Meet Term Two Lecturers: Sergio Biggemann

Dr. Sergio Biggemann

I would like to introduce Sergio a veteran Otago MBA lecturer with four years of experience teaching marketing in our programme. Biggemann holds a Doctor of Business Administration from Macquarie Graduate School of Business (MGSM) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  He also holds a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Management and Public Policy from the Catholic University of Bolivia (both with Distinction) and a bachelor’s degree in Mining Engineering.

Sergio brings extensive practical business experience into the classroom. Originally from Bolivia, he spent twenty years in mining and related industries. He is a co-founder and was general manager of a mining company, a terotechnology company, a silver-ware crafting company in Bolivia. Founded a paint manufacturing company in Australia, and more recently became involved in a construction company in Bolivia.

Sergio is a Senior Lecturer it Marketing at the University of Otago in New Zealand, he is also currently a visiting fellow at MGSM where he aims to extend his research on business relationships. His research interests are in the dynamics of business-to-business relationships, interaction in business networks, the creation and implementation of business solutions, and supply chain integration and collaboration.

What's the classroom experience like?

Sergio uses a case-based pedagogy.  He introduces students to a broad range of marketing concepts (e.g., stretching into product logistics); supplies outside readings and cases; and devotes class time to student-driven discussions and analyses of data (e.g., case studies such as LG Electronics, Bolivia Coffee, Global Oil & Logistics, Firestone and the Global Wine Wars).

We are fortunate to include Sergio as a member 

of our Otago MBA faculty team. 

Term Two: update for week three

From Olga Meglinskaya (Curriculum Delivery Manager)

Winter has arrived in Dunedin, but no worries. We have a sunny day this fine Monday and the rest of the week looks good with high temperatures of 10+ degrees Celsius (i.e., 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit) with a mix of clouds and sun, and little rain. We're all following the World Cup: Go USA!

Assessment Dates:

BMBA508 Investment & Global Financial Markets – Quiz 1 (in class exam)
Tuesday 24 June, 9:30-11:30am: MBA classroom
Open book (textbook, notes, calculators and laptops are allowed)
Answers to be completed in the exam scripts provided

BMBA507 Accounting – Quiz 2 (online, multiple choice)
due 12 noon Friday 27 June on Blackboard

 Reminders:

• Friday                4  July,       12-2pm                  Syndicate Debriefs with Brian Johnston

• Monday             7  July,       1-2pm                    Time Management Workshop with Suzy Keane

                                                                                    RSVP to Olga by 30 June

• Wednesday      9   July,      10-11:30am           Networking Workshop

• Thursday          17 July,      11:30am -1:30pm  Toastmasters session- TBC

• Wednesday      23 July,      11:30am-1:30pm   Group Mentoring: Career Planning – TBC

• Thursday          24 July,      12-2pm                   Guest Speaker - Lauren Rosborough, Reserve Bank

Best-Masters MBA survey

Eduniversal is conducting their annual survey of MBA programmes. Please spare a few minutes of your time to sign up and participate in their survey. To complete the Student Satisfaction survey, please open an invitation letter sent by the Eduniversal Masters ranking office via email and follow the instructions. To receive a new invitation letter, please register at http://www.eduniversal-survey-mastersranking.com/. Last year, we ranked top 8 amongst full-time MBA programmes in Oceania. Your participation has a direct impact on the ranking of the Otago MBA program and its international reputation. Receiving your adequate feedback will not only result in a more accurate program ranking, but also better recognition of your MBA degree and institution of study.

Term 2: week two update

From Olga Meglinskaya (Curriculum Delivery Manager)

Welcome to Shahnawaz: 

Please welcome our new full-time student, Shahnawaz Aslam, who is joining the MBA class this week. Shahnawaz comes from an Accounting and Finance background and will be part of Syndicate A this term. We wish him a very good start on the programme and appreciate your support with helping Shahnawaz to integrate smoothly into the MBA environment.

Guest Speakers, Career Development & Mentor Programme Events:

We have planned a number of workshops and professional development sessions for you in Term 2: please note the calendar of events below.

These events are scheduled in your MBA Calendar on the Otago MBA website. Please check this calendar regularly for any updates. You can also import the MBA Calendar into Outlook by following the instructions at the bottom of the web page.

• Wednesday    18 June, 12-1pm Questionnaire Design Workshop with Beth Rose

• Friday               4 July,   12-2pm Syndicate Debriefs with Brian Johnston

• Monday            7 July,    1-2pm Time Management Workshop with Suzy Keane –                                                          RSVP to Olga by 30 June

• Wednesday     9 July,    10-11:30am Networking Workshop

• Thursday        17 July,   11:30am -1:30pm Toastmasters session- TBC

• Wednesday    23 July,   11:30am-1:30pm Group Mentoring: Career Planning – TBC

• Thursday        24 July,   12-2pm Guest Speaker - Lauren Rosborough, Reserve Bank NZ

Dunedin Beaches

Doctors Point Beach

Dunedin (and the immediate surrounding area) is home to more than fifteen beaches, identified below, with numerous opportunities to surf, swim, beachcomb, walk dogs or view wildlife. Very briefly, St Clair may be the favourite beach (most used) for surfing and viewing the ocean from the esplanade (with restaurants & coffee), especially on stormy days; Tomahawk is great for walking dogs (plus surfing); and the beaches south of Brighton go on for kilometers. Long and Allans beaches are beautiful and less used; and all of the beaches have distinctively different sea shells. Dr.'s Point and Aramoana are particularly great for hunting shells. Most beaches provide easy access (i.e., many within minutes from downtown Dunedin), but Tunnel and Sandfly require some effort.

