So after 8 weeks, I've finished my 1st course....with an "A" no less!!

Looking back on it I noticed:
1) It did not totally disrupt my life!
2) It was so convenient to be able to log in at anytime to view the lectures and participate in the discussion forums
3) It actually had relevance in my work already!

The 1st course was 1 week of introduction, 3 weeks of Statistics 2 weeks of Marketing and 2 weeks of Economics
The project for the course was to create a Business Plan....and this is not just an outline of what you'd maybe-possibly like to accomplish  on a topic....it's a 30 page MBA-Level Business Plan!

It was pretty neat how the course was set up because each week the topic related back to the Business Plan and we'd complete a section of the Business Plan until the end and it was done. It was a great feeling to look at a complete Business Plan and know that it is so complete that you could go to a bank to submit for business financing if you'd like!

*I found a really impressive tool that helped me in this assignment too, it's a software program that walked me through step-by-step each section with examples of how to complete the section of a Business Plan and gave 500 sample Business Plans for me to refer to so I could see how other people did there's etc. If you'd like to do a Business Plan for your business, whether you're in an MBA program or not it's an awesome tool!
CLICK HERE to see if it's right for you!

One last observation on this 1st course is that it's so totally different going to school in 2007 than when I went to College in 1989 (duh!)....but what I mean is that whenever I was doing a problem or assignment and wondered how to do it, I'd Google the topic (isn't it crazy that "Google" is a verb!).
But I'd research "How to use Excel to solve Binomial Distribution" for my Stats section.....and up pops page after page of sites that discuss that or showed me screen-shots of how to do it.....!! (too bad I couldn't just type in the problem and up pops the answer! But then I wouldn't learn how to do it on my own!)

I was talking to someone last night in the College and Career Sunday School class I teach who was telling me how he and his friends in High School would do just the minimum amount of work to pass a class so they could goof off!
I was thinking how different this mentality is from what I'm experiencing....I'm paying a pretty large chunck of change for this program.....MY MONEY....MY TIME....! And I want to learn it to apply to my Career and future! 

So do I do just the minimum to pass so I can goof off....UH, NO!
 
One of the reasons I'm getting this Marketing MBA is to start a Marketing Consulting firm, and I started building a website of Marketing Tools that I'll focus all the consulting around....let's face it, Sales Professionals, Realtors, Mortgage Lenders, Insurance Agents etc are typically not savvy on cutting-edge marketing tools!
(I know because I work in the Mortgage Sales industry as a Senior Loan Officer for a large bank)
Keep an eye on my site: www.TotalMarketingToolbox.com

I start my next class in a few weeks, so check back for the summary of that class.
Until then BTW....I thought I'd recommend one of my favorite books!