Building the course curriculum

Another thing that excited me about the Fall semester was my course line-up. I didn’t take the popular G-lab (and travel to an exotic location in January) and had couple of courses that I could have lived without, but by and large I was pretty happy with my line-up.

It included New Enterprises with Howard Anderson and Bill Aulet – a recommended and a very hands-on course for any aspiring entrepreneur. In addition to several VC speakers, my team built a business plan for a patent pending prescription drug dispensing technology from MIT. Beyond the nuances of business plans, this provided another opportunity to learn about the pharma industry (after the Market lab project in the Fall’07) and all five of us felt pretty good about our pitch. We’re still in the process of securing IP and finalizing our decision to enter 100K this Spring…stay tuned.

Another one from Howard and Peter Kurzina is CEO Perspectives, where in one of the student is chosen as a CEO for a real life adversity a CEO faced, and s/he has to make recommendation to the remainder of the class (the Board members) in the presence of the real CEO. Talk about pressure! But learning was next nothing from real personal lessons.

I think a must for any Corp Fin enthusiast is Advanced Corp Finance from Kevin Rock (from Chicago). Beyond regular cases, he was able to distill important lessons from IPO, corp restructuring, or LBO, in simple and clear terms. Though still not clear whether he’ll be coming back to MIT Sloan, his class is lot of value add anytime in the future.

The highlight of my academic roster this semester was the class with Jack Welch. An experience of a life-time, our weekly sessions included discussions about his management style, the current economic crisis (and our take on these), the Presidential election (and it’s broader impact), and his life after GE. To top it off, the dinner with Suzy and him at the end of the semester that cannot be matched. Its too bad that they have decided to move to NYC next year and he won’t be coming back to MIT Sloan.

These courses further reinforced MIT’s motto of mind at hand, and provided me an excellent opportunity to hone my skills further in the areas that I am interested in.