As I did last year, I thought I could provide a brief overview of my thoughts on the mandatory commerce courses that second years take.

Comm121 – Introduction to Finance
Covers the basic concepts that are fundamental for more advanced finance courses in upper years. There’s a lot of overlap with the Canadian Securities Course, so for anyone thinking of taking the CSC one will help with the other.

Comm132 – Marketing II
The ultimate course in terms of workload this semester. It is case based, with assignments and presentations going basically non-stop. This class takes presentation to a new level.

Comm163 – Business Decision Models
Really interesting and fun class in my opinion. It’s logic-based and not too technical, so it’s not really about solving problems, but how to approach a situation to formulate a problem that can be solved.

Comm190 – Enabling Business with Information Systems
This class taught me how little I actually knew about computers. It gives everyone a basic understanding of the technologies and information systems that companies use today, which can only be a good thing.

Last year, I also talked about the group work in commerce courses. One of the appeals of Queen’s Commerce is its strong community and cohesiveness because there are only 300 or 375 students in each year, so everyone pretty much knows one another. Given that we’ve had a year to get to know each other, the group work dynamic has change a lot.

For every course except for Comm190, we got to pick our groups this year. Further, for Comm121 and Comm163, we could pick anyone across all sections. Obviously, friends ended up working with friends, but there’s something very interesting that happens when you have the same few people in multiple groups. Last year in Organizational Behaviour, the professor recommended that we should keep the same assignment group for every single assignment in all commerce courses each year. This idea was poorly received by us students at the time.

Now, having basically tasted this idea to an extent, I think it’s not a bad idea, but should only be introduced in second year because people need first year to get to know each other. When group members are the same in multiple groups, it makes completing assignments from different classes that are due on the same day much, much easier. And multiple assignments sharing the same due date is a common occurrence in Queen’s Commerce, so I find that work is a lot more manageable this year. It’s partly due to the fact that scheduling group meetings becomes significantly easier, but I think there’s also some synergy that develops.

Another thing that’s a frequent topic of discussion these days is exchange, as the class of 2013 will be applying to our exchange destinations in the next month. That’s for a future blog post.