Hello everyone! It’s been a crazy, crazy couple of months here. Let me take you through a quick recap on what I’ve been working on lately:

As I mentioned in my last post, I started my summer internship in Marketing and Communications for a software development company based in Toronto. While I am officially part of “shared services” across all department areas which include financial services, e-health, retail, and product ventures, my main area of focus has been in the mobile practice. I’ve been sitting in on meetings, researching market trends in the mobile industry, attending industry conferences and workshops and reviewing press releases. I have also been working with the in-house graphic designer and the rest of the mobile team to launch a new website for the company. One of the fun perks of working in the mobile department is getting to play with the iPads, iPhones and PlayBooks.

In June, I attended the Retail Council of Canada’s STORE 2011 conference at the Toronto Congress Centre. The conference featured keynote speakers like Mark Derbyshire, President of Holt Renfrew; Joseph Mimran, the Creative Director of Loblaw’s Joe Fresh; General Rick Hillier, Former Chief of Defence Staff for the Canadian Forces; Mike Pratt, President and COO of Best Buy; and Jordan Banks, Managing Director of Facebook Canada. One of the VPs from the company I’m currently working for was also one of the speakers so I was able to directly contribute to his presentation for the conference, which was a good experience.

Towards the end of June I volunteered for Luminato, an annual creativity and arts festival in Toronto. I really enjoy volunteering at special events to meet new people and to learn more about event planning and logistics. My favourite part about volunteering is studying the operations teams at large events to learn from their experiences as I co-chair the 24th Annual Queen’s Entrepreneurs’ Competition (the QEC) in January 2012.

Working with my executive committee for the QEC has been challenging, as the 16-member team spans multiple time zones with students going home for the summer or on exchange abroad. Luckily, my team has been extremely hard working and we are ahead of schedule so far. We have been fortunate to secure some high profile judges for our business plan competition, and sponsorship looks extremely promising. The QEC will be hiring frosh reps in the fall, so incoming Commerce Class of 2015 keep a look out!

Also over the past few weeks, I’ve been going to Blue Jays games at the Rogers Centre to work as part of the Honda Indy Promotion Team. I love reaching out and engaging with the public; and it was a great way to catch some baseball games for free! During the race weekend, I worked as part of the Honda Indy Social Media Team which was an amazing experience. With my all-access media credentials I was able to talk to drivers and their crew, attend pre- and post-race press conferences, hang out in the pits, check out the views from all the VIP suites, and watch instant replays from inside the Media Centre. I was able to capture some of my best photos from inside the Winners Circle at the podium–at one point being so focused on my camera I ended up getting sprayed with champagne from the winning team! You definitely can’t get much closer to the action than this.

Hope you enjoyed my post! If you have any questions or just want to chat with an upper-year Commerce student, feel free to email me at katwong@business.queensu.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter @kwongtooyen

Until next time!

Katherine Wong Too Yen, BCom’12

I’m writing this blog on the way back from QPREP – it was great getting to meet the incoming class of 2015! There was a rather extensive discussion on printing plans and printers this afternoon, so I thought I would share that. Basically, as a Commerce student, you have access to the NSC, a printing lab in the basement of Goodes Hall, which services business students specifically. The plans are SUPER cheap (comes out to about 5 cents/page) and adds a lot of flexibility. For instance, if you forgot to print slides off for a class, you can run downstairs, print off the deck, and get back to class in less than 2 minutes. I personally have used the NSC religiously during my time at Queen’s, and have found it convenient to do most of my printing there. That said, I also found value in having my own printer as a backup in case I don’t want to go to the NSC to print something or if the NSC is closed. Either way, I think it’s useful to get both your own printer and have an account at the NSC.

The rest of this post is going to be more about showing how you can apply the knowledge and skills you learn in the Commerce program to just general curiosities. It kind of follows what I did in the Random Research: High Gross Movies post last summer.

Firstly, Groupon. About a month ago, Groupon announced that it was going to be filing for its Initial Public Offering and the valuation for the company being thrown around was $15-20 billion. As a Commerce student, you’ll find it hard to ignore big stories like these. Furthermore, you’ll be armed with the skillset to analyze what’s being written in the news articles and develop your own opinions. That’s what I’ve done in an article I’ve written for DayonBay.ca. It’s a bit more finance focussed, but essentially, I went through Groupon’s financial statements, found how their business has performed in the past year, looked at the way the competition is setting up in the industry, and interpreted what it would mean to be paying $20 billion for Groupon.

You can read the article here: Would You Buy Groupon?

Secondly, marriages. The other day, my friend asked on his Facebook status, “What percentage of married couples reach their 70th wedding anniversary? Less than six percent is not an acceptable answer.”

Less than six percent is not acceptable because if you Google the question, it brings you to an article that says the stat is less than six. But when you think about it, six seems really high. Considering couples don’t tend to get married until their late 20s, both couples would need to live to about 100 years old. Depreciating the stat even more is the increasing rate of divorce.

