INSEAD, their knowledge moved up from 90% to 95%. Obviously on an absolute scale there’s no contest, and on a comparative scale I’m pummeled to death. However thanks to the smarties, we also get a bigger standard deviation which will hopefully save my ass.

The last exam, Process and Operations, had twists in the questions, some easier, one definitely the hardest, and I kicked myself for not spotting some things but oh well, it’s over. I hope the soft subjects will help me. I told God, “If there’s only one subject I can do well in, let it be Marketing”. However the paper required a lot more calculations than we expected! Doing well at Strategy would be nice too, as I plan to move into a strategic role. I will be focusing on these areas (as well as Organisational Behaviour) because I have a genuine interest and my career path will continue in that direction. Whatever you do, as you move up in life, you will have to start managing and leading people, groups, organisations. Had an interesting conversation over the weekend with my former HR boss about it and maybe I will chat more with her in future on this topic.

Still, I wish I could ‘get’ quant concepts faster like my classmates with engineering, finance and science backgrounds. Those of us with more artsy backgrounds rely a lot on more savvy classmates to explain things to us, and I’m grateful for the Finance help, particularly to “Professor” RB, and to MEK for clarifying things shortly before the exam. What gets me however is that the standard at INSEAD is high, it is not easy to get in, and I’m in a company of very talented, brilliant people.

Overall for the subjects, I feel I grasped the key concepts enough that they will linger in my memory, and I can apply them to my future work and that will be important in the long run. However in the short run, I must get through to the next round!!!

That’s all I have left to say about the exams. Onward to P3!

Two articles I spotted in the local press today refer to INSEAD:

The Straits Times ran an article, ‘Surge in MBA applications’, a rising trend in this economic downturn. [You can now view the full article.]

Here are relevant excerpts about INSEAD:

“French business school Insead reports more applications today from the unemployed, compared to a year ago.”

Our local press always refers to us as a ‘French’ school despite our slogan, ‘The Business School for the World’. Our PR team really needs to work on this. I thought our Dean Frank Brown was very particular about our positioning as international, not French, especially now that we have centres in other regions as well.

On increasing the cohort sizes:

“Others like Insead are expanding enrolment next year, from 919 to 960.”

This statement as a standalone is OK, but wait till the end of the article…

There are quotes from various MBA applicants in Singapore and their reasons for doing an MBA now. An incoming INSEAD MBA is cited:

“Computer engineering graduate Chow Lee Ling, 28, is looking forward to starting at Insead’s Fontainebleau campus next month, because she will ‘get to analyse the crisis as it unfolds in her classes with people from different backgrounds’.

She also hopes that networking with successful Insead alumni will give her a ‘leg-up’ in her career.”

(To the incoming student: Actually, your Finance classes will begin with a much more basic and mundane topic, the time value of money, and in between you will probably get insights from professors on the crisis. But yes, the networking is great :))

[Update: Lee Ling wrote to me after viewing this post - she was misquoted in the article.]

What is slightly puzzling is how the article is structured, such that after quoting these students from various schools, it then ends by mentioning two ‘top’ schools - Rutgers and Chicago.

“However, schools say the spike in applications means it may be harder to get in as top schools like Chicago Booth School of Business, which takes in about 90 students yearly, and Rutgers, which accepts 50 students a year, are not increasing their intake.”

The sentence is clumsy and misleading. I interpret the overall point is that the really good schools wouldn’t increase their cohort size - perhaps referring to quality control. Which then implies that INSEAD isn’t as good. Admittedly, overcrowding is a valid concern as we’re already feeling there are too many students on campus. But increasing cohort sizes isn’t indicative of diminishing quality. Some top US business schools have far larger intake sizes than we do. So the point here is weak.

Also, the writer should understand that a top university doesn’t necessarily have a top business school. For instance, universities like Oxford and Cambridge are also top in many areas but their business schools are ranked above average, not number 1. We should compare apples to apples.

Next, I wouldn’t deny that Chicago is a very good university with a great business school, but it only has an EMBA programme here - the MBA programme is only in Chicago - so again, the journalist is not making the right comparisons.

And when you do make the right comparisons: INSEAD’s ranking is far better than Rutgers’s business school, which is not in the BusinessWeek top 100 at all but is only listed as as “U.S. Programs Also Considered For Ranking”. INSEAD is currently #3 on the non-US list, #6 in the Financial Times 2008 rankings after Harvard, with Chicago as #9.

The article also praises Rutgers for updating their syllabus to include macroeconomics to help students better understand the current economic crisis…

“Others like Rutgers are wasting no time retooling their MBA programme to make offerings more recession-focused. Come next year, it will offer electives like a macroeconomic policy course examining the US credit crunch to address the current climate.”

…when INSEAD has long included macroeconomics as a core (compulsory) course. We saw it coming a long time ago. And ‘International Political Analysis’ is also a core course, so you can say we’re very holistic; definitely a school with an international, big-picture outlook that fits our slogan.

