Today was the first day of Ivey Preparatory Knowledge Program (PKP). The MBA is finally starting to feel real.

I flew into London, Ontario around noon yesterday (April 29, 2007). Despite its small size London has its own airport, which is very nice. My first surprise came as I boarded the direct flight from Winnipeg to London to discover the plane surprisingly full. After getting into London and taking couple of minutes to unload my stuff at the Bed and Breakfast place, I ventured out for the rest of the day exploring the neighborhood. So far, I’m left with a very favorable impression of London. The city definitely has a university town type of feel to it. Considering that there are 350,000 permanent residents in London and 60,000 seasonal students the city feels much larger than it is just by the shear number of young people that you see around the city. At least that’s my first impression. Starting in the summer MBA Cohort we get the unfortunate part of seeing the tale part of the student body (to my disappointment that also includes the better looking part of the student body) migrate back to the places of their permanent residency outside London, at least until September.

OK, now a little bit about the Ivey PKP program: it is designed to ease students back into the study routine while reinforcing the foundation of skills necessary to hit the ground running when the actual program starts. The PKP program consists of three modules, first four days are Quantitative Skills, the next two days we will live and breathe Economics, and the last three days focus on Accounting Skills. The classes run from 8am to 5pm with couple of breaks in-between. The 8 hours of classes a day will definitely take some getting used to. My second surprise came when a saw the number of people that are attending the PKP, according to the rough count there was 52 of us out of the class of 69. As the result, one of the bonuses of the PKP program is a chance to meet and work with majority of your classmates before the start of actual classes.

The material taught today consisted of a morning session which started to build on the fundamentals of statistics. For me that was a much appreciated refresher. The afternoon session dealt with modeling a case problem using MS Excel. We’ve learned number of Excel tricks that will most definitely come handy in couple of weeks when we will start analyzing actual cases.

With that in mind I’m off to doing my homework for tomorrow,

Till next time,

George