Saturday, September 11, 2010

Role Playing Game

Disclaimer: This post is (almost) purely textual.

The title reminds me of the stories I heard about Kamaron's old World of Warcraft playing roommate, where he was probably a commander of a barbarian horde out to defeat all the evil goblins in the world. But that is not at all what I mean when I talk about the Role Playing Game I was involved in this week at school.

As you all know, I am in my first year of graduate business school at THE Indiana University. It has been an incredibly quick two weeks (only 14 left), partly because of a project that I was involved in all of last week. The project consists of a case study that requires on average 40-50 hours per person for one week - on top of all other class and work commitments we may already have. Luckily, my team was chosen to present our case early in the semester when the workload in other classes is not extremely heavy.

My New School

Each week, there is a different case that a team must solve, and our case involved acting as a professional service company (PwC) that was helping another company assess whether or not they were ready to go public through an initial public offering (IPO). While this may not sound interesting at all to a lot of people, the thing that made the project worthwhile is that we worked directly with PwC employees in Chicago who wore many different hats playing different characters. Sometimes they were PwC peers, other times they were blue-collar employees of the company considering going public, and still other times they acted as the CEO and CFO of the company. All the while, we were role playing as consultants and accounting advisors.

Needless to say, we were able to interact with these people throughout the week through conference calls and constant e-mail communication. While our team knew nothing about the IPO process initially, we worked all week to get educated and develop a strategy that we could present at the end of the week to the company's management on the following Friday.

Not going into too much detail about what we did, we devised a strategy and presented it to the PwC professionals (who flew down from Chicago) on Friday who were acting as management. Overall, the 1-hour presentation went very well, and they seemed very satisfied with our recommendations.

This was definitely a huge learning experience for everyone involved, and we even had to deal with what our professor calls the "fickle finger of fate". Basically, something goes wrong with every case (can't use projector, two people can't present), and our fate was that due to the labor day weekend, we were unable to receive any information on our company's position until last Tuesday. This turned out not to be too bad, and we were able to handle the added pressure pretty well.

Anyways, I hope that didn't bore you, but that was pretty much ALL that I did this week. Literally, I only spent about 1-hour per day at home and awake - the rest of my day was spent at the school with my team. And luckily, my team is pretty great!

Glad it is over, and it should be smooth(er) sailing from here!

4 comments:

  1. You totally lost me from the first paragraph (well, almost totally!), but I'm just glad you were pleased, the execs were pleased, and most-importantly your professor was pleased!!! Great job...I was thinking about you all week. My prayers paid off! Love you!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. dude...you lost me too. sounds like you're taking care of business though...pun intended!

    ReplyDelete
  3. So glad that week is over for you! Congratulations on a job well done and welcome back into my life. I've missed you. hehe

    ReplyDelete
  4. Did you buy any stock after the company went public?

    Sounds like ICORE to the extreme! Glad it's over...

    ReplyDelete