Nature of Markets - Introduction to Marketing

by , May 29, 2010

beatvit is a Beat The GMAT community member who is currently enrolled in George Washington Universitys Part-Time MBA program. He will be regularly contributing articles to share his perspective of life as a part-time MBA student. Be sure to check out his blog, or ask him questions about his experiences in this forum thread.

Tonight I had my second class that I am taking in this Summer Term at part-time MBA program at GWSB. I have been looking forward to this course and it appears that my high expectations will be met. I have long been interested in marketing and I really expect to learn a lot from the course. The professor is very knowledgeable and explains concepts very clearly which is a big plus.

Frankly, pretty much all of the professors I have had so far during my first year of MBA program at George Washington University have been very good in terms of knowing their subject matter cold. However, not all of them were equally good in the department of teaching.

That's why I cannot stop raving about ratemyprofessors.com . After the first module in fall and my less than idyllic experience with Financial Accounting, I have constantly been checking out ratings of professors on that website before signing up for any of my classes. So far it has proven to be very helpful. I actually have rearranged some of my classes on a couple of occasions and have even postponed taking a class to a later time when a different professor teaches it based on some of the ratings from that site. And I have managed to steer clear from any classes where the instructor is "TBA" at the time of sign up. This flexibility of selecting even your core courses is a great benefit of a part-time MBA at GWSB which I have come to appreciate greatly.

As for Marketing, we have five business cases to work on for the remaining five weeks of the class, so it is going to be quite an intensive reading/writing term. Especially because my other class in Business and Public Policy is also heavy on write ups. In both classes we have been arbitrarily assigned to groups by the instructors, and almost all cases we work on will be group projects.

I have "tough love" with group projects. If everyone in the group is pulling their share, it's mostly fun. But with even one free-rider in the group it can turn into the major source of frustration. I had both types of experiences in my MBA program and had a post about group projects. That post explains why I am in a "love-hate" relationship with group projects. Unfortunately, you cannot look up your group mates on some sort of ratemyclassmates.com, and even if you could, having arbitrary group assignments would make it useless. Well, I will have to live with that and make do with whoever comes my way. I guess I am not all sugar myself for some of my classmates either :-)