Monday, July 09, 2007

course bidding, Google

The time is upon us CBS'ers to bid for next semester's courses. Since it is Fall term, there is an enormous selection of course (good), but much more competition to get into the popular ones (bad). As you may know, CBS has a system by which you bid on courses against your fellow classmates. Some of the more popular ones like Entrepreneurial Finance (taught by Dean Hubbard) or Top Management Process (taught by Professor Biggadike) tend to go for a large number of points. In fact, I've heard from the 2nd years who just left that it is quite possible that you will end up spending all of your bid points on maybe 2-3 courses that you really want to take. Of course, if you're not shooting for any of the 'popular' courses, you won't have this problem. But who doesn't want to take a course with the Dean, you know? :)

On an unrelated note, I saw that Google today announced they were going to acquire a company called Postini. Postini offers an email spam filtering service. This fits into Google's whole application strategy pretty nicely, so it will be interesting to see how and where the technology gets integrated. Speaking of Google, I would love to speak to someone in their corporate development group. They are doing a large number of transactions and it would be cool to hear about their methodology, how they staff their corpdev organization, etc. Unfortunately I have had trouble tracking down anyone in my network who knows folks in that group. If any of you have any thoughts (or contacts), please let me know!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you use LinkedIn ?

I think practically every single employee at Google is on LinkedIn so that might be a good way to hunt down contacts in various departments

John said...

Actually, I am a LinkedIn junkie, but I have not been able to find anyone at Google in that group specifically. Maybe I need to widen my search,

Anonymous said...

Hey buddy, Do you find doing the 'accelerated program' helps you in terms of being able to pick up the more 'popular' courses because less people are 'bidding' for it ?

John said...

My experience suggests yes, but only in the summer term. There are a limited number of electives, but most have plenty of room to satisfy demand. During the fall and spring terms, J-termers are bidding on the same courses as regular termers, so there is no advantage.

In short, I wouldn't use that as a determinating factor as to whether you aply to J-term or regular term.

Hope that helps.