In short: Between us and Chicago, we are the best business schools with campuses in Singapore. And we have the best MBA programme in the country.

Maybe we have a communication problem; maybe our official spokespeople aren’t that passionate about it and other schools seem to get the limelight more. But I’m sure many classmates are proud of being at INSEAD for many other things as well and we ought to have better recognition overall.

Of course, what matters more is how much you get out of the school, not just the prestige that goes with the brand name, but I’m also sure if you name-drop “Harvard” you will see Singaporeans going all agog with admiration. INSEAD is much newer, more specialised (business only), and thus it faces an uphill battle in name recognition among people outside the business community.

There is another article which briefly quotes INSEAD’s Executive MBA director on Singapore’s decision to embark on a trilateral partnership involving US and Chinese universities.

We’ve had our Strategy, Managerial Accounting and Leading Organisations exams so far. Today marked the last of our existing group’s work together. We’ve done assignments together for the last 4 months - that’s 40% of our time at INSEAD. I can hardly believe it’s over!

We worked pretty well for the last group exam, and did quite well too, and we’re hoping for a similar result this time. We had the same plan but this time more time was spent brainstorming as it was a more complex, intertwined case. But our views were aligned and our writing styles were (amazingly) so similar this time that integration was smoother.

As with any other group with a diverse mix of people, we have had different views about things over the course of time. I believe these differing views helped to create a stronger alloy and avoided groupthink. And I do hope we will all remain friends.

Onwards to Marketing, Finance and Operations exams next week!

Today was my supersmart groupmate RB’s birthday, and I was trying to think of something interesting to do to him. It also happened that this morning, our Strategy professor liked our group’s submissions for the Apple case and wanted us to present our views on a particular question.

My groupmates asked me to make the presentation as I was the one who prepared the slides for that question! Despite being a big Machead (i.e. Apple fan) I had long abandoned any notions that my work would be singled out for show and tell at INSEAD. So this certainly gave me a confidence boost which will hopefully help as the Strategy exam is this Thursday!

RB had improved many of our slides before submitting it, so he offered to come up with me to present. Then I realised we could spring him a little surprise. So I told RB he could present 1 slide and I would present the other. I quietly passed a note to another groupmate MEK to tell her that when RB presents we should sing ‘Happy Birthday’. And so the whole class sang!

We proceeded with our presentation. At the end, the professor told me ‘very good’ and we saw similar comments written on our paper submission :)

Then we got news from our Marketing professor that we scored 93% in our last case. I think we learnt from our mistakes in the previous case and did a much better job this time. We seem to get consistently high scores for analysis and this time, full marks for recommendation. Last week we scored 25/25 for a Managerial Accounting case where the mean was just 19.82 marks, even though at one point it nearly killed some of us (with angst). So it is heartening to know we can get full marks for qualitative components as well. Overall I hope this makes our group above average. We need every ‘competitive advantage’ we can get! ;-)

Gotta go. This may be the last you’ll hear from me until after the exams which end next week (unless something very significant happens)…

After interrogating various classmates, with all of them refusing to tell me what exactly I was nominated for on Santa’s naughty list (they were made to swear an oath of secrecy to non-attendees), I finally found someone who told me.

I was nominated, apparently, for having 1000+ Facebook friends and updating my status 15 times in 20 minutes. Wow, someone counted?! :P

How can it happen? Well, I have set things up for automatic updates. When I update my blog, it pings Twitter so that my Twitter subscribers are alerted to a new blog post. And when Twitter is updated, my Facebook status is updated automatically as well. It is a whole chain of events. You can call it an assembly line with no bottleneck. Of course, I can also choose to Twitter without blogging, and update my Facebook status without blogging or Twittering. So you can imagine the potential here.

Having said that, I don’t think I could have done 15 updates in 20 minutes! But I might just do that now to prove your point. Since I’m naughty already, I have to live up to the reputation, no?

I guess it doesn’t help to announce I just added 2 more friends this evening. Actually a few hundred friends come from INSEAD alone, and because I also joined our juniors’ Facebook group a lot of them have become my Facebook friends too. I have many friends from other schools and workplaces. Then there are 200 odd people I play Mob Wars with, and I don’t know them in person and they can only view my Limited Profile. Apart from that and several other random friends of friends or people I’ve met online via blogs or other community channels, I know everyone else personally.

INSEAD’s very own Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) is coming to Campus this evening. And apparently my presence was expected, because it seems Sinterklaas thinks I have been naughty in trying to do well this period and might thus affect the Z-curve.

I am not sure what punishment would have been meted out on me, but since I have dinner plans tonight, too bad! (In Singlish: You want to saboh me? I siam!)

And me, disrupt the Z-curve? I am so flattered. I’d be happy with an average score - anything so I don’t have to resit any papers. If it’s Z-curve disruptors you want, I’ll gladly volunteer my groupmate RB of 6 Sigma fame. I’m sure he has a much greater impact on the Richter scale.

