Finals

They stink. In all the rest of my life, if you go to class, and you understand the material, you do well on the test. INSEAD is different. They ask you to apply the material in sixteen different hard ways that are sort of related to one think you may have learned in class. You're never asked the name of a framework or the details of some guru's dissertation. It's all case based, and it's all application. Well, that's hard. AND they need to make a distribution of our scores, so it's REALLY hard - otherwise we would all be stuck in the middle, and if you made a silly mistake you would fail. It must be spread out.

Yesterday was strategy - and we had to write about Toys R Us in 1992 - analyze the industry, their competitive advantage, how their competitive advantage changed from the 80s moving into the 90s, what course of action they should take next. I wrote 13 pages. My arm was honestly sore afterwards.

Today is managerial accounting and leading organizations. MA is probably the most important class we have taken yet. It's all about how to allocate costs appropriately - and it's really not obvious. In fact it's really hard, but really good to know. The exam will be a killer.

Leading Organizations will be a group exam (the last time I am working with my group...but only one is going to Fonty for next period, so the rest of us will be around). We will have to analyze a case from three different perspectives - political, cultural, strategic design - and then giev recommendations for them to move forward.

I will have EIGHT hours of exams today. Ouch.

But...then I'll be halfway done with P2 exams, and I'll be more on my way done with the hardest part of INSEAD.