I've seen seal, sea lion and penguin on numerous beaches.

Dunedin Beaches

Allans Beach

Brighton Beach
Tunnel Beach
Blackhead Beach (surfing)
St Clair Beach (surfing)
St Kilda Beach (surfing)
Tomahawk Beach (surfing)
Smaill's Beach (surfing)
Allans Beach
Sandfly Beach
Victory Beach
Aramoana Beach
Long Beach
Purakanui Beach
Doctor's Point Beach

Purakanui Beach: leopard seal

Adventure in Education

Duke University Fuqua School of Business

Most people go through life avoiding emotion-laden experiences; they hope

nothing extraordinary will happen in the course of the day.

Applications for International Exchange are now being accepted. Between now and mid July our students have the opportunity to pay Otago MBA tuition and take three courses from one of our world-class international exchange partners during (in most cases) the first semester, 2015.  For many of our students this may represent a once in a lifetime academic adventure, with access to a phenomenal educational experience.

Exchange Partners:

National University of Singapore
Mahidol University College of Mgmt (Bangkok)

Kenan-Flagler Business School (USA)
Duke Fuqua School of Business (USA)
Kelly School of Business (USA)
Schulich School of Business (Canada)
University of Economics (Prague, Czech Republic)
Copenhagen Business School (Denmark)
Cologne Business School (Germany)
Grenoble Ecole de Management (France)
Aston Business School (UK)
Rotterdam School of Management (Netherlands)
Universitat St Gallen (Switzerland)
Vienna School of Business (Austria)
More...

I've entitled this post, "Adventure in Education." Why? It's interesting: the memories we carry for a lifetime, those that track our path through life, are those that are emotional-laden.The experiences informing these memories infrequently happen; they take us out of the routine of life; and they come with a cost (e.g., dollars, time or anxiety). They also inform us about who we are as individuals. So, imagine the potential value in life experiences and career opportunities (strength of your resume): an MBA from University of Otago, New Zealand and international exchange from another leading school in the USA, France, Denmark....

Shouldn't an MBA degree come with experiences that excite or scare us, rather than

just sitting in a classroom or earning a piece of paper?

Note: Feedback from our students and exchange students coming to the Otago MBA describe our programme as rigorous (or more) than elsewhere.

University of Economics, Prague

Term Two: week one update

From Olga Meglinskaya (Curriculum Delivery Manager)

9 June – Classes Start

We trust you've had a wonderful break and are well rested and ready to engage with your Term 2 papers. This term will include:

• BMBA507 Accounting: Lecturer (Daniel Hellyer)
• BMBA502 Marketing: Lecturer (Sergio Biggemann)
• BMBA508 Investment and Global Financial Markets: Lecturer (Anindya Sen)

Go Skills courses:

If you want to brush up on your Excel skills for Term 2 papers, please see the following links:

• Excel and Powerpoint (free)
• Project Management (free)
• Excel for Assignments (Subsidized training course) 

International Exchange Briefing
Tuesday 10 June, 11:30am

This session will provide information about the International Exchange Programme – a key feature of Otago MBA. It will introduce a list of exchange partners, application process and deadlines, as well as support/grants available to students going on exchange in 2015. All students are welcome to attend.

Toastmasters
Thursday 12 June 12.30pm – 2.00pm

Guest Instructor (Jamie) will be running another Toastmasters workshop on Thursday – this session will concentrate on organising a speech, getting to the point and will involve some impromptu speeches.

Term One: Lecturer's Meeting

All Students Passed Term 1 Courses

Our Otago MBA team met on Friday for the end-of-term lecturer meeting to review students' performance and formally accept final grades: all of our full- and part-time students successfully completed their term one courses!

We use these meetings to discuss insights gained from the experience to improve our programme, year over year, and identify ways we can further support our students as they enter term two.  Our Term One lecturers and MBA management team shared the following insights:

• We have a very capable group of full- and part-time students: they performed well.

• Our MBA38 full-time students were anxious starting the year and may not have anticipated the rigor of our programme: the need to study every day.

• Time management represented a continual challenge through the term.

• A few international students struggled with the challenge of thinking in their language and writing in English, an issue we are addressing.

• Our students focused excessively on grades (over the quality of their reasoning) early on. 

• Our support with writing workshops (focused on conceptual reasoning) appears to have helped with our students' study (reading) habits and performance on assessments.