Stress levels all around seem to be rising as we wind down to the final week before P2 exams. This week for me has been one of improving relationships with classmates I didn’t know so well, and confronting a couple of sensitive incidents, which is also good training for me.

My style is more collaborative than confrontational. I usually do not go heads-on with people unless I feel very strongly against something. And those of you who’ve been my colleagues will know quite well that I can be quite outspoken.

Future business leaders of the world can be nice, but they shouldn’t be pushovers, either. That’s all I can say about this week.

As INSEADers are aware, we need at least 3 languages to graduate with our MBA. This is my second (and hopefully last) attempt to pass French at basic level.

I took my Delf A2 exam at Alliance Françise today. It started at 9am and my oral component ended at around 12.40pm. I was there with HT, another INSEAD classmate. We’ve been going for private French lessons together. I was fairly confident it would be better than the RELC exam we took, which was more like B1 standard as it was meant to test French as a second language as well.

Today, we were supposed to do the Listening Comprehension first, but some students arrived late, and after waiting a few minutes in vain, my coordinator said we would all do the written comprehension first. I found it fairly easy and finished with time to pre-read the topics listed in the Listening Comprehension and the Essay section. I thought it was quite doable.

Then the last student came in and we all listened to announcements in French. I thought that was also straightforward though after discussing my answers with HT I might have made a few mistakes. However I am sure I will get at least 50% for these two sections.

HT’s coordinator, in the next room, warned the students that there was a final question at the back of the exam paper. Mine didn’t say anything and I discovered to my chagrin that I had to write a second letter. This last question had two words in the instructions I was not sure about! However I learnt that I made the right guesses - I had to ask for information and also send gifts. I’m not sure if I made the word requirement but oh well, hopefully my first essay will get a higher grade to make up for it.

The oral component was harder than expected. We had 10 minutes to choose which topics and pictures to talk about and describe. I waited for what felt like another 10 minutes outside my examiner’s door before he called me in. We greeted each other. I misheard his first question but he repeated himself and I began talking about myself. I went straight to life at INSEAD and complained happily about how much homework there was to do, how tired I was and how I wanted to become a manager. He understood that clearly. He asked me what am I studying exactly and I said, en anglais, it is called “MBA” which he understood - no way could I remember the French equivalent!

He did not ask specific questions during this segment and when I stopped talking, he asked me to continue sharing even more about myself! After a while you do run out of things that you’ve practised saying, so I took the opportunity to ask him questions about himself! I said je suis celebataire, et vous? He said he was married to a Singaporean and I asked if his wife was Chinese. Now I even know where she works! I praised her company which is a ‘grand hotel’. He seemed happy with that and moved on to the next topic.

That was tougher as I had to talk about TV programs or my favourite recipe! While I knew I could name a number of vegetables to make minestrone, I felt more comfortable talking about CNN which I watch frequently. I ended up discussing American politics, how I was happy that Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, and why I like Barack Obama. It so happened that my examiner was a black guy who also had an international background. Again, he wanted me to say more than I could say. I started insulting George Bush as not having an interest in other people’s lives (I didn’t know how to say ‘warmonger’ in French). There were awkward pauses in between as I grappled for the words.

Things got trickier when he asked me what I thought of CNN. In English I’d have said it’s not bad but still US-centric sometimes. All I could say was pas mal, but I also watched the BBC (thank God for acronyms and recognizable names) and groped for a word in French, saying in English “neutral” - which he offered as ‘neutrale’ in French. I repeated that word. We moved on to the final topic… role play! I was the buyer and the examiner was the seller.

I had to choose between buying 6 types of bicycles or 6 types of cake/bonbons. As I wasn’t sure of technical terms I stuck to buying cakes, saying that it was for dinner tonight at my friends’ place. I noticed there were 2 chocolate cakes so I said my friends preferred chocolate, could he recommend a gâteau? (I might have mauled this question but he understood, so, moving on…) So I threw the ball back in his court and he recommended the two cakes as predicted, and then I asked ‘for this cake xxx’, combien ça coute? And he had to think of a price. It looked like the first time anyone had thrown the question back at him as he took some time to think of a number. Then I asked him how much was the other cake, and he gave a cheaper price. I asked him which was better and he recommended the second one. Since the price was lower and he said it was the specialité of the region, I asked him if it was delicieuse and he said yes! So I said ‘je voudrais acheter le [2nd cake]’. I asked if he accepted credit cards and he said oh yes, so I said voici! voila! We thanked each other and said goodbye. That ended it. Phew!

Of course on hindsight I could’ve done better and been more garrulous - if I really had more ideas to churn out and the vocabulary to go with it. And I was used to practising with more interactivity, and not having a soliloquy. Oh well. Moving on… to next week’s INSEAD exams! C’est tout!