All Posts Tagged With: "sbs"
Studytime self-nudges
Avoid distractions and stay healthy
It’s crunch time for me and my classmates at SBS. Time to master finance, economics, marketing, strategy, decision science (aka statistics) and financial reporting in a week before exams start to hit one after the other. It makes for days of full, focused study, one after the other.
I know through this that I need to make progress through the material while maintaining my health (a huge thing in Oxford, where people come from around the world to engage in a particularly intense life), and not dropping the most important non-school stuff. I also know that I’m not naturally good at this, without a little help. So I help myself, with compensating nudges. Some examples:
- I’ve created a little colour-coded spreadsheet, so I get the satisfaction of changing tasks to green as they are done (ex: Finance, problem set 1, Marketing practice exam…). This almost makes finishing an accounting problem set fun. Almost.
- I keep healthy food within arm’s reach, so I can reach for the banana chips when hungry, instead of another avocado melt. Same thing with the multivitamins.
- I’ve been rotating through environments. My 600+ year old college library is a good one, with little but dusty books and the sound of oil trickling through the heaters. No internet either. It’s pretty hard to get distracted in there.
- Ive nailed the music soundtrack. Only 9 songs from Bonobo, Phoenix, Cinematic Orchestra and Zero 7. It plays in rotation for hours in the background. I suspect if these songs now came on in the car at home, I’ll start instinctively working through the capital asset pricing model on the window fog. If I’m too tired for this mix, I jack it up with Daft Punk or Alexisonfire. That gets things done. This has now approached Pavlovian response whenever one of the songs comes on.
- In order to keep growing the First Drop community as we move towards launch (one of the few things that can’t wait for exams), I’ve made sure the Facebook Group is number two on my firefox toolbar. Thus I instinctively click it when procrastinating, checking group progress and adding articles, where I once neglected it. By being the second toolbar link, it has become top of mind, where it needs to be.
My friend has gone a step further, locking up his laptop and installing himself on the other side of town. Good stuff.
None of this is new. We all set up little systems to help us subconsciously shift behaviour. What are your tricks?
Dealing with group work
MBA programs are chock full of group work. I suppose this is to simulate the real world. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the number of people that can’t seem to work in a group. Oxford being 95 per cent international, I fittingly have a Ukranian/American, Peruvian and South African in my current group, [...]
MBA programs are chock full of group work. I suppose this is to simulate the real world. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the number of people that can’t seem to work in a group.
Oxford being 95 per cent international, I fittingly have a Ukranian/American, Peruvian and South African in my current group, which stays together over 8 projects and 3 months. Our experience? Peace and relative productivity. For that I am thankful. Very thankful.
Still, it astounds me when I hear about other groups with frequent decompression meetings, or groups where, after one minor assignment, certain members aren’t talking. I can’t say this happened very often to me in the real world, whether Ethiopia, the UK or Canada. Am I simply surrounding myself with good people? I’d like to think so, but maybe I’ve also been lucky.
Our admin suggested a few months ago that we plan to work for some later projects with people we select. I thought, well, it’ll be hard to tell who works well, won’t it?
Apparently not.
Heading to Oxford
Hey Everyone, My name’s Brendan, and I’m a recovering engineer… ..eerrr, let’s start that again, shall we? Well my name is Brendan, and I have been an engineer. Studied as an engineer at UBC. Worked as an engineer in Canada. But it wasn’t long before I felt other areas pulling my attention away. I’m also [...]
Hey Everyone,
My name’s Brendan, and I’m a recovering engineer…
..eerrr, let’s start that again, shall we?
Well my name is Brendan, and I have been an engineer. Studied as an engineer at UBC. Worked as an engineer in Canada. But it wasn’t long before I felt other areas pulling my attention away. I’m also a fairly socially-motivated person, and I basically concluded that I could have more impact in business development and entrepreneurialism than while working as an engineer. More chance to build something world-changing. That kind of thing. So I’m heading to Oxford in a few months, to take the MBA, with a focus on social entrepreneurship.
It’s been a long path to get here. Like many 20-somethings I know, I’ve struggled with my career path at times. In my case, it’s been an attempt to reconcile a love of the technical with a desire to tackle tough social challenges. This sometimes translates into a conflict between micro and macro approaches. It has led to a fair amount of work with Engineers Without Borders, both in Africa and Canada (a fantastic organization, and very likely strong at your university), as well as work with other organizations working in the area of appropriate technology. Before starting at Oxford, I’ll finish up with Practica Foundation in Ethiopia, where I’ve been working to set up an office over the past year.
I’m excited about Oxford. It’s been a long time coming. I started thinking about it almost two years ago, while taking courses at Cambridge. I decided that it was the right path, and set about trying to get there. Actually, for an MBA, the tough part is trying to pay for it, especially if your aims are more… say, social than financial. But the more I thought about it, the more I realize that my career goals, to start and grow various socially-minded organizations, would seriously benefit from the skills and credibility of an MBA. So I’m biting the bullet.
Oxford is an odd place, chock full of tradition and Harry Potter-ness. Anyone accepted by the 800+ year old university for study must also be accepted by a college, which forms a social network, support and accommodation. I’ll be joining Oriel College a mid-sized College established in 1324. Yep. 1324. My college is almost five times as old as our country. It’s an odd feeling for a Canadian.
I’ll leave it at that for now, and will check back in in the next few weeks as I get everything prepared to head to Oxford. Feel free to fire me any questions, either here or via my personal blog. I’ll do what I can to answer quickly.
Cheers,
B
- photo courtesy of Monica
