Final

Last night I took my last final for Summer I. The course was "Competitive Advantage from Operations" or Comp Ops for short. It was taught by the department head, a wiry Dutchman who's been teaching for thirty years.

It was a very interesting class, once I'd been looking forward to for quite a while. It was a bit more quantitative than I had expected, though fortunately since my near-death experience in Statistics, I seem to have ingrained some of the fundamentals of how to utilize the normal curve. Where I got lost at times was in parsing the problem, that is, how to express it in math.

The final was hard, but not inordinately so. It was, as the CFEs describes, "appropriately demanding of my time". We were given two and a half hours, and I clocked out at two hours twenty-five minutes. I later learned he let people run long, since most of the class was still on the case when I left. This morning, there was an email about extending partial credit more generously on the last problem; apparently a lot of people had difficulty with it.

All of that being said, I found the class very informative and useful in my present position. Reviewing my study notes, it's clear we covered a lot of very distinct topics: queing, supply chain management, project management, resource management, quality control, and using statistical models for decision making. It's the kind of thing that I used to make fun of in my youth - that period when we rebel against ourselves in order to prevent mono-dimensional personalities. I have to say, if (for example) you're shipping boatloads of cars overseas to market, you'd better have an accurate way to predict demand and resource your warehousing appropriately.

So, with that, Summer I is done. Summer II begins tonight! This time I am taking only one course - Foundations of Finance. I'm sure it will be a more demanding course, but the simple fact that I'm not getting home at 10 four nights a week will be greatly appreciated.