Today is Saturday 6th Feb ie. one day after due date for submitting the Financial & Management Accounting paper.

What was the project about? In ACCA Oxford Brookes programme, you are supposed to do financial analysis on a company of your  choice. The MBA requires us to analyse two companies in the same industry in terms of profitability, liquidity, gearing and investability within 3,000 words. The tough part is the 3,000 words. We all got so much to say and all exceeded by thousands. Many tried to edit down but gave up and submitted.

The second interesting thing is the marking results of Costa Rica project. I passed. Relieved. Satisfied but with a question mark of how my fellow team mates graded my contr ibution. Anyway it is done. Let's move on.

Thirdly, the annual ranking results of MBA Business Schools by Financial Times for 2010 was released recently. The big deal is that NUS did not appear in the top 100 and in fact, it did not appear at all in the list due to a technicality. NUS reported the post graduate students' salary in the wrong currency. Nanyang Business School, its local advesary and University of Strathclyde Business School retain their top 50 business schools in the world.

Chinese New Year is around the corner. Wish you a great year ahead. Smile.

Dear friends,

Year 2010 started with 2 weekends of lessons. The hurly burly fortnight ended on Jan 15 with the submission of a group assignment on Costa Rica of about 140 pages with about 23,000 words. Why Costa Rica you may ask?

The name of the module is Exploring International Business Environment. We are tasked to generate scenarios of Costa Rica ten years from today using the model developed by Heijden and his team. We were supposed to operate in a state of uncertainty given the fact that no one has much idea about any of the countries in Central America. At the end of exercise, we ALL learned something about a country none know much about a month ago.

Another interesting aspect of the assignment is the requirement to validate our scenarios with "Remarkable People" ie. talk/communicate with people who has some authoritative knowledge of the country the team has chosen. Where can we find Costa Ricans in Singapore? A team member found out that Costa Rica has an embassy in Singapore. We thank the Ambassador and his team for granting us an audience and wonderful hospitality. We also wrote to academics,newspaper editors and bloggers of and in Costa Rica. It is certainly a new experience for me.

My next assignment dateline is February 5. Tell you more next time.

Be human. Edgar