Hello, readers. After a very long break, I am delighted to resume writing my posts. I don’t really have any excuses for my prolonged silence. Yes, I’ve been occupied with various projects and studies, but, at the end of the day, the truth is that I succumbed to procrastination on a few writing days. Those days turned into weeks, which eventually turned into months…
I suspect that I’m not in the minority, and I must say that this experience has given me insight into how some blogs come to an end. Drawing a comparison to running, it felt like I stopped when I shouldn’t have, as resuming my writing feels more tiring and painful than pushing through those extra miles to reach a goal (although I wouldn’t know how to define a goal, especially when it comes to this blog).
A few months have passed since I completed the Quantic EMBA and since then, I have been getting quite a lot of questions from prospective students regarding my experience and most importantly, whether I would recommend this course. This will be my final post regarding Quantic and I am hoping to touch upon most of your questions to help you make an informed decision.
1. The Capstone Project
I have written extensively about my learning experience for the individual models and if you read my past posts, you will recall that I was not a huge fan of their teaching style. The Capstone Project was a pleasant surprise as it was more engaging and gave me the opportunity to interact more with other students. In a nutshell, the project required us to come up with a viable business plan, something which incorporates most of the concepts that we learned throughout the course. We must have spent around a month in finding group members, a couple of months in discussing and finally choosing the business idea and finally a solid 3-4 months in drafting the business plan.
Overall I found myself in a good group, with professionals from a wide range of industries and backgrounds. I am not saying that we didn’t have any hiccups on the way but I thought that we managed to submit a reasonable piece of work and a very viable business idea (I will not go into details here). We had weekly meetings and worked on market research, developed mock ups of our product, created a pricing plan and finally some very realistic financial projections.
The only disappointing part of this project was the marking. Based on the comments that we received, it was very clear that the marker had not understood or thoroughly read our plan, the comments came across as very rushed and generic. To add insult to injury, the comments that we got from our appeal process were very unprofessional, something that I would never expect from a well reputable academic institution.
2. The Graduation Ceremony
The graduation ceremony was also disappointing; to summarise, it was pretty much just your name being read out in a big ZOOM meeting. While I understand that given the number of students (and cost?) it might not be feasible to organise hybrid events, I thought that some additional work could be done in hosting a more inclusive graduation ceremony.
3. Has the degree been a game changer?
This is a question that I get asked quite a lot but I might not be the best person to answer it as I have not been actively looking to change careers with this EMBA, however I can speak based on what I have seen in my cohort. I would say that the short answer is no (at least in APAC). Unlike past degrees, I did not get the impression that student made big career moves after graduating; as someone who has invested in this EMBA, I would love to hear that I am wrong though. I regularly speak with recruiters and I must say that the brand image is still low so I believe Quantic still has a lot of work to do to increase the perceived value of their degrees.
4. The Network
The networking aspect is where I see the most potential. Quantic have done a very good job in gaining momentum and attracting smart students around the world. There are various WhatsApp groups and communities and they are all very active. The question to ask is whether this momentum will continue to get stronger or whether the networks will fade away. I am optimistic here and as a graduate, I am hoping that the Quantic brand continues to grow. I am also looking forward to exploring the “Quantic network” in the following months.
5. Final verdict
My advice for Quantic is to review the teaching style and add more opportunities for students to interact. The few group projects throughout the course were the most enjoyable experience and the Smart Cases were extremely monotonous and ended up becoming a tick box rather than the intended active learning tool. The tutorials and events are still very US centric in terms of timezone and I thought that greater consideration for APAC based students would have been nicer. As a prospective student you might ask me whether I would enrol in the course if I could go back in time and the short answer is No. However I would like to re-iterate that this will depend on your personal circumstances. If you do not want to get into debt in gaining a degree, Quantic might be a suitable choice but I still think it’s a bit of a gamble. As a graduate I do hope that they keep adding to the learning experience to avoid becoming one of the many degree mills.
Hello readers, as I am writing this post, I have completed all the modules required by Quantic’s EMBA programme and I am currently working on the Capstone Project with February 2023 being the expected graduation date.
