Glinda

Finished my last final on Friday to wrap up the program! I doubled up 3 times—ISDS 705/ECON, ISDS 710/MADM 760, and FIN 701/MADM 710.

Good luck to you all! Not sure what to do with all this free time!

If Phillips’ course load for 701 is anything like 710, it’ll be somewhat heavy. I’ve posted about it so you can look at my post history to see what I mean.

No, I agree with you. There is also a discussion board post + 25 question quiz each week. My discussion board posts have fallen in the 1000-1500+ range or thereabouts. Just as an example this week there were 4 questions to answer in that post including one that required 2 pro/cons and fully fleshed out arguments to go with it. Before that last question my word count was at 948. As it’s an HR class we are working on things weekly like writing a fully fleshed out job description + analysis, but we weren’t allowed to write it on our own job or one within our department. And both discussion board post and weekly assignment require a fair amount of outside research as they ask questions that can’t be answered with the core text.

All of this is fine—it’s a graduate level course after all—it’s just much more involved than the syllabus made it look in the beginning. I’d say the workload is nearly comparable to James’ MKT701 when you factor in all the research/etc.

In case anyone wants to know how MADM 710 is going—discussion board post and response once a week. Very simple case study responses but lots of questions to answer. Either a “mini project” or case study response each week to write, minimum of 500 words, and a quiz over the readings. Manageable course load.

Here’s the bad so far—extremely slow grading. Here we are at Thursday and nothing from last week has been graded save the quiz. I don’t like to write a second assignment before I know how the person grading likes things done but looks like I have no choice here.

To be fair, those reviews are 2-4 years old. No telling if it’s the same professor and even if it is, she may have changed. Fingers crossed anyway.

Finally got my grade last night at roughly 10:30. Got zero feedback, just a score. Glad I seemed to do it right as I had already turned in my second.

I paired Gibbs 705 and Econ and didn’t have a problem. I found Gibbs’ workload to be manageable—I put in 1-2 hrs a week, all on Monday, and spent the rest of the time on Econ. I enjoyed the class because he really worked it from an angle of project management and not just straight IT systems. The workload was—two sets of questions to answer per week from the book, a short quiz, and a piece of the project you work on the whole way through. Some weeks he had a video to watch, but the one he had us watch was on start ups and it was actually pretty interesting. Dr. Gibbs is funny and engaging, he responds quickly to questions and was more interactive than a lot of the other professors I’ve had. I enjoyed the class a lot.

I’m so annoyed. I really feel like people could have thrived under the new setup IF : there were weekly zoom sessions to begin with, the emphasis was on the book and not DC, and the DC assignments had been laid out well to begin with. I cannot believe we are throwing the format out the window halfway through. If everyone was struggling then you need to rework the format youve already set forth, not decide to revert back.

That is funny. What a mess this is so far...I think the concept of the class could work but he’s going to have to do some tweaking for sure.

The weirdest part to me is having us complete the DC assignments on weeks where they aren’t part of the test. Like last week we spent so much time on the apply family but weren’t tested on it at all. I know the concept is that everything builds but I feel horrible for the people who have absolutely zero stats/programming backgrounds.

Yes, ISDS 710 has been interesting. My biggest trepidation is that there are so few points available that it seems like one misstep could cost you big time. I’ve been doing the practice datacamp quizzes which does seem to help but it’s chewing up a decent amount of my brain space.