Hi everyone! Now that the core part of the program is in full swing (or at least, it certainly feels like it, even though we’re only 3 days in), I thought I’d reflect back on my experiences in pre-core.
Because my undergrad was in English, I decided to take all 4 pre-core courses, and I am very glad I did! I suspect I won’t understand the true value of the courses until we get farther into the core, but I definitely learned a lot.
Pre-Core 1 – Quantitative Methods
The Quantitative Methods pre-core course was largely a math class. A lot of it covered material that was on the GMAT, but with a lot more detail (and with numbers complicated enough to require calculators!) Specific topics included algebra, probability, finance and basic calculus (not as scary as you might think). Unlike a traditional math class, we applied these concepts! The finance stuff was all completely new to me, but the prof (Brian Graham) did an amazing job of explaining things. Every concept was demonstrated with an easy-to-follow, step-by-step example. We also did a fair amount of work with Excel, which I think was pretty challenging for people who weren’t super comfortable with Excel already. I consider myself relatively Excel-savvy (though not an expert by any means!), and I found the material challenging but interesting.
One of the things I think the prof was really trying to drill into us was the danger of making unfounded assumptions. Our gut instincts can help us with a lot of things, but we shouldn’t always trust them blindly… especially when it comes to money!
Pre-core 2 – Accounting
I’m going to start out by saying that this course did not make me discover a deep-hidden passion for accounting… That said, it was an incredibly useful, detailed introduction to a topic I’d never studied before. We covered topics like journaling (in the accounting sense, not the write-about-your-life sense), income statements, balance sheets, and assets and liabilities and how to determine which transactions belong in which categories. It may sound fairly straightforward, but we went into a *lot* of detail. According to the instructor, Steve, who is also one of the core profs, we covered approximately a semester’s worth of an accounting undergrad course!
A lot of this class consisted of us doing practice problems, and we had quite a bit of homework… Of course, had I been better at accounting, the homework would have gone much faster, I’m sure. All in all, I feel much better starting to look at case studies now with the accounting pre-core under my belt, even though I still have a long way to go before it *all* makes sense to me.
I’ll continue talking about the other two pre-core courses in a later post!
~Stephanie
