"You'll Never, Ever Experience Doing a Book Report in Your MBA"

During the last day of our class in Investment Analysis (one of my elective class as part of completion for my specialization), we had our final exam in a multiple choice format. During this time, my core friends in MBA and my former classmates from previous subjects are done with their Strategic Management class and were participating in their Integrative Action Research workshop.

During the exam, I happened to stumble upon two questions that are Strategic Management-related concepts such as Porter's Five forces. I just took a picture of those questionnaire and did not post it on social media until all exams are done since I was planning to make a joke that we're also taking up Strategic Management - albeit during the final exam.

After the examination, I indeed post the said questionnaires with the caption "Sinong may sabi na kayo lang may Strama [Strategic Management], kami din noh? Sa final exam nga lang." Some of my former classmates took a laugh on it based on their reactions of the said post. Meanwhile one of my former classmates somewhat took a shot on it commenting on my post that nothing beats doing a Strategic Management paper. It was utterly true that nothing beats doing a Strategic Management paper as the paper was really hard to do, but I think all of those who reacted on it knew that it was just humor. Since I took up an additional electives in pursuit of my specialization in Financial Management, I replied to his comment as "True, but you'll never, ever experience doing a book report in your MBA." One of my classmates who also pursued specialization saw my comment and he was like, I did a great job replying at that post because it made sense.

While the quote seemed to be that childish as that graduate students should not supposed to be doing book reports as it was supposed to be done during elementary or at most college days. However, the book report is not just a book. We're talking about The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman. Those are quite sophisticated books - way beyond what we normally read such as novels or even articles.

Those that were ahead of us may have the bragging rights in terms of experiencing something that would make other people like us somewhat jealous of their accomplishments. However, the desire to experience everything first might fail them to miss on other things that were also worth experiencing. One could post that he/she could finish the program at a faster pace, while people who chose specialization like me can brag that at least we get to have an extension of our degrees like MBA-FIN or MBA-MKT by the time we graduate. They may never get that chance again as they chose to do things at a faster pace even if one thinks it's such an unnecessary thing to do.