Hello Readers, this is post number one of my experience in preparing for the GMAT exam. Just to give you some background, I took the GMAT exam for the first time 12 years ago during my last year of university but I opted to cancel my score which was a big, big mistake. A lot of time has passed since my first attempt but I recall that the questions that I was seeing at the end of the exam were easy, leading me to think that I had done very poorly. It was a bad decision to cancel the score and there are a lot of articles out there including this one from Manhattan Prep that argue why you should not. My second attempt was three years ago and this time I did not cancel my score just to receive my extremely underwhelming result of 470……. So what went wrong? If you check out other posts on this blog page you, can see how I have been taking other arguably challenging exams so why did I perform so poorly on the GMAT exam? There are a lot of posts out there from test takers who got their desired scores and got accepted at their target business schools. This is not one of those posts but I am hoping that this gives you some insight as to the bad habits that you should avoid when preparing for this exam.
Mindfulness has been a buzz word in the past years, there are a lot of definitions out there, however the one that I like is the one that refers to mindfulness as the ability to focus on the present moment experience without evaluation. I started practising mindfulness three years ago and I have had a very positive experience. It has had a very strong impact on my professional career and on my personal life, but most importantly, it has allowed me to better understand how my mind works.
Have you been struggling with writer’s block recently? You have that piece that you are working on and the harder you try to think the harder it is to get words? Then you might want to try attending a Shut up & Write session. I joined a meeting for the first time a few months ago and it has been a great experience. If you need to write regularly, have an urgent deadline but get stuck, or like me, you love procrastinating and get easily distracted, you should try Shut Up & Write. This is a group that I recently discovered and my experience so far has been extremely positive. For those of you who are just hearing about this group for the first time, Shut Up & Write is a community of people around the world who host chapters where members meet together, update each other on their writing projects and get cracking on with their work. Events are free and hosted online and in-person.
In this post I will be covering Quantic’s Economics module. Similarly to what I wrote in the Accounting module, I sat this course as someone who already had exposure to most of the concepts covered in the course either via full semester courses during my undergraduate degree or from studying for financial qualifications.
In my previous post, I wrote about my experience in competing for the first time at a speech contest. The post was focused on my experience in drafting the speech and the help that I received from club members in fine-tuning different parts of the speech. In this post, I would like to focus on another point that is equally important as the speech, the delivery. You can have the perfect speech scripted, but if you are not able to deliver it well, you will struggle to impress the judges on the day of the competition. In this post I will be sharing some tips that I picked up as I was preparing for the speech contest.
An important piece of advice that I received when I started working as a new graduate was about how I needed to continue investing in my personal development if I wanted to be successful in my career. One manager at my first firm went as far as telling me that he spent 10-20% of his income every year in his personal development during his early career. In my case, I didn’t have a fixed monetary amount but every year I made a conscious effort to have some additional personal development goal outside of work. Very often this was in the form of attaining a professional qualification. Before you continue reading, I want to make my view clear, I’m not professing that going out there and collecting degrees and letters after your name is the winning tactic. Ultimately, your success at work will depend on how well you can do the job and communicate your contributions to key stakeholders. What I am saying is that especially in a very rapidly evolving job market like the one we are seeing today, failing to grow your skillsets might not just stop you from getting that promotion but might even be detrimental for your career and job stability as a wide range of jobs become obsolete due to the development of new technologies.
As my Toastmasters journey continues, I have been reaping a lot of the benefits from being an active member. In my last post, I spoke about how taking a club officer role helped me in working on my leadership skills. In this post, I would like to share with you my experience from entering Club Level, Area Level and Division Level competitions. A few years ago, the idea of entering a speech contest would have terrified me since I was never comfortable speaking in front of people. Competing in a speech contest was a goal that I wanted to work towards but one that I felt was of my reach, however thanks to the confidence that I built in delivering speeches at my club and thanks to the warm support of my club members, I was able to finally reach this goal.
TheFinanceNerd 