On Classes

I realized I haven't even done a rundown of classes for this semester yet, which should be a requirement for any student blogger, I think. I'm taking all good classes -- there's not that achilles heel one that really bothers me, which is nice.

Here are the highlights:

Entrepreneurship and Private Equity is taught by Professor David BenDaniel, a veteran of many a start-up board of directors. We get to do a bunch of live cases surrounding VC and PE investments, with the investors coming in to tell us how the funding and financing scenario all played out in real life. Also, the big assignment is presenting a complete business plan with detailed financials at the end of the semester, which is really exciting and one of the big reasons I came back to business school.

Managing Technology is jointly taught by Professors Ganem and Huttenlocher, an organic chemist and a computer scientist. We've had a number of interesting speakers to talk about the three fields of technology we cover in the class -- bio, info, and nanotechnology.

Negotiations is a great class, taught by Christin Munsch, a sociologist by training. It's a full semester of learning the ins and outs of how to approach a number of different negotiation scenarios, from increases in salary to full labor dispute resolution.

Integrated Marketing Communication, taught by Professor Raj (his first name is real long and hard to spell), is also a good course. We're doing a live consulting project for Kodak and get to learn about trends in advertising and marketing, and how to develop an integrated marketing communications plan across multiple platforms.

The last and probably my favorite class is Macroeconomics and International Trade, with Ori Heffetz. Ori is a really great teacher -- funny and knowledgeable. This is probably a little known fact outside of the Johnson School (I certainly didn't expect it coming in, and it definitely wasn't one of the main reasons I came to Johnson), but studying economics here is awesome. I had New York Times columnist and well-known author Bob Frank last year, and Ori Heffetz is just as good in the classroom.

So, that's the rundown. I've selected the courses for the specific skills I wanted to acquire, and so far, they're working out well.