Finance Finance Finance

The last three days I did just Finance. Calculating old Past Exam Papers of the previous years, calculating extra questions the lecturer gave us, try to get the theory in my head ... all this stuff ... now my arm starts hurting from writing all the stuff the whole time ...

I have a bit of a mix of feelings for this exams. Usually I was more scared and this time I'm more confident. Don't know if this is because I'm used to study now and I'm really better prepared or maybe I just lost fear because of my good results of last term which leads to overestimating my knowledge and bad degrees this term ...

I'll figure it out soon anyway, just 3 days left and I can't wait till it's over again... I feel so tired I think after exam I'll just sleep for a whole day without doing anyting...

Project Management vs. Finance

For the last tow days I was studying now Project Management and as longer I stick to this one as more concerned I get about Finance... At the moment I think, that Project Management is not too difficult and I'm confident to get the processes we are supposed to know in my head... but for Finance I'm more and more worried about the stuff...

I just went through the first 3 parts of the Project Management Exam which are:
Case 1: Organisational Breakdown Structure
Case 2: CPM (Critical path method) or PERT (Project evaluation and review technique)
Case 3: EVA (Earned valua analysis)

...for all this topics more details of course and things like advantages, limitations and so on...

Finance Revision

Thursday/Friday was now my Finance revision. It was quiet good, we got lots of questions and cases to practice and this was not bad. I just hope now, that the focus of the Exam will be the same like the revision classes because in the "back book" is much more then what we covered during the 4 day seminar and the 2 day revision.
Today I'm back on Project Management, didn't look at it for a while and so I have to refresh it now... time is running, just 8 more days to my next exam ...

less then two weeks to go

Last Sturday/Sunday I enjoyed the revision session of Project Management. Was really good and I enjoyed doing the group work with competent people round me :)
Yesterday I went back to my Finance book, I try the online MCQs at the moment and get a bit frustrated how many mistakes I make... but as long as I do them now and not at the exam I'm confident to learn the stuff within two weeks :)

PM Notes

I'm getting more and more tired, but now I have just 30 pages left to finish my notes for Project Management. This morning I had to get up early, we had voluntary finance revision and I decided to go there to get a bit practice with this stuff... was quiet good, the only bad thing is just the discussions about the solutions... it's so frustrating working with such stupid people who are not able to answer a view questions in 4 hours! Even I didn't know everything but I went to the computer and searched for the missing information and so I know the stuff now. This guys didn't even bother about looking for the answers... I'm happy that I don't have to do much more work with them...

China's Financial Conundrum

Today was really good! ... not for my studies, but it was the first time that we had a guest Professor at EBS who did a presentation. It was about "China's Financial Conundrum: Lessons from Japan and Implications for the U.S. Credit Crunch" and the speaker was Ronald I. McKinnon... people who are into Economics know this guy (http://www.stanford.edu/~mckinnon/)
It was really impressive, how the actual situation in China looks like compared to the situation of Japain 30 years ago... really sad is just that it seems that the political leaders are too stupid to realize the danger of doing the same mistake again and so the people have to suffer...

...now I have to catch up with some studies for PM...

Studying

Not much happening in my life at the moment, its pretty much the same now all day... getting up in the morning, having my cup of coffee while reading the financial times. Driving to EBS round noon, studying, having lunch break with coffee, studying, having afternoon break, studying till 10pm, having quick dinner, driving home, having cup of tea and relaxing, studying till 2 or 3 am, going to bed... that's it... not really exciting, but in 3 weeks are already the next exams and I wanna try to get my next distinctions...

Financial History

Before I came here I thought Marketing is just producing some Promotion things and that's it... now after my Studies of Marketing, I really like the topic because there is so much content in it like setting the strategy, analyze the market and all this interesting things around ...

...and now I have the same with Finance :) ... I thought it's about boring calculations and this stuff, but it's much more and that makes it really interesting ... unfortunately I can't do all courses with classes here because of time and money, but maybe after finishing the MBA and back at work I might do some additional courses to learn more and maybe get later an MSc to my MBA ... :-)


Yesterday was one of this interesting courses, they had tow days of Financial History and they were discussing stuff like the actual crisis in the financial markets and things like financial behaviour, which sounds really interesting. It starts with people who buy shares at the stock market. Almost everybody who buys shares ignores bad news about this company and prefer to look for good news :) ... but that's just on a small scale... now think about the same situation for a project in a company. If the project is successful nobody will care. But if the project is not that good usually the funder of the project will look for the good news but ignore the bad ones just like the share holder is doing for his share decision. And like in the share market if a share goes down, many people avoid to realize their losses and just hold on bad shares and watch how they are going down... same with the projects ... to get rid of big bad projects in a company you usually have to change the CEO to have arguments for the shareholders why you do it. If the old CEO would stop the project it might weaken his position in such a way that he is no longer in a strong position to lead the company... unfortunately I haven't been at this course because I just got this part in discussing with one of the guys sitting there... have to ask them later how this story ends and what you can do to avoid personal bias in project decisions to stop projects at the right time...

sun sun sun sun

I can't believe that the weather here can be so nice!
We had sunshine for the last 5 days and hardly any cloud around... even the wind is hardly to feels... feels like proper spring :) On one side I hope it stays like this, on the other side I hope for a few rain days as well to have a good reason to stay inside to study ... ;)

Studying goes on very well, I just finished first revision of Finance and think I got all important things in my head. Tonight I plan to do a bunch of practicing and tomorrow I'll move to Project Management. There I then have another 10 days time to practice this before revision classes and then the "hot" phase before exams starts again with practicing all the stuff and studying the details to the concepts... And I now already ordered tow of the books for next term, so if I feel to be ahead of schedule I can already read a few pages of the new books I have to know next term... or finally enjoy life a bit more :-)

There is hope :)

Last weekend was great, I was studying a lot and made some progress with my Finance studies. I'm still 2 days behind schedule, but that's not too bad and I hope to save this two days on another place when I can speed up in doing the practicing part of Finance in calculating...

On Saturday I went to dinner with a group of students who came for the Mergers & Acquisition course and it was good fun. We had a great dinner and the people were all proper people with plenty of experience and knowledge about the business and so finally I had the pleasure to have proper discussions about business and the world how it runs :) This was exactly what I needed to see hope that there are normal people doing this courses which are not just coming to pass exams...

Today was the sunniest and warmest day in Scotland so far and it was the first time I left the house just in T-Shirt and jeans and went on a hike up Arthur's Seat here in Edinburgh... now I took a bit of a rest and after finishing this post here I'll go back to my Finance book to get some more pages done ...

Counting the days

Today the counting starts again, in exactly one month or 31 days I'll have my next exam and this means that I have to increase the hours of studying again ... I was studying the last days now Finance but still look for the light on the end of the tunnel ... I have many formulas in my head, but most of them don't really apply to any case and this I have to find somehow to go on ... tomorrow I'll try to do more exercises and hope to reach the point of understanding them ...

Next week I'll go back to Project Management...