The specific statistic is pretty obscure and unlikely to be found online. However, I figured I would be able to find some related statistics that could guide me in finding some sort of answer. After Googling around for a while, I came across a report by Divorce Magazine (yeah it exists) that provided a series of statistics, but most importantly these:

Percentage of married people who reach nth anniversary:
5th: 82%
10th: 65%
15th: 52%
25th: 33%
35th: 20%
50th: 5%

This is very useful. We can extrapolate this set of data to figure out what % figure would correspond with the 70^th anniversary. If you take the relationship to be linear, you would get that -34.7% of marriages will reach the 70^th anniversary. Obviously, this doesn’t make sense because you can’t have a negative number.

Fortunately, there’s another way to approach this that is even more statistically valid. You can treat the length of marriages to be a normal distribution, and assign “z-scores” (you’ll learn about these in first year stats) to each year of marriage. Under this approach, you end up getting that 0.288% of marriages will reach the 70^th anniversary (with very high statistical confidence). So to answer that original question, we can say that about 0.3% of married couples will reach their 70^th wedding anniversary.

So I hope you see that what you learn in class isn’t limited to just the classroom.

Zeya Yang, Comm 2013

Hello from Kabala,

I am now three months into my eight month internship at SWET, a microfinance institution in Kabala, Sierra Leone. I am continuing to enjoy my time here and I am appreciating the great work and life experience that I am getting.

I want to give you a bit of an idea of the context in which I work. Kabala, where the SWET office is based, is a small town which is the hub of Koinadugu District, Sierra Leone. Koinadugu is geographically the largest district in Sierra Leone, but it is sparsely populated and it is considered to be the most marginalized region of the country. It is difficult for me to give a population figure for Kabala, as no one I have asked knows and I cannot judge population by the same means I would in Canada. I’m going to say it is probably between 15,000 and 30,000 just to give you an idea.

Although life here took a bit of getting used to at first, I feel that I have adjusted pretty well. We live more comfortably than most locals, but my co-intern and I do not have running water or electricity in our house. We get our water from a well (although we do not fetch it ourselves), and although we have a generator that we can power the house with if we buy fuel, we have still yet to take advantage of it. We have grown accustomed to lighting candles and using our headlamps at night, and at a certain point, using a generator to light our house seems extravagant and expensive in the context. As for the water, I use water from a bucket to flush the toilet, shower and wash dishes every day. For drinking water, we will usually boil a pot of water at night to sanitize it and filter it in the morning to use for the day. Unlike most people who cook over charcoal, we have a gas stovetop, which makes boiling water and cooking relatively easy. Leisure activities in Kabala include: reading, playing Sudoku, going to “the roundabout” (where all the activity is at the centre of town), going to “Choices” to grab a drink or watch a football (soccer) match, going dancing, practicing African drumming, playing with the large groups of children who show up at our door and climbing one of the three small mountains that border the town.

A lot of the work that I am involved with at SWET involves what we call “going to the field”. Although SWET has clients in Kabala, most of its clients are in the rural villages of Koinadugu, and to service them we have to go to their villages. Some of the businesses these clients operate include the sale of rice, groundnuts, palm oil or other produce, the sale of prepared food, the tailoring of clothes and hair styling services. Each loan promoter has a route and a number of villages along that route, which they visit to disburse money and collect repayments. It is worth noting that these routes are not easy to navigate. The road conditions are very poor and safety is always, but especially in the rainy season, a concern. From Tuesday to Thursday each week the loan promoters drive to these villages on their motorbikes (and sometimes take me along) and then on Fridays they stay in the office, where the clients from Kabala come to receive and repay their loans. When you go to a village to collect money, you drive through honking the horn to let the clients know you’re there and gather them. Then you stop at one or two houses to wait for everyone to show up. There are set days when the clients make their payments, but setting an exact time to meet is not practical in rural Sierra Leone. So, we wait around on the porch of someone’s house for the clients to show up and while we wait we are often offered food, such as mangoes, bananas or groundnuts (peanuts). It is considered rude to turn down an offer, so I always take some. There are always kids around and more often than not there are nursing babies, but despite the numerous distractions business just continues as usual.

The loan promoters will remind the clients, who are in solidarity groups of 4 to 6 women, how much money is due, the clients will hand it over for counting and then the group leader will sign the receipt with her thumbprint. Although the thumbprint is by far the most common method of signing receipts (because of low literacy rates), I have encountered a couple women who, because of CAUSE Canada’s literacy classes, have learned to sign their name and proudly ask for a pen instead of an inkpad to sign. It is really quite exciting when that happens because you can feel their sense of accomplishment. When we arrive back in Kabala we count the money again and then deposit it in the community bank, which is the only bank in Kabala apart from the two mobile banks that bring money in a truck from Makeni (a city about a two hour drive away) once a week.

So, as you can imagine, the circumstances in which I am living and working are very different from what I am used to. It is all about being flexible and adaptable to every situation – even if it means rats in my bed, but I’ll leave that story for next time.