Things to brag about being a student of Oxford Saïd Business School

1)      That as per the latest FT ratings, we are now the second best Business School in UK and the sixteenth best in the world.  Yay! Yay! Yay!

2)      Oxford is a cute little town with 800 years of history. That means that the college that you now live in was built when our great, great, great, great, great, greaaaaaaat grandpa was not even born.

3)      Some of the events held at the School allow you to rub shoulders with the best of the Business world. So the next time you run into a snob who boasts about his exquisite knowledge, you can very casually mention what Sir Terry Leahy said to you in his supper or what Roger Carr had to say in his speaker session.

4)      Diversity of the class means one day you sit next to a French Chef who explains how to make pumpkin pudding fantastic and the very next day you will be listening to a life scientist explain strange physiognomic phenomena.

5)      The authors who changed the world are your teachers. Some of the best books such as fresh Lipstick (Linda Scott), how Brands became Icons (Douglas Holt) and Social Entrepreneurship (Alex Nicholls) have been written by faculty members.

Things you would die before you tell anyone about your MBA

1)      That actually when you spoke to that great industry leader, you had spinach stuck between your teeth.

2)      That some of the books written by your teachers are really heavy stuff and you haven’t read them.

3)      That some of your fellow students achievements can sometimes make you feel small. Getting into the Business School was your biggest career achievement so far.

4)      The subject that you just passed has the highest number of distinction holders. (You wonder when they really study when most of the times they are hanging out with you in the Common Room.)

5)      That despite being the best of the best (thats why you are at Saïd after all!), you still have to look for a job, go through the hassles of applications, resumes and cover letters, interviews, case studies and yes, rejections!

After a long break of about 4 weeks, we are all back to Oxford again. Frankly, while I thoroughly enjoyed vegetating during the break after a very stressful exam week, towards the end of the break I was missing the school and being with the classmates. It was sort of revisiting the school days again when on the last week of the summer recess you get excited to meet friends again and exchange stories of ‘what you did last summer’, but you do not, at the same time, want the recess to get over.

The exams here are stressful. In the first 4 weeks of Michaelmas, it seems that the subjects are easy to tackle (specially for people like me who are from quant background), but then suddenly one is swept off the ground in a flood of assignments, and before you know, you are in the middle of the exam preparation week. You take a couple of more days to organise notes, take printouts, finalise study strategies etc. Then once you realise that you have to write 6 papers in 4 days, reality strikes you real hard! The rest is just a long and painful story of endurance, sleepless nights, desperation and iron-clad promises of studying hard the next term right from the beginning.

However, the winter break is sufficiently long to recuperate from the exam trauma. Oxford becomes a very quiet and serene place during off-term times and especially during the winter break. Almost all students either go home or to some warmer part of the globe. Which means that apart from other things, you can go to the most popular movies without booking tickets in advance, or eat out at the most popular joints without having to wait in a queue for nearly an hour, all of which was great for me. This year it snowed very heavy and for a few days Oxford looked like it has been chiselled out of a huge mound of icing sugar. There are a few tall places like Carfax tower, which when climbed, offers a brilliant view of the High Street colleges, the Radcliffe and such. The day after it snowed, we went atop the tower and it was simply brilliant! Highly recommended!!

OK. End of flashback. Back to Hillary Term week 1. This term is particularly known to present exceptional academic and intellectual challenge to the Oxford MBAs. This is the time when you get to do the Entrepreneurship Project. Whats an EP in SBS? Read here. What is interesting, we are being taught very specific tools needed to do the project. As an example, a little while ago, I attended a workshop session by Lucy Kimbell on how to generate and develop ideas at the early stage of planning. These are practical, hands-on techniques that can be used and it proved to be quite effective for my team. Looking forward to more of her sessions.

This is also the term when we start electives. As you would guess, since we choose our electives, there is an escalated level of commitment among the class to learn, which is resulting in very initiated debates in class. I have taken finance II, macro economics and strategy II, technology and innovation strategy as my electives. Let’s see how it goes.

I have a dinner invitation in Oriel College in a while, so have to run off to get dressed in a suit, my host has kindly informed that I cannot enter the Oriel College Hall without being properly dressed. So off I go. Please leave your comments and let me know what you want to hear more about.

Take care!

Every spring, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, based in the Saïd Business School, puts on a huge, well-attended conference called the Skoll World Forum. In an effort to extend some of the knowledge and excitement created in this conference to a student audience, this November the Centre started a new conference called Skoll:EMERGE. Students came from all over the UK, and some even from outside to participate. The speakers were drawn from all over the world, and organized into sessions in four streams: Starting out as a Social Entrepreneur; Careers in Social Entrepreneurship; Global Challenges; and the Ideas Workshop (which I will explain later).

