Stats is All About Jumping In

Most of the posts on this blog will be related to the human experience of the Wharton program, but from time to time I will try to give a glimpse of what some of the academic content is like.

Stats 601 requires installation of a SAS software package called JMP IN, which slides, dices and graphs data to an MBA's content. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:

We are studying normal distributions, quantile plots, the Central Limit Theorem, probability, hypothesis testing, z-statistic and t-statistic tests.

Let's hope it's useful for fantasy football....

Post-Term Grade Stress Syndrome

It certainly seems like there's a wave of grade anxiety in the class over grades for the first term. There appears to be two camps on both ends of the bell curve: 1) those that are worried about not QCing a class or two and 2) those that are trying to get an A. I call it "Post-Term Grade Stress Syndrome". :) It's a balance of the "stick" avoiding the bottom 10% or the "carrot" incenting us to achieve the top 10%.

The question to ask is: are we positively or adversely affected by the new grading policy? We haven't gotten a lot of clarity on it yet and the uncertainty is causing some concern. Our profs can't even explain it yet. And I think it has caused our class to be too grade focused. Everyone went "pedal to the metal" on finals last term. From what I hear from Class 31, the hyper-competitiveness starts to calm down in Term 2-3...

It was good to get graded final exams, solutions and distributions back for MGEC 603 and ACCT 620 last week. Prior to the start of Term 2, we also got email from Prof Ryan on our FAP grades. A lot of the class is speculating how MGMT 621 is going to be graded.

Unfortunately, there's no way to find out what our final grades are. It's just a waiting game now. Wish I could sit next to the mailbox!

-Chairman P

Wartun32 Fantasy Football League

Wharton isn't all about studying. After class on Friday night, twelve "Wartun32 Fantasy Football" wanna be NFL GMs armed with laptops, cheatsheets, magazines, beer and chips drafted 180 NFL players in our first annual fantasy football draft last Sat. It was a great experience for both the experienced playahs and the newbies.

Da boys all say hello at our fantasy football draft.

What's fantasy football? It's a huge business. That little "fantasy ticker" at the bottom of ESPN is geared toward fantasy sports players, who understand what all those stats mean. For those of you who don't know what it is, look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_%28American%29

The first twelve draft picks were:

Shawn Alexander, RB, Seattle (Mark)
Larry Johsohn, RB, Kansas City (Azar)
LaDainian Tomlinson, RB, San Diego (Robert)
Tiki Barber, RB, NYG (Bolaji)
Steven Jackson, RB, St Louis (Richard)
Rudi Johnson, RB, Cincy (Ron)
Ronnie Brown, RB, Miami (Clay)
Peyton Manning, QB, Indy (Guru)
Edgerrin James, RB, Arizona (Frank)
Bryan Westbrook, RB, Philly (Nihal)
Clinton Portis, RB, Washington (Adam)
LaMont Jordan, RB, Oakland (Loren)

Highlight of the evening: Nicole and two of her friends stopped by for a drink. I'm sure they noticed the high testosterone level in the room...

-Chairman P

Term 2 Begins: OPIM 621 Wins Most Interesting Class Award

Following a quick rest after finals, Term 2 has already begun. We have new study rooms and they mixed up the sections, which is great to be able to meet new people.

Our curriculum for Term 2 is:

STAT 601 - Statistical Analysis for Management - Prof. Richard Waterman
FNCE 602 - Macroeconomics and the Global Economic Environment - Prof. Andrew Abel
OPIM 621 - Decision Models and Uncertainty - Prof. John Hershey
MGMT 652 - Foundations of Leadership - Prof. Michael Useem


OPIM 621 gets my vote for the "Most interesting class" of the weekend award.

Why?

Here's Prof. Hershey illustrating the solution space for a three variable Linear Programming problem.

(Props goes to Masha for prompting me to have phone camera ready to go...)





It got even better on Sat. Here's a pic of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" game we played with LP questions on Saturday:


Warning for next year's students: Prof. Hershey uses a "random cold call" generator to call on students during lectures. Ambal, Bolaji, Prasad, and Preetam all got lucky and played the game....

Term 1 Finals are Done!

It's your friendly neighborhood Wharton West reporter "Chairman P" checkin' in after a brief hiatus to craaaam for finals. Who's got time to blog when there's so much studying to do? Whew, what a relief that Term 1 is over! It sure feels goooooood to have the MGEC, ACCT and FAP behind us!

After finals on Sat, there was a toast to the end of Term 1, with the usual hosted wine, beer, soda, and nuts. A lot of us hung out to relax and unwind, which was cool.

Happy WEMBA students toasting the end to our first term.

Then Ariel managed to break a chair and splash some wine on the top of his shirt, as shown here. How he managed that I don't know! (Notice Clifton holding the top of the chair and the pieces on the table. Notice the dark red wine stain on Ariel's shirt; that is not a shadow!)

Ariel breaks a chair

On a more serious note, I polled about 20 WEMBA students after class, asking the question: on a scale of 1 through 10, 10 being the highest, what's your overall rating of the WEMBA program, including the classes, professors, people in our class, experience, competitiveness, etc? The answers ranged from a high of 8.0 to a low of 7.0. The average response was a 7.25 out of 10.

I asked the reasons for the ratings, and here's some of the quotes, (anonymously of course):

"Overall, Wharton has met my expectations. I'm still glad I did the program even after Term 1. The people have been great and the caliber of people is very very high."

"It has been a LOT more work than I originally signed up for. Everyone is super smart, and there is an insane amount of work. I've had to study study study."

"The FAP experience sucked in my group. Some people on my team didn't do squat. I put in way too much time and it wasn't fair. That's why I graded the overall number down."

"I wish there was more time for getting to know our classmates. The program is so packed and the pace is so fast that it is hard to get the time to get to know each other."

"A 360 degree review would be useful input for grading the FAP. If we had one, it might provide incentive for more equal involvement in the teams. And it would be useful to get some feedback on the grades for our case studies during the term."

"Smetter's class was very entertaining. I loved the econ problems because they were real applications with parodies that made me laugh."

"Accounting is like a giant Easter egg hunt. It was like trying to find the magic number amidst the mass of financial data and footnotes. I never really was sure that I got the right one."

"Econ was all about not making a mathematical mistake. It felt like my upper-division engineering classes."

"I hope we actually use some of the textbooks they assign us for next quarter."

"It's pretty cruel that they give you a bag full of next quarter's books to lug home at the end of this one."

Enough of the quotes... Here's some pics of some very happy WEMBA Class32 students at Brother's #2 Korean Restaurant in SF. We headed there after finals to enjoy some traditional Korean food like kimchee, kalbi, kimchee chigae and soju. It was a great place to blow off some steam...

Smiles, kimchee and kalbi at Brother's #2

Alice, Ron, Malika and Zia

Here's some pics of Ryan's last management class (section 1). I can't imagine it's easy teaching a class full of WEMBA students after two finals and a FAP. Most of us looked pretty tired by Sat afternoon as you can see below.