The format is simple: you receive a case in the mid afternoonof one day, and, working with your learning team, you produce a report and a presentation deck 24 hours later.
Sounds simple.
The kicker is this: the morning of the day you receive the report, you would have to sit through four hours of grueling DMA exam. If you are an aspiring student, looking to ask questions about school, just hit up any current student and say “gee, tell me about DMA,” and pretty much you’re set for an earful. So I’ll leave out that DMA explanation here, but you can guess -it’s a kicker alright. By the end of it, you would have felt like Hannabal Lecter just ripped open your head, ran solver with 95% accuracy, and optimized the distances of your synapses, and you would feel a little bit exhausted.
OK back to the 24-hour report: it’s a case. It’s a complex case, and it uses many of the techniques and ideas you will learn throughout Module 1.Typically, you are asked to take on the role of the main decision maker, and you need to make one or more decisions. That would be part of the report. Also, you’d be asked to analyze the decision from the learning team’s perspective, and that would also be part of the report. This is the kind of time when you lock a group of talented people in a room and tell them to create a report, and suddenly, fire blows out of everyone’s ears and noses and mouths.
I am writing about this because the September class just finished their first 24-hour report yesterday, and I was at Spencer, trying to give my passing classmates some support here and there. It was fun to see them going through that experience, knowing that it is the first major milestone in the Ivey program and seeing everyone moving forward at lightning speed. They may not realize it now (as I surely did not, and sometimes even now I do not realize) just how fast the program moves and how much growth they have already made.
If you are a prospective student and you want to know about student life, definitely ask about the 24 hour report (and DMA) when you get a chance.
Jim Pan completed his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Waterloo in 2002, and spent the next six years in the technology sector. He enjoys analyzing problems and finding creative solutions, and his passion for excellence led him through career progressions and eventually to Ivey. To Jim, MBA at Ivey means an opportunity for self-discovery and transformation, and he celebrates overcoming every new challenge. In his spare time, Jim enjoys volunteering with the Canadian Cancer Society. Jim also enjoys hiking, swimming, and staying generally active. He recently completed his first triathlon race in 2009 and is planning for another race in 2010.