Archive for October 7th, 2008

Truly random

• Obama needs to calm down after McCain speaks and, IMO, distorts the former’s position.  That’s the nature of a debate.  Things are distorted.  Obama keeps jumping out of his chair.  
• McCain recommends nuclear.  I like that he grabbed that.  No one likes to talk about nuclear, but he did.  Interesting.
• Energy independence is my big thing (kinda hard to say that with the giant mortgage crisis right now).  A mixed plan is really the only way to do it (check out T. Boone Pickens’ plan, which I think is pretty okay).  I’m not sure Obama has addressed the infrastructure needs to get there.
• Actually, I don’t think either has addressed the infrastructure.  
• Wow – “Manhattan project like effort” to fix energy issue.  That’s a great question.  And goes to infrastructure.
• Off-shore drilling to bridge the gap (McCain) – yeah, cuz it takes no infrastructure time to set up off-shore rigs
• Lots of talk before the debate about how well McCain does in town-hall style debates.  So far, he’s been a lot…well, his comments aren’t very veiled at all.  He’s sneaking in a jab with every sentence.  Don’t like that.
• Wow, McCain just pounds on this “Obama hates small businesses” thing…

At a glance

• Workload:  Heavy
• Teaching Style:  Lecture
• Interest in students: High
• Relevance to outside world: Moderate (this is baseline theory)

Overall Professor Rating: 4

Overall Course Rating: 4

Finance 451 is a baseline, theory-oriented course that examines some of the general principles behind finance.  One really learns to apply these concepts in later courses.  While I obviously haven’t taken 451 with professors other than Collins, I really enjoyed the course, and I felt a big part of that positive but challenging experience is due to Collins, specifically.

The Review

This is the latest of my reviews on the professors I’ve had while an MBA student at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. There are lots of sites out there that provide feedback and rates – ratemyprofessor is the most notable. The SantaClaraMBA Yahoo group also has a big database of comments and lots of additional information in its message archive. That database can be a bit hard to wade through, and the comments are short and often just link to other threads, which are themselves pretty short and superficial. Only here can I write as much as I want 

I review professors from a variety of perspectives.  First, I explain the context(s) under which I took the class.  Time of year, time of day, etc.  Then I talk about the quality of the class and the professor, and finally about the professor as a person.  After all, we are trying to learn about our interactions with people, so knowing that side of a teacher is critical, too.  So these would be interactions outside the classroom, etc.  I also just write whatever it is that I think is relevant or will be helpful to others.  That is my overall goal.

This review goes way back to Fall 2007, which is a full year ago.  I might stop my reviews of past classes after this one just for fear of having lost too much since I took it.

The facts

I took Finance 451, as I said, a year ago in Fall 2007.  It is the first of the finance courses and is a core requirement of the MBA program.  I have no idea whether I took the class on a Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday schedule.  Collins is actually in the OMIS (operations) department, but teaches Finance 451 in the fall (followed by OMIS 355 and 357 in the winter and spring, respectively).  He is obviously there because he offers a compelling and effective introduction to the topics of cost of capital, net present value, etc.

Them’s the facts (slim as they are). Now read on for the review.
(more…)

Examining America’s presidential candidates | Examining the candidates | The Economist

On his plans to fix the financial crisis, Mr Obama averages 3.1, a point higher than Mr McCain. Still, some said they didn’t quite know what they were rating—reasonably enough, since neither candidate has produced clear plans of his own. 

This is the interesting line in the article, at least to me.  The candidates haven’t put out their plans yet.  Why?  Because there is no pretty picture to this mess.  There is nothing that can be proposed that won’t come off as a horrible, terrible scenario.  So no one says anything…