Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Summer Term Grades and Fall Term Outlook

MBA Update

Summer term 2006 was the best semester I've had so far!

I earned an A- in security valuation and an A- in managing teams, so all A's and A-'s this term.

The Fall Semester will be a cakewalk.

For the first mod, I'll be taking International Financial Markets with Amar Gande. This is his first semester teaching at SMU. He just came from Vanderbilt. His first class last night was boring ... especially compared to the last two classes I took. Hart and Gande are stark contrasts ... Gande will bore you with a PowerPoint lecture while Hart was constantly writing on the board and the students had to keep up.

That is the only class I'm taking this mod. Next mod I'll have just one class too ... Advanced Master Negotiations with Robin Pinkley.

Quixote Update

I've already mentioned that I finished it. I found that Blue Devil Knight is reading the same Edith Grossman version that I read. He posted a quote from the book regarding chess. I found a few quotes from the book that are applicable to the 7 Circles quest. I'll be posting those quotes as I continue my quest.

Chess

I hope to be able to start playing some long time control games again in the next few weeks. Besides the quest, there isn't much else I'm doing right now.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Summer Term is Over

I had finals this week.

The managing teams final was just a quiz worth 15% of our grade. I think I did better on this one than the first. Our paper, worth 50% of our grade, is due tomorrow. I've already written it and just need to email it to the teacher.

It was a good class. I think I'll get an A- or A in that class.

Security Valuation is over. I did a complete review of all the material over the last two days. My friend and I worked on the practice exam last night. The exam was tonight. It was all quantitative except for 3 points. If I did my calculations correctly, then I think I will have earned close to a 97% on the final. Assuming I earned a 100% on the project, then I would get an A in this class. Otherwise it'll be a B+ or A-.

I finally finished Don Quixote. It was a good read. I'm reading Life of Pi now.

As for chess ... I'll be posting a lot more chess now. I'll only have one class a week from now until I graduate in December. I'm working on the Circles and will update the Circles blog more frequently as I progress through the levels on CT-ART 3.0. I think I'm up to problem 180 as of today.

It feels so good to have the summer term over with.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Monday, August 07, 2006

Summer Week 12

Managing Teams

I expect to do well in this class. With that said, it is starting to be a really boring and predictable class. The first few weeks were "fun" and we learned quite a bit. Now it seems as though the teacher is struggling to come up with a decent lesson plan. Last week he lectured quite a bit. Then he sent us off for a half hour to work on this case. The case was very vague and most of the people on our team were grumpy and really didn't want to be at school. We put in a half-effort. After we worked on the case, we had to present it to the class.

During the other presentations, we were to be evaluating them on how well they presented. There is this one team that is very good at presenting. I think they have most of the "bonus" points from all the presentations and challenges. Anyway, it's been really tiring listening to them give their "perfect" presentation week after week. However this week, their presentation was probably the worst of all presentations given in class. I was feeling a little snarky, so I sung their praises and applauded how well their slides looked and how short and consise it all was. That's when it dawned on me that I'm really bored with this class.

One last item ... we got our quizes back and I scored a 91%. The average was 86%.

SV&S

He assigned our project to is this week. Then he lectured on DCF's ... more specifically, free cash flows to the firm and free cash flows to equity.

He also handed back our mid-mod exam. I got an 87%. The average was 88%. I was expecting to get in the low 80's or even 70's, so I was happy about hitting close to average. He said the final will be more difficult because there is a lot more to put together.

Saturday morning, my friend called me to see if I wanted to work on the project and knock it out this weekend. We started working on it Saturday afternoon at 1:00pm. By 7:00pm I had still not finished it. By Sunday morning, we were very close to finishing it. Last night, I think we finally fine-tuned our numbers and got the right answers.

Family Update

Squid #4 is still doing well. My sister-in-law came into town to help out. Sunday afternoon she went into some sort of seizure. We called 911 and she was submitted to the hospital. She's doing much better now and hopefully she can continue to help out with squids 1, 2 & 3 the rest of the week before she heads home on Friday.

Chess Update

Which leads me to chess ... because life keeps getting in the way, I've not been able to concentrate on chess very much. I did manage to get in 3 games Friday night. I lost 2 and won 1. I posted a couple of those cames on my blitz games link.

This Friday the 11th I'll begin the Circles. During lunch this week, I will do some chess vision reviews.