Financial Management Review, Ending and Grade

Here is my, honest review of the summer “semester” as it relates to the Evening MBA program at Georgia Tech. Firstly, let me say, for the program to be completed in the very feasible and allotted time frame of three years, students taking two classes at a time MUST take classes during three summers. With that simple fact stated, the summer term was a shortened and very abbreviated version of the courses we signed up for. Because of the shortened classes, I felt like we missed out on some material.

The Finance Class was an interesting situation. The summer class should have been a full 11 weeks, but because it was on a Monday, we missed two class periods because of holidays. So what is normally 45 hours of material (as described in the previous post) is in actuality taught in a very generous 27 hours. I say generous, because we were let out of class early more often than not. We could have easily reached 30 or so hours and covered another topic, the classes are a lot of money and I have very little interest in getting out of class early.

Our understanding of the material of the class was based on our performance on two exams and three projects. The three projects were group assignments that were directly related to the material we were covering at the time they were due, which was awesome. However the spacing of the projects was questionable. The first project was due pretty early on in the class and was very quantitative in nature like the teaching style of the first two thirds of the class. However the second project had very subjective material and expectations that weren’t properly explained; the third project was due when we turned in the second project. Because of the logistics of the due dates we were unable to follow the subjective shift of the course as we would be expected to do in a normal Fall and Spring semester, with at least a week of time between receiving the grades and the next project being due.

Professor Clarke did a great job of bringing the material to real world applications. Though I can’t help but feel that we missed out on material because of the abbreviated term of the summer. I ended up with a “B” in the class, which was what I had hoped for. The Group projects brought my average down quite a bit. Overall I would give Financial Management a “B”. I don’t believe we had enough time in the summer to learn the material properly enough to apply all the concepts to our real life jobs.