A Run

Monday was a well deserved holiday(Victoria Day), after the tiring Pre-MBA and week 1 of MBA. Not realizing that the groceries shops are also closed on National holidays unlike in India, I had a long walk with no fruit.

Tuesday, we had an electrifying communications session from Professor Denis Shackel. We also had to prepare for a 3 minute speech for that class. We delivered the individual presentations to our learning teams. All the speeches were recorded and we should be receiving our feedback from the professor, shortly. Later, Jeffrey Gandz Managing Director for executive programs at Ivey (who also is a member of Board of directors at Maple Leaf Foods Inc) delivered his guest lecture. Guest speaker series has been truly inspiring. Listening and learning from real life people has been terrific.

Week 6 had presentations from the Ivey Consulting Projects and New Venture Project coordinators. Students are required to participate in either of the two projects. More details on these projects to follow later. We also had tutorial sessions for the Decision Making and Analytics course. Reza walked us through several key concepts and it helped us tie the many loose ends.

On Thursday, we had a brief session about consulting companies and handling case interviews. Diana Wong( a current from My cohort who has extensive consulting experience) led the session. The consulting club plans to conduct “case-interview mocks” every Sunday.

The week ended with the Outward Bound Ropes Course, coordinated by YMCA at Western. The session was wonderful. Almost everyone had to push outside the comfort zone and work as a team to reach the goal. The course easily demonstrated trust, empathy, leadership, teamwork, commitment, overcoming fear, etc.

I’ve started to cook and surprisingly, things seem to work well so far. I hope I can continue and build on my cooking abilities before I complete the MBA. We also had a couple of Golf sessions at the Windermere golf Centre driving range. At the outset, I had to unlearn my cricket postures ;-)