Course registration: Why do we need intensive tracks?

At Babson, we have phased and tiered registration process. Full time students get first preference and in phase I, we get to choose 6 credit hours (2 courses) and then in phase II we get to choose the rest. For people like me who have opted for intensive track like Managing the Technology-Intensive Enterprise (MTIE), required courses in these tracks would be registered at the end of phase I. So, it made my life easier as I had to compete only for one course. However, registration is not so bad as we have options to choose a course in day time or evening time and mostly we can get into the courses we desire.

Specialization seems to be out of favor at Babson. Many people who wanted to take EIT (Entrepreneurship intensive track) or MTIE have opted out to take a good mix of interesting courses. Hope school administration makes note of this trend.

After working on strategic planning in my internship at a leading tech firm, my course selection in second year have changed considerably. I find corporate development to be an interesting career option as well. Taking good finance courses could be very handy in the future.

I could not stop appreciating the curriculum after I started my internship. Our industry analysis in BCAP comes very handy in going through tons of research articles from Forrester, IDC, etc.

Why pay cash?

In finance classes, professors convince you that best way to acquire a company is pay by cash for several reasons. I will not dwell into those reasons. Let us see some of Google's acquisitions, DoubleClick offer 3.2B, mostly by cash, Postini for $625 M by cash. When the stock is doing so well and Google want to hire more, why pay by cash?

On a different note, I happened to browse GoogleFinanceBlog and came across this post. It is amazing! Ability to pull real time finance data from Google Finance is extremely powerful. If I had known earlier, I would have done all my finance class work in Google. Combine this feature with ability to discuss, share with a group and access to earlier revisions. Awesome, isn't it?

(updated on 11/2/2007) Here is a spreadsheet for you to take a look at.


Note: Make sure to check out both tabs. Both are retrieved in real time. To import income statement, all I had to do was to use this formula:

ImportHtml(concatenate("http://finance.google.com/finance?q=",A3), "table",24)


My internship is going great. I am working in a strategic planning organization in a tech firm. Could not have gotten any better. It is no coincidence that our research and consultancy work we did in BCAP comes very handy.

Oh yeah, our registration started this week. Babson is entrepreneurial in every way. Courses were (are?) still being created as we were about to register. There is a new one based with a focus on second life. Sounds interesting but I am not bought into 2nd life yet. I will wait and watch till Spring.