End of Term Wrap Up

I’m going to follow Sam’s template here and do a review of the classes I took this year. Thanks for the idea and title Sam!

Commerce 292 (Organizational Behaviour and Management)
Deborah Rupp
Tuesday/Thursday
11:00am – 12:30pm

OB in a nutshell is basically employee-manger relationships in the modern workplace. Maybe it’s because I have two office-type jobs or maybe it’s fate telling me to pick the Human Resources stream in third year, but this class turned out to be one of my favourite of the term. Yes, the textbook is common sense to a certain extent, but one has to approach OB with the intent to apply it to the real world. The class was largely discussion/activity based with lecture off the powerpoint usually taking no more than 40% of the class time (I think we spent half an hour having a paper tower building contest *ahem*teamwork in one of our classes). We watched hilarious clips from The Office and movies on Kennedy and decision making. Both the midterm and the final were multiple choice; a one page “cheatsheet” was allowed for the final exam (I managed to cram 6000 words into mine, don’t ask lol). The class was very much team-oriented. A group case study project was worth 25% of the mark, and the rest came from participation. Dr. Rupp was a very nice and enthusiastic prof who gave us the choice of what to do each class, whether it was a discussion on past material, lectures, or a jeopardy review game (did anyone else notice that OB profs seem to be the HAPPIEST ones around? Makes the students more cheerful too!). She definitely knew her materials and was extremely well-prepared for each class with activities and such. Our section had the highest class average – a whole 5% above the grade average – so that says something about the prof (or us haha)! For those of you who want to get her as a professor, unfortunately she was only at UBC for a one-term Sabbatical. Grade: A+.

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We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

… to bring you this special message.

I just got the funniest email from the Sauder School of Business, parts of it are reproduced below. It’s titled COMM 299 Winter Term 2 – Assignment #1‏. Homework in university over the winter break?! Hmm… it’s an online assignment/survey type that takes 40 minutes, so I didn’t mind too much. Then I read the rest of the email.

For the second term of your Comm 299 class you will be learning all about how to figure out what you want in a career and how to land your dream job. It is a very rewarding and powerful part of the course. […] Developed at the Harvard School of Business, you will receive much personal value from this assignment. See below for details.

Assignment #1: CareerLeader online assessment (5%)

STEPS:

1. Pay the MANDATORY $17.50 (taxes included) fee online at [URL]
2. Take the online assessment using the following details at [URL]
3. Print out the “Narrative Report” and bring it to class during week of Jan. 12-16 […]

* The system is setup to ensure that you can take the assessment immediately even if you do not pay before taking the assessment. We recommend you pay before beginning the assessment to avoid forgetting. But you must pay nevertheless no later than March 31 at noon. Failure to do so will result in your grades being withheld resulting in a “0” grade for the course. [emphasis added]

Wait what?! It’s a 5% assignment, that requires payment, and if we don’t pay we fail the course?! Such a bright outlook for the future of business schools. So apparently the cost is there because the class taking the assignment is very large. This is ALMOST as a good as paying $45 for a piece of paper with a password on it so I can do my econ labs online.

P.S. – Lack of updates due to exam season. I’ll be done on Tuesday and will be back with a TON of uber awesome posts =D

UPDATE: You know what? I did get some great insight from this CareerLeader survey. My professor is a huge fan of this assessment so I thought, hey, there must be some merit to it eh? Although the results weren’t what I expected, it did open my worldview to other possible career options to complement my law school journey after undergraduate years. COMM 299 is slowly becoming one of my most enjoyable classes this term. But come on Sauder, couldn’t you subsidize this?!

How Incredibly Keen We All Are

Follow-up on Textbooks

One of the disadvantages of getting second-hand textbooks is that they sometimes do not have the glossy, colourful pages of the newer ones, hence causing frustration to their readers.

Observe page 47 of my Econ book: “The blue arrows in the upper half of Figure 2.9 indicate the flow of labour… the red outer arrows represent [blah blah blah]” Great, my Figure 2.9 is black and white and filled with grey arrows of different shades *sulks*.

In other news, the $12 book I ordered from Powellbooks.com got here in one piece. This hardcover on a Civil War battle looks like it has began to turn yellow from sitting in the warehouse for too long – what an exciting item to receive the first time I buy something online! (That’s sarcasm, by the way).

Lyryx Labs

Speaking of Econ 101, Lyryx labs are slowly becoming the bane of my existence! We get unlimited tries on these online quizzes, and Lyryx just records and sends in our highest score. It took me 5 tries and 3 hours to get 64/64 on the first lab (okay, maybe I should’ve read the chapter BEFORE attempting the question, lesson learned). From the data Prof. Lemche showed us, an upward of 800 students took the quiz, with an average of 96%+ on most questions. The average attempt number was four.

Can you imagine the scores for a quiz like this (worth 1% of final mark) in high school? No doubt most students would’ve been happy with an 80% and wouldn’t even bother retrying. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that as much as my peers announce how we should skip lectures, we are all secretly working our butts off trying to get a high mark.  Academia is an awesome thing. Almost makes my daily two hours pole-dancing-on-the-bus commute to UBC worth it!

VIDEO LA LA LA

On a completely unrelated note, here’s a short video. It’ll make you smile, I promise (if not just watch it again). TURN ON SPEAKERS.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRH3iTQPrk[/youtube]

Cheers.