So what's P1 about?

Week one of P1 is almost over and it feels about right to explain you what it is going to be all about. INSEAD MBA program is organized in five 2-month periods, with five to six classes each. In the first two Ps, all classes are predefined. From P3 onwards, we start choosing elective classes, according to our preferences and future career goals.

P1 includes the following classes:

• Financial Markets Valuation
• Financial Accounting
• Prices and Markets
• Uncertainty Data Judgement
• Organizational Behavior I
• Introduction to Business Ethics

Uncertainty Data Judgement is another fancy name, attributed to our Probability and Statistics class, basically aimed at helping our decision making process under conditions of uncertainty. The evaluation system is closer to the Portuguese standards, with the final exam weighting 80% of final grade. The additional 20% are equally split between a group assignment and class participation. Interestingly enough, UDJ's professor is indeed Portuguese: Miguel Sousa Lobo, one of our most fast-paced professors!

Moving to the softer courses, Organizational Behavior I is a psychology class, aimed at discussing influence, commitment, cooperation, coordination, leadership, self-control, management of others, and so on. And all these topics are strictly correlated to our personality and working styles, so the course started with a few tests (answered by us and our colleagues at work) and the assessment of the resulting reports, part of which I am going to share with you in the next post. Although these may seem quite fluffy, the power of such self-awareness tools is brutal, and the articles we've been reading are pretty interesting and eye-opening. Evaluation is 30% of contribution to study group (graded by my fellow group members), 10% of a team contract assignment (where each group establishes norms to enhance effectiveness of team settings), and 60% of a closed-booked final exam. I wonder what the final exam could be about... As you know, I am not really used to non analytical courses... We'll see! OBI's professor is Stefan Thau.

Last but not least, we also had a 2-module class on Introduction to Business Ethics. Here, we discussed a few polemic real life cases, learnt a few tools to guide a manager throughout business life in what concerns to ethics. It's a pass or fail class, and the only assignment was a 2-page essay, which I already submitted for review. Our professor is/was Craig Smith.
After this first week of real classes, I've already noticed a few interesting things about INSEAD:

1. INSEAD's Swiss train policy actually exists. Classes start exactly on time, which requires students to be inside the classroom before schedule. If someone arrives 1 minute late, he/she won't be able to attend class anymore. Bad luck!
2. Almost every class requires pre-readings. What does that mean? It means that we have to prepare for class, study in advance, read case studies, think about topics by ourselves, etc., etc. It may seem weird but the truth is that this system allows the students to follow each class much more efficiently.
3. Pre-reading styles vary from class to class. The most conventional professors provide slides, case studies, starred articles or suggest textbooks. The most modern ones are creating videos, produced by themselves, explaining main concepts, equations, graphs and applications in the real world. This modern method saves students quite a lot of time! The only tradeoff is that they don't provide structured notes right away.
4. And because not every thing about INSEAD can be great, nowadays there are way too many different platforms, which may be a bit confusing. Depending on personal style, professors prefer post materials in the official my.insead website, providing printouts, using dropbox,or even just sending e-mails. On top of it, there are specific websites for different aspects of career services, there is an internal social network (yammer), and more. We all wish it was all consolidated in just one website. Maybe one day...
5. Oh, and we had classes last Saturday and today - a national bank holiday...! INSEAD has been performing well on keeping us busy.

Although the names are kind of alike, all subjects are very different. The only two things in common are being quite interesting and taught by over-the-top professors. Also, they all aim at providing us the necessary tools for efficient and knowledgeable managerial decision making.

Financial Markets Valuation is a pure Finance & Capital Markets class. Its curriculum includes valuation concepts and techniques (e.g. time value of money, discounted cash flows, value creation), concepts of risk and return (e.g. tradeoff of risk and return in the context of investment portfolios), and companies' capital structure. Evaluation includes two cases (10% each), online tests every two weeks (20%), and a final exam (60%). It is taught by the youngest of our professors Bart Yueshen. 

Financial Accounting is an Accounting class, aimed at equipping any MBA student with accounting literacy skills, allowing for a correct understanding of financial statements during decision making situations. I am hoping to get a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Statement of Cash Flows guru by the end of this P. This class is taught by the bright Peter Joos, who's worked both in academia and in the banking sector. Everyone is pretty impressed how he manages to teach Accounting in such a interesting and practical way. Evaluation includes a open-book quiz (15%), a group financial statement analysis project (15%), a final exam (60%) and... professionalism (10%)!

What about Prices and Markets? Prices and Markets is just a fancy name for Microeconomics. It will cover topics such as supply and demand, production and costs, pricing strategies, competition between industry participants, strategic decision-making and decision-making under uncertainty, and their applications. It is taught by a very enthusiastic and humorous professor: Pushan Dutt. Evaluation is based on an individual quiz (10%), three group assignments (10% each), and a final exam (60%).

I'm late! Need to go back to studying.

Lots of love,
Marta