Summer, 2009 Courses

Summer classes are over, so note that perspective as you read this....

I'll try to sum up the summer courses by noting the professor and their special quirks, the class content, the workload, and a super subjective short phrase about whether or not I enjoyed it!

15.761  Intro to Operations Management

• LIKE FACTOR: Loved it!
• The PROFESSOR:  Bradley "Call me Brad" Morrison.  This class truly separated the undergrad MIT experience from the business school experience.  As I sat during the introductory Intro to Ops Mgmt class, I recalled some of my "firsts" in undergrad - as they relate to courses, of course.  I'd walk into class, the professor would point to their name on the board, and then start writing on the chalk-board.  And, there would be homework that night.  There was no "easing" into the school deal, it was all business.  In contrast, there was the class at the beginning of summer, casually-clad in t-shirts and flip flops, and there is Professor Morrison....except that he notes we may call him BRAD.  Brad? I'm thinking wtf, are we not in business school?  It was a short-lived indignation. I got over it.  Brad was an awesome professor and I hear he finished off the year playing beer-pong during the LGO end-of-summer party.
• The CONTENT:  As the class title suggests (whoever comes up with class titles, btw, is a genius), this class was an introduction to Operations Management and covered topics such as the Economic Order Quantity and light Inventory Management, tradeoffs between Service Levels and Inventory Holding Costs, the "Newsvendor Model", and others that have escaped my memory
• The WORKLOAD: Light.  There were a bunch of cases to read and analyze for class discussion, but I generally enjoyed them.  I only remember 1 HW assignment, and there was 1 midterm.  There were also some team assignments and a competition using a web-based simulator.  We also played the famous Beer Game as part of this class - http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html

ESD.60  High Velocity Organizations

• LIKE FACTOR:  Liked it.
• The PROFESSOR:  Steve "Bowtie" Spears, author of Chasing the Rabbit.  
• The CONTENT:  "Lean"; how organizations can leverage the tools required to sprint ahead of the competition.  From the syllabus, class objectives were:

Objectives

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

1. Understand the capabilities that distinguish high velocity market leaders from

their capabilities.

2. Have some capacity to apply these capabilities to their own work.

3. Understand how various quality and productivity programs—lean, six sigma,

TQM, and the like can be useful in supporting the development and

deployment of the four capabilities of high velocity organizations.

• The WORKLOAD:  Light.

15.064  Probability & Statistics

• LIKE FACTOR:  Undecided. The first half of the class was enjoyable due to the professor's dorkiness; the second half was painful for similar reasons.  However, the material was noticeably valuable, and I wish I had learned more.
• The PROFESSOR:  This class was unusual in that the first half was taught by one professor with the support of one [unpublished] book, and the second half was taught by a different professor with the support of a different book.
• The CONTENT:  As the title suggests.
• The WORKLOAD:  Moderate.  Individual assignments, group assignments, a midterm, a final, and a helicopter build competition.

15.066  Systems Optimization

• LIKE FACTOR:  Loved it!
• The PROFESSOR:  One smooth French dude - Jeremie Gallien.  Professor Gallien was a no-BS professor who called out students when they were late, felt they had better things to pay attention to, or simply looked guilty of not understanding the material.  For some reason, I always thought of the Disney movie, "Ratatouille" while I was in that class.  Weird.
• The CONTENT:  Optimization - learning about how to solve for Max/Min problems given a set of constraints.  My ultra favorite problem was on an Individual Homework assignment.  It was so awesome that I spent about 90% of the time allotted for the assignment on this problem.  The problem was titled the McDonald's Diet Problem and it had to do with finding the least-cost daily diet that was nutritionally complete based on guidelines provided and was composed entirely of foods from McDonald's.  The answer to part a of the problem had someone acquiring an insane amt of honey packets (because these gave you calories for free), which was pretty funny.  Added constraints yielded a much more "rationale" answer.
• The WORKLOAD:  Heavy.  Only 1 individual assignment, for which we were  given 8 hours and 8 hours only.  I spent 8 hours and did not complete it.  For the homework assignments, our team easily spent about an average of 6 hrs each (x 6 people) per assignment.  No midterm...no final.  The final project, however, was pretty work intense and many many hours were spent on it!  

15.317 Leadership

• LIKE FACTOR:   Undecided. On some days, the material was relevant and interesting, while on other days, I struggled in finding the value in the examples/analogies to something i'd actually encounter post graduation.  Our journey with "leadership" is to continue throughout the remainder of our 2 years, so we'll see how my opinion changes. 
• The PROFESSOR:  Jan Klein.
• The CONTENT:  
• The WORKLOAD:  Moderate.