Marketing Strategy has got to be one of the most awesome classes ever. I’m currently sitting in the final presentations, where each team is showing what decisions they made for the next period, whose decisions were due today at noon. After the presentations are done, we get our results in competition with each other. What fascinates me is that we can see how all the strategies have been built, established, and how they interplayed with each other over the past few periods. For instance, one of the best performing teams had a strategy that wasn’t particularly coherent, while all of the middle teams have solid, tight, cohesive strategic statements that are very likely to pay off in the long run.

Fall San Francisco trip is starting to take shape. Looks like it’s cheaper to fly into SF rather than Reno, and go hit the JMT from there. I won’t really have any time to visit people, as I’ll rapidly disappear into uncharted (sortof) wilderness. And when I come back I’ll be more interested in soaking up hot springs than driving back to SF to meet peeps.

And thus, the second half of the trimester begins. Today is my first session of Marketing Strategy, a class I suspect will be six weeks of a reasonable level of work, but annoying nonetheless because it happens in the middle of the summer, conflicts with Soccer, and will guarantee that Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays will be spent working on class foo. What’s particularly annoying about this class is that for the second half of the term the classes run for three and a half hours. Yes, that’s right, I get to sit listening to the guy from 615PM until 945PM for two nights a row, and hope that I can glean some kind of understanding from the man. If that wasn’t enough, I have the same instructor for both of my classes, so I get to see the same guy for 7 hours a week, lecturing on two different topics.

So, yesterday started off with a comment in my inbox from Terri and a reciprocate post of hers in her own LJ that totally started the day off right. The side effect of this is that I now feel like I should post more… though I really don’t know what to post about. I mean… apparently I “relieve creative urges”. Seems almost like I’m a rather drastic medieval solution to relieve biliouos humor or something like that, kept on the shelf in the supermarket right next to the discount thumb screws and the Heinz Brand Boiling Oil (”Now with guaranteed flaying!”).

Course descriptions were handed out for the summer term, and… well, it’s interesting when you no longer have any options. Summers are notoriously bad for that- not a whole lot of selection, focus on the required courses, and the two I was lacking were nice enough to conflict. Luckily, I found a few courses I wouldn’t mind taking, realizing now that I’m lacking only one Ops course (my focus) which is offered in the Fall. Woot. I just hope it doesn’t conflict with Strategy, the programs’ capstone. So, without further ado, my courses:

That quote has been running through my mind rather often recently. I’m increasingly discovering that there are only so many things I can keep in conscious memory. As a result, my brain has adapted in that it requires a certain amount of chargeup time to really focus on a particular task, but once it’s gotten there I retain the scary efficiency that I pride myself on- sortof like loading a program into Ram, ironically enough. There are other coping mechanisms- regulating most aspects of my life, ensuring that I lay a solid theoretical foundation underneath my applied knowledge so that if the upper tiers dissapear I can derive the necessary functions on the fly, associating musical styles with productivity, self-programming locations with particular tasks so it’s easier to ‘get into the groove’, as it were… and all of these methods are becoming less and less useful.

One of the big things that my Investment class has taught me is how to be “Wise” in my investments. This isn’t just one lesson, but several, ranging from a change of perspective regarding money to a debunking of many common stock-market fears. In the end, it’s really just a question of education and understanding, [...]

I just got out of my Finance final, and for the sake of me I am once again amazed at… what happens when I sit down to take an exam. Now, a bit of back story- I was scared of this test. Seriously scared. Not because it was difficult material, but because I needed to understand it to a degree beyond what I’m used to. See, I’m taking Investing and Capital Markets next semester because I’m curious about what it would take to become a securities broker, and the second part of this last semester focused on how to value securities, beta values and other stock related math (I’ll spare you the details). A large part of stock finance, however, is Statistics. And I suck at statistics. So I’m walking into an exam for which I could have studied a lot more, knowing full well that if I didn’t click on every single problem that I could kiss any potential future as an investor goodbye.

So I head home after work at about 330PM yesterday (After having spent the night there) and decide that a nap would be a good idea. I set the alarm to 530, so I have enough time to get to class at 615, right? My internal clock kicks me out of bed at 525, and I have to run from the bathroom to the bedroom sudsy because I forgot to de-prime the alarm five minutes later. So I wander to class, manage to pay attention (We cover CRM and the importance of relationships, then go into calculating present lifetime customer value given retention across multiple complementary product lines- see? I remember!), then wander home to get ready for Salsa.

Consider a market of 4 million customers whose preference across a range of product types are evenly distributed. These product types are types 0,1,2,3, and 4 (For sake of simplicity, use ‘spoons of sugar in cereal’ as an example). Any company entering this market can choose to make one, and only one, of the five product types. A customer will buy whatever product is cheapest , given that the additional ‘psychic’ cost of a product that doesn’t match his preference is (x-y)^2, where x is the products specification and y is the preference. Every customer has a reserve price of 50. Thus a customer will buy a product if p + (x-y)^2 < 50, and is the cheapest.