Melbourne Business School on Dopplr

I came across Dopplr in June last year via Web Worker Daily ('Social Networking Dopplr Connects You When You Travel' by Stephen Collins) and thought it was a great networking tool for people who travel a great deal:

How often have you thought to yourself, “I’m going to <insert random conference/city/event here> next week. I wonder who else I know is going.” At this point, there’s invariably a chain of ill-timed emails, inevitably missing someone who is actually going to be in the same place as you at the same time. Dopplr aims to resolve this issue through providing a way for those serendipitous moments to be under your control, rather than left to random chance.

After signing up for Dopplr, you enter your upcoming travels, building a list of your movements. As you add connections with people you know, Dopplr comes into its own, letting you, and your connections, know when you will be in the same place at the same time.

Yesterday, while searching for MBS-related blogs, I discovered that in November last year Dopplr opened up its then-in-beta website to business school travellers from a hundred global b-schools (called its 'MBA 100') and that Melbourne Business School was included in that list.

Dopplr's service has since been launched to the public and, from what I've heard, it's pretty good. I don't have much use for it myself -- I don't travel much, at least not yet...maybe I will once I get a job -- but I'm sure others will find it useful. And who knows, maybe our faculty and Alumni department already use it. I guess I'll ask.

For more on Dopplr, read this Webware.com post by Josh Lowensohn.

Melbourne Business School Blogs

UPDATE: I now maintain this list on its own page.

A few days ago I mentioned to a colleague that very few Melbourne Business School (MBS) students, faculty, and staff members are also bloggers (to my knowledge: two faculty members, three students, and four staff members).

Later it occurred to me that I might have spoken too soon. Yes, I had done quite a bit of research on this in the past -- which is why I was confident enough to have made that statement in the first place -- but was my statement completely accurate?

To check, I did a much more comprehensive round of research on the 'net and, whaddya know?, I found some more MBS blogs. Here's an updated, more comprehensive, listing:

Current Students

Alumni

Staff

I know of three other staff members who blog but, since they haven't declared themselves as MBS staff on their blogs, I'm not going to mention them here.

Also, one of my part-time MBA class mates, who is also the CIO at MBS, wrote an blog post (don't know if he's going to contribute there regularly) so he also gets a mention:

Faculty

I haven't found any new faculty member blogs so I thought I'd list faculty member websites instead. Also, since a lot of our faculty members have their publications listed at the Berkeley Electronic Press website, I've included a link to that as well:

Have I missed anyone? If so, please let me know. Thanks.

My MBA Journey So Far

I started writing about my "MBA journey" in a section called Ameel's MBA Journal on my website. Relevant from that are the following:

To quickly recap, though, these are the courses that I have taken so far:

  • World of Management (core) with Paul Dainty
  • Accounting for Managers (core) with Jim Frederickson
  • Data and Decisions (core) with Chris Lloyd
  • Financial Management (core) with Sam Wylie
  • Managerial Economics (core) with John Asker
  • Managing People for High Performance (core) with Carol Gill
  • Business Strategy (core) with Doug Dow
  • Economics and Public Policy (core) with Ian Harper & Mark Crosby
  • Managing Processes (core) with Kannan Sethuraman
  • Marketing (core) with Jody Evans
  • Corporate Finance (elective) with Ning Gong

And these are the ones that I am taking now:

  • E-Commerce (elective) with Pat Auger
  • Information Strategy (elective) with Pat Auger
  • Leadership and Change (elective) with Amanda Sinclair
  • Negotiations (elective) with John Onto
  • Implementation of Strategy (elective) with Jack Goodwin

I am 5 weeks into this study term (all study terms are 12 weeks long) and my first three courses have already started. The last two are second-half intensives -- i.e. taught in half the time with double the number of classes per week -- and will start on Friday.

Now that I've set the scene, I can start talking about what we're doing in each of the courses I'm taking right now. I will do this in future posts, of course, and not all in this one!

Recapping Older MBA Posts

This is my new, "professional" blog. Before this, I used to blog exclusively on my "personal" blog. On that blog, I wrote three MBA-related posts that are, naturally, relevant to this one as well. Instead of re-posting them here, I figured I'd simply link to them instead.

The first post ('Talking About My Internship') is about a panel discussion that I was a part of during the latest MBA intake's Orientation Week. In it, I list the points that I tried, and hopefully managed, to get across in that discussion.

The second post ('AFR Ranks Australian B-Schools...Hmmm') is about the latest business school (b-school) rankings published by the Australian Financial Review's (AFR) BOSS Magazine. Their method of ranking determination was a bit contentions and this post talks about that.

The third post ('MBA Blog Spin-Off?') was the proposal that led to this blog. It contains links to other b-school blogs that you might find interesting.