• Our full-time students are very good group: cohesive and supportive within and across syndicates.

• The full-timers have proactively (doggedly) solved challenges affecting their performance. They have taken full advantage of the out-of-class access to our lecturers.

• All of our students are gaining confidence and should perform well going forward.  They are experiencing the normal transformative (growth) process of becoming polished professionals. 

Congratulations on a great start to the year!

David

Term Two: a preview

Term Two Preview

Term two of our (2014) MBA 38 programme begins on 9 June, with our students taking Accounting, Marketing and Investment & Global Finance. Our lecturers this term are Daniel Hellyer (Accounting), Dr. Sergio Biggemann (Marketing) and Anindya Sen (Finance).  As a brief introduction, Daniel is an Associate Director at Deloitte Consulting with extensive practical experiences to share with our students; Sergio is from Bolivia with more than fifteen years of teaching (using a case-based pedagogy) and extensive international experience; and Anindya is our new MBA management team member (last) from IIMB in India, with three years experience teaching stats and finance in our MBA programme.  Anindya is a perennial favorite lecturer owing to his energetic personality; he has designed a balanced course emphasizing corporate finance and investments (including derivatives).

Students will complete term two with a professional understanding of how

assess the financial and operating performance of a corporation

owing to their acct and finance courses.

We look forward to an outstanding term two. Our students will continue to build their quantitative skills with a practical emphasis, as well as analyze real world data (cases) using the professional marketing literature--another opportunity for students to refine their conceptual reasoning abilities. Students will also enjoy the diversity and multicultural experiences of our lecturers from India, Bolivia and New Zealand. 

In terms of logistics, Accounting will meet on Monday and Thursday morning (9:30 to 11:30); Marketing happens on Monday and Wednesday afternoons (2:00 to 4:00); and Finance classes meet on Tuesday and Thursdays (2:00 to 4:00); with tangential professional development workshops mixed in; and Fridays reserved for non-contact hours (e.g., readings, class prep, syndicate work and written assignments). Final exams occur on 28 & 29 July, marking the end of the term.

As a side note, the Otago MBA management team will soon begin to work with our students

to identify "Live Case" clients, a syndicate level analysis of a real client conducted over

about twelve weeks - and delivered on the last day of our 2014 programme. 

The challenges our students face will continue to grow, as will their readiness and 

confidence to face these challenges. This growth is fundamental to the

transformational experience of our MBA programme.

Express your interest now to join next year's MBA class.

Cheers, David

Term 1: Wrap up

Term One: Complete!

Term one is complete!  Our students took their final exams over the weekend; turned in final projects; and have gone their own way for a much needed break.  We offer our congratulations to Murali who became a first-time father yesterday: he has a daughter.

Final marks (i.e., grades) for Term One courses remain to be finalized, but we're confident that all students performed well in the face of rigorous academic challenges. We made them work!  I'll offer a few personal observations.

This year's full-time MBA class appears highly cohesive and independent; they seem to grasp the nature of the challenge before them and require very little hand holding.

They have grown in confidence in their ability to work in syndicates (teams) and deliver case presentations in class.  They produced excellent work and seemed to enjoy (figuratively) having the spotlight or stage.

End-of-term interviews with each student suggest our students have few, if any, concerns about their performance and our support. The academic year has gone very, very smoothly!

Our two social events (pregame carry-in / Rugby match + barbecue) went over well, with a good mix of faculty, management team and student participation.  The Highlanders (our home team) won the rugby match by one point.

We conducted two writing workshops to aid our students' understanding of conceptual reasoning. This thinking ability (i.e., the quality of their reasoning) remains a core theme across courses and constitutes a skill refined with practice (i.e., like learning to ride a bike).  But, they are getting it!

Our students appear to grasp the distinction between understanding the professional treatment of concepts and the application of concepts to data.  

They understand the need to ground their thinking in a professional literature (i.e., defining core concepts) and apply concepts to analyze (not describe) cases and personal experiences (i.e., real world data).

We addressed a source of confusion. Students began the year with a fixation on right answers (i.e., what is the lecturer looking for) and grades.  We emphasize the following:

• At the MBA level, right answers do not exist and our concern remains the quality of the student's reasoning, even if the logic diverges from the lecture's expectation.  

• They should restate questions on written assignments and exams, to permit the lecturer to mark answers based on the student's understanding of the question.

• Students should create boundary conditions: i.e., identify what is included and excluded in their answers.

• They should interact with, and demonstrate an understanding of, the relevant professional literature, such as defining core concepts with references.

• Separate their discussion of the professional literature from the application of concepts in an analysis of data.  The real world in all forms (e.g., written cases, live examples and personal experiences) comprises messy data (e.g., mired with irrelevant details and opinions), with the student responsible for imposing a structure on these data.

• Construct a cohesive logical (i.e., additive) argument. Don't repeat. 

• Remember that grades are dependent on the quality of their reasoning and not how many concepts are included in their answer.