I attended the careers session on Social Finance, and loved hearing from Rod Schwartz of ClearlySo—an online marketplace for social business. Rod will be co-teaching the Social Finance elective in Trinity term, so it was fun to get a preview of his engaging talks. I also heard from Cecile Galoselva at the Ethical Property Company who talked about her company’s innovative model. In one of the general addresses, Caroline Casey from the organization Kanchi was literally one of the best speakers I have ever heard. I highly recommend checking out her organization if you get a chance.

My personal favorite part of the conference was being a mentor for contestants in the Ideas competition. Basically, budding social entrepreneurs submitted an overview of an idea then finalists were selected to pitch to judges at the end of the conference. During the day, peers and mentors helped them shape their pitch, and at the end of the day we got to see the finished product. There were some amazing ideas such as a new recycling process to make toys and household items, and a charitable loyalty card. The finalists will get support throughout the year to develop their ideas. Later in the year, a final will take place and the winners will get funding from UnLtd and Barclays Capital. 

Overall, it was a great and inspirational day, and one of the many examples of the amazing opportunities happening at SBS. I only wish I had more time to take advantage of them all!

On December 17th, 243 Oxford MBAs descended toward Ewert House, and sat for our final exam of the Michaelmas term. Decked out wearing ’sub-fusc,’ we ripped through the Marketing case study. We had spent the past week sitting for uncomfortably long periods – wearing our tuxedos with academic gown – as we constructed 3×3 matrices to compute the variance of a basket of stocks, then calculated the standard deviation of those stocks within a 95% confidence interval, and finally decided whether or not options on those stocks should be expensed.

The term certainly flew by quickly – just as they said it would. I remember having just arrived in Oxford (for the first time in 10-years) this past September 24th. As an undergraduate, I had studied abroad here under the tutorial system. But now, as an MBA, I would come to know Oxford in a whole different way.

In the short span of 10-weeks I fully immersed myself in Oxford life. I rowed for my Exeter College Novice B team in the Christ Church Regatta. Before coming here, I would have thought that sounded like some obscure religious ritual. And in some ways it was, because Oxford is crazy about their rowing! I also became Treasurer of the Student Government, and completed my lock on finance by becoming Chairman of the Finance-OBN. My schedule has been so full this past term – not to mention the 6 core courses we all took – that attending the end-of-term Gala proved to be the best way to conclude Michaelmas term. Click on the video below to see some photos from our Michaelmas term 2009 Gala.

“If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society’s capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.”
- Konosuke Matsushita(1894 – 1989), Founder of Panasonic Corporation

What makes the Oxford MBA different? Many people try to answer the question; school director in journal interviews, alumni in seminars, and even applicants in admission interviews (how unfair). And yes, your intuition is right; it is damn hard to come up with a good answer without actually doing the programme. But after eight weeks in Michaelmas, the first term, I feel my grab on it.

Asking right questions, not just one, but all possible intellectual questions from holistic scopes is what I learned in past weeks. Although the first term is designed to lay a foundation of business knowledge, lecturers kept asking tough questions. This is to introduce a scene in one of the core courses.

A standing ovation does not come to an end. I even hear some sobbing. Can you believe this? I am in the last lecture of accounting class. Now I recall the professor raising a question in the first lecture, “what is financial reporting for?”, and the class replying in ways that “it is to represent reality in business.” or “it is to perform a comparative analysis over companies’ performances.”

True, accounting can be dull, tiring, and not anything more than arithmetic operations. The professor nodded, “Yes, many business schools teach accounting only by introducing accounting rules and calculating ratios, but not in Oxford. We are going to challenge that idea.”

It was just incredible how quickly we learned. In week 2, those who had never opened Yahoo! Finance started asking right questions in an income statement of Oxford Biomedica, a biopharmaceutical venture hatched in Oxford. In week 3, we learned how to give a double-entry for stock options for executives and discuss dark-sides of it. In later weeks, the topics extended to recording future profits from a palm tree in Malaysia, politics among IASB board members, accounting practices in NPOs, reasons for establishing huge accounting institutions in China…

All lectures, cases, and homework demanded tough critique; “How can we trust the business knowledge we are learning now?” And in week 8, at the very last lecture, the professor is sending us a farewell. “Although it depends on situations,” he said, “account-ING is not just a representation of reality because people make the reality. As a manager, you will have to do some creative accountings in the future. How do you account for your business activity? Please do your good accounting.”

For more than a decade before the business ethics came on top of the must-be-taught list in business schools, the Oxford MBA has taught how good and evil the business knowledge can be. As Oxford intellectuals, we are ought to ask right questions on both sides.