It's good to be the king

Today we started a new class called International Management which focuses on the management of the multinational corporation. Since this was the first day we didn't cover a whole lot in class but instead spent some time covering course objectives and introducing ourselves and our backgrounds to show the wide diversity of people and experiences we have in the class.

Then we had an afternoon session which was rather interesting. We met at 1:30 to undertake a cultural simulation. We divided the class into two groups, the Alpha's and the Beta's. The object of this simulation was for each group to have a completely different "culture" and then observe how we interact and see if we could figure out the other culture (however, we didn't know this until the end). I'll try not to give away too many details of the game because I don't want to ruin it for future classes.

I was in the Alpha group and our culture was a very social or relational culture. We liked to touch each other (which wasn't always necessarily as fun as it sounds) and valued the relationships we forged more than the results of the "game" we played. One rather interesting twist was that the Alpha's have a patriarch. This person was chosen at the beginning and was usually the oldest male in the group. So that just happened to be me. My job was to protect and oversee the group, and especially the women of our group. As you can see, this part of the job wasn't so bad :)



Then we played a game. We each had three cards (although one of them was a bad card) and we would shuffle them then reveal them. To be honest, I don't really know how the rule worked about who "won" the chips because as the patriarch, I automatically won every time. Again, not such a bad deal. So all we did was hang out with each other and play this game.



We sent small delegations to the Beta group so we could try and understand what they were all about. When our people came back we would all gather around and listen to them tell what they learned (or didn't learn).





And I must admit we really made the most of this game. Amit even came up with an Alpha song and Nolen performed the Alpha dance for the group.



In the end it was a lot of fun and I think we pretty much figured out the Beta group. We saved our best analytical minds for last as evidenced by this picture of Ryan (AKA Blur) briefing the group while John (who was our Alpha bouncer) stood guard.



Until next time....

Financial Accounting final tomorrow!

Thank goodness the accounting final is tomorrow! That has been one of the harder classes for me this summer because I have absolutely no accounting background at all. I know how to balance my checkbook (although knowledge is different from actually doing it sometimes) but that's about it.

But conceptually it was a very interesting class. I liked learning how to read financial statements and understanding the plethora of information a company reveals in those statements. For instance, one thing that I still find intriguing is Coca Cola. Two months ago if you had asked me what their primary business was, I would say that obviously it is producing coke products. But in actuality they essentially a syrup producer. They produce the syrup but the bottling companies are the ones that mix and distribute the final product. For some reason I found that kind of information fascinating.

Another thing I got out of this class is the relativity of money. We would read statements and see companies throwing around millions or billions of dollars. Companies would make multi-million dollar decisions and refer to them matter-of-factly. Then on the other hand, some weeks I struggle to come up with the $35 it takes to fill up my gas tank every 3 days (it is 55 miles, one-way, to school so I spend a lot on gas). It's all a matter of perspective I guess.

So I like the ideas and concepts we learned in this class. But the t-accounts still mess me up, still not sure I am doing the journal entries correctly, and I can live without doing things like determining the amount at which investments are reported on the balance sheet and the amount of investment income recognized by the investor on the income statement.

Alright, break time is over....back to studying because I have the final, which is 50% of our grade, in 23.5 hours :)

Oh, and by the way, in case anyone was wondering it is still hot as heck out here. Today at 3:00 the temperature in Aiken was 105 degrees with a heat index of 117. But luckily it's supposed to cool off tomorrow and only get up to 102 :)

Heat!

Ok, maybe my sarcasm didn't come across very well in my last post because obviously someone didn't get that I was actually tired of this heat and was hoping it would cool off! According to the news tonight we tied the all time high at 108 degrees and at 3:30 the heat index was 122 degrees! It was up to 108.9 here at the house; that is just too dang hot.

Why I love South Carolina so much

You really gotta love this place. It has been over 100 degrees every day this week. Here it is 9:30 at night, the temperature is 93 degrees with a dewpoint of 78 degrees (putting the heat index somewhere around 100).

Here is a picture of the thermometer in my car at about 3:00 this afternoon driving home from Columbia.



Then another of the thermometer at my house (which is in the shade) at 4:30. The temp is in the upper left corner and the dewpoint is in the upper right corner.



If only it could be just a little bit hotter!

Global Entrepreneurship

Well first of all, I haven't written lately not because things have been slow but rather because it has been non-stop for the past couple of weeks. Seems like every week we either have a test, a paper or some project that is due. For example we have a 3-5 page paper that is due this Friday, two projects that are due next Wednesday then our final exam in Financial Accounting next Friday (which nobody is looking forward to). Then on top of that for me, the foreign exchange student that we are hosting is flying in Friday morning so I'm sure that will keep me busy this weekend.

So yesterday we starting an interesting class called Global Entrepreneurship. It is a little bit different so far but quite fun. We don't have an exam in the class but rather we have to come up with a business plan and the winning plan will get $500. And of course we are encouraged to actually implement our plan which makes it all that much more interesting. And on the first day of class our instructor divided us into groups of four and gave each group a lottery ticket. The drawing is tonight and if we win we'll have to split it a few different ways so we'd "only" end up with around $10 million before taxes. I think I could live with that :)

Today in class we started out by playing a game. Our instructor took out some money and placed one denomination on each tier of tables. It went from $5 at the lowest tier, then $10, $20, $50 and $100 at the top. He then placed a coffee can on a table at the front of the room. Three teams were chosen (from the teams we we placed in yesterday) and each team member was given a quarter. The object of the game was then that each team member would stand at the tier which held the amount of money he/she wanted to win. If they could throw the quarter in the coffee can from that level they could keep the money (or maybe had to split it with their team, I'm not sure on that one). So all you had to do was determine how much money you wanted and weigh that against how good you thought you were at beer pong (to put it in terms everyone can understand....lol).

It was actually pretty fun. I didn't get pictures of everyone but here are a few. Jason and Somil tried for $50 and $20 respectively but both missed.





Stephanie tried from the $10 level but even with standing on the table she still missed :)



But the best one was probably John. Standing at somewhere around 6'10 tall he simply stood at the lowest tier, reached over and dropped his quarter in the can.




In the end I think somewhere around $30-40 was won; looking forward to seeing what happens next time. But for now, back to Financial Accounting and Decision Analysis :(