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Optimizing Our Coursework. DECS Waiver Exam

How can I optimize my academic experience in the JD-MBA program? That’s a question many of us here at Northwestern think about tpretty often given our limited time at both Kellogg and Northwestern Law. The general answer seems to be take more classes we enjoy, take less required courses, and enroll in more classes that will help jumpstart our careers. But that’s easier said than done given the steep course requirements at the law school, not to mention the foundational courses needed at the business school. But hopefully that won’t stop a few of us from being able to lighten up our required b-school course load this semester and make our transition to Kellogg more exciting this fall.

Just this week, the JD-MBA group finally received the results of the waiver petitions we submitted a few weeks ago. Many of us hoped that Kellogg would help us lighten our b-school core by giving us credit for relevant college courses.  A number of JD-MBAs got classes waived, including Accounting, Finance, and Statistics, while many others did not receive any waivers.  A third group of students have been out of school for just long enough, that although they may have deserved waivers, Kellogg decided not to give them credit because of the time.  For the second and third groups who ended up without waivers in some classes, we’ve decided to take Kellogg’s waiver exams to try to waive courses.  The first exam is tomorrow morning 9am sharp, less than 7 hours from now. And it’s for Decision Sciences (DECS) 433.

DECS is really just a fancy title for Business Statistics, which is a class where you apply statistical mathematics to business topics such as “inventory management, supply and demand, principal-agent models, herd behavior, selection bias, rare events, real options, and risk.”  Although it sounds pretty interesting now, tomorrow morning at 9am, a group of us are going to do the best we can to pass out.  Me and one of my classmates have never taken statistics before, so it should be interesting to see how it turns out for the two of us. We just started learning most of the coursework last night, and we’re quite thankful for two amazing classmates who stayed at the school late on a Friday night just to give us a crash course.

Turns out one of our classmates is a stats guru, and the other is a pretty gifted teacher who taught LSAT, GMAT, and SATs for a while before Northwestern. We’re both pretty thankful they offered to stay around to help, and we’re both feeling pretty good about the test now. But no matter how the test ends, I suspect we’ll both be pretty happy.  Either we’ll be excited to pass out of the class and to take an extra elective course at Kellogg or we’ll take a stats class that sounds pretty interesting and learn all about business statistics.  So it that sense, it’s a win-win situation.

In the end, we all just really want to optimize our time in the shortened program, and that not only includes taking as many new courses as possible but also learning all the things we need to learn while here, including stats if need be.  And no matter how the class plays out, its always a lot of fun spending time with our JD-MA classmates and learning about the new and interesting experiences everyone has had. In fact, it oftens turns out that these end up being some of of the best experiences.  Hopefully we’ll all pass the test together in the morning. I’ll keep you posted.

4 Comments to Optimizing Our Coursework. DECS Waiver Exam

DreamChaser
January 30, 2010

good luck Jeremy! I heard everyone is afraid of DECS, but it is actually very useful class.

Jeremy C Wilson
January 30, 2010

@DreamChaser–The test was a bit harder than expected, but I think most real tests tend to come out that way. As an actual class, I don’t DECS is anything to be afraid of. I think you’re right that the topic is probably pretty useful, and it also seems like it’d be a pretty fun class. Thanks for the well-wishes.

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March 2, 2011

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