Final residency in Ithaca.....

Week of Jan 11, 2010 is the final week of residency in ITHACA for EMBA2010. Comparing all four residency week, this week was the hardest of all. We had several deliverable some of them are individual assignments and some of them are team assignment. Most of my classmates are counting number of weeks to graduation already.

The weather in Ithaca was surprisingly better compare to single digits we had during last winter residency. The room I stayed in Statler was facing the Sage Hall and Cornell Bell tower with amazing view of finger lake valley. Sometimes during the late night studies, I just open the screen on my room to see the beautiful view of the tower and the valley.

Two papers taught during residency are supply chain management and financial statement analysis. The financial statement analysis professor Bhojraj is also manages the Johnson Cornell Cayuga fund. He showed us the parker center where students manage the fund. I should appreciate Johnson school for creating a Parker Center. This is like on the job schooling. Parker center has everything required for an investment banker, hedge fund manager or a mutual fund manager including software, hardware and real-time market data feeds. Predecessors to Prof. Bhojraj are managing 100 Million plus funds now and I am sure he will also move on to manage bigger investment units in the near future.

Usually during residency week we go out for Dinner. Due to high volume of school work, we could not go out for dinner except couple of days during this 4^th residency week. After several long hours in Sage hall (Johnson school building), the seven days felt like a month. Finally when we left Cornell campus on Sunday, we were completely exhausted and sleep deprived.

9 more weekends....And 18 weeks left in the program.....

After the residency, the first weekend class started on Jan 30^th in Palisades. Two more papers started this week end. Classmates were busy with identify and finalizing their private equity projects.

One of my classmates Tony arranged an ongoing racquetball tournament. I heard that Tony, Shireen and Omer are the leaders in this week. Hope to see more in the coming weeks.

After a small break during holidays, school work started in full swing again. In the remaining 9 weekend, one is down and 8 more to go....

Thanks for visiting my blog, see you all in couple of weeks.

Thanks

Patham