Tips from last year’s cohort

These are some of the discussions held in the “Oxford MBA Handover Group – 2018-19” on Telegram. Please note that these do not
represent the view of the entire 2017-2018 cohort and they are comments from only a handful of students. To learn more about
specific topics you can join the channel.

Some of the oversubscribes courses from last year:

• Business History -10
• Entrepreneurial Finance -7
• Financial Statement Analysis -10
• Impact Investing -44
• Leadership Perspectives from the Humanities - 6
• Marketing Analytics -1
• Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructuring -20
• Negotiations: Strategy and Practice (Stream 2) -5
• Private Equity (Stream 1) -4
• Private Equity (Stream 1) -7
An updated provisional list of Summer electives can be found on Canvas.

Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics in Marketing

• Good class, not great.
• It spent most of the time reviewing statistics concepts and went to the point of teaching
segmentation through cluster analysis and a small bit of how AI works.

Asset Management
• Highly recommended.
• You definitely do not need a finance background for Asset Management. It is studied at very high
level.
• One student commented it was even useful for picking assets for his own personal portfolio.
• Taught by my Mungo Wilson, who comes highly recommended by last year’s class.
• Student comment about Mungo: He has a "mad scientist" passion and oddness about him, is a great
lecturer and has a great sense of humour/sarcasm.

Behavioral Finance
• Student comment: I personally do not recommend this class. I wanted to like it because I like the
psychology aspect, but the delivery was so dull and dry it was painful to sit through. If you read
Thinking, Fast and Slow you can cover a lot of what this class did.

Business History
• Business History is mostly out of the classroom, on a boat, in museums and colleges.
• Gives a real good understanding of how UK and Oxford were key parts of the first industrial revolution
and world trade. And we had a champagne reception on the lawn of old quad in Brasenose.
• Student comment: I took Business History, and I really enjoyed it, but I think feedback was better for
Leadership Perspectives from the Humanities.
• Another student comment: I took both. I preferred the lectures for the Leadership Perspectives from
the Humanities, but loved the assessment for Business History.
• Another student comment: Business history... I got frustrated with the lecture style. I think I would’ve
really enjoyed it had it not been such a busy term/lifestyle. But for me, it felt too rambly/pointless and
I just didn’t want to prioritise them. But then I got really into the case study we had to write, and it
was one of my favourite assignments all year.

Business Strategy and Politics

• One of the best electives ever. Good content, highly engaging professor.
 • Jan de Neve comes highly recommended by last year’s class.
• Last year’s main assessment (70% of the grade I think) was a simulation which required partnering up
with classmates to role play in a business/political negotiation. Check for updated assessment on
slides.

Circular Economy
• One student comments he was extremely challenged by circular economy and learned a lot during
that class.
• Another student says she loved Circular Economy - it really challenged her thinking and she felt like
it impacted her philosophy in a lot of ways.
• It was a smaller class and everyone wanted to be there, so they had great discussions.
• Not a very structured class but had lots of great guest speakers and the professor is supposedly
awesome.

Corporate Turnaround
• Great class. Content is mostly applying MBA skills to solve real business problems.
• Taught jointly by Steve New and Alastair Nicholson.

Financial Markets Trading

• Student comment: It is undoubtedly the toughest course in the whole MBA, the concepts are too hard
to grasp, and you can’t apply the learnings anywhere unless you are a trader.
• In other words, take this if you’re really into this stuff.

Fundamental Analysis for Active Investing

• Last year’s class did not have this class, but they had a course called financial statement analysis
(might be similar?)
• Student comment: The course content and assignments were quite challenging, but it's quite useful if
you are planning to be an investor or have a genuine interest.

Identification in Finance and Social Sciences

• The course is about systemically identifying causation compared to correlation. Student comment: In
other words, it's a bullshit radar and very powerful.
• Taught by my Mungo Wilson, who comes highly recommended by last year’s class. One student
commented: He has a "mad scientist" passion and oddness about him, is a great lecturer and has a
great sense of humor/sarcasm.
• The reviews from last year’s students were amazing. Mungo is fairly certain no other business school
in the world teaches identification.

Leadership Perspectives from the Humanities

• The class shifts your perspective away from traditional leadership roles and management styles.
• Outside class visits like St. John's and visit the Ashmolean.
• Professor Pegram is highly recommended.
• Last year had some amazing lectures, and some less interesting.
• A couple of people commented that they wish they had taken leadership perspectives from the
humanities instead of business history.

Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructuring

• Highly recommended.
• Not a finance course, more about studying the business models of the companies.
• Very crowded class last year. Careful when bidding.
Nature of the Corporation
• It's mainly about corporate governance. Last year’s class thinks it was actually a really important class.
• The course didn't require a lot of reading or coursework last year, no assignments and the required
readings took about ten minutes per class.
• Student comment: Colin Mayer is a really great and famous professor to work with. The style is a little
traditional and last year’s assessment was a traditional two-hour exam. But the content is very
thought provoking.

Negotiations
• Many people from last year’s cohort think that Negotiations is one of the must courses in the MBA.
• Very crowded class last year. They had to open a 3rd stream to accommodate people. Careful when
bidding.

Private Equity
• Highly recommended.
• Not a finance course, more about studying the business models of the companies.

Project Management
• Didn’t receive much good feedback about this one. People thought the content and the lecturer were
not good overall.
• People compared this to the Mega Project Management elective taught in Summer and said Mega
was a fantastic course. Apparently Bent Flevberg is a global expert in the field and the class content
is excellent. If you’re considering Project Management, you might want to look at this one and decide.

Reputation & Leadership

• The class got some good feedback from previous year’s class.
• Some great guest speakers. Although the content is fairly limited, it's padded out with the guest
speakers.

Supply Chain
• The course didn’t live up to its potential last year.
• The examples in the material weren’t coherent and the delivery wasn’t intellectually stimulating
either.

Trust in Digital Age

• Has been classified as a must take class.
• Student comment: Rachel Botsman is potentially the most impressive professor we have at Oxford.
She advised AirBnB and BlaBla car at very early stages.