Linda Craib is entering the Yale Health Care MBA program. Her background is strikingly similar to many or our students at UNT Dallas. Can we learn something from her experience? I wonder what she thought lay ahead with three kids and a degree in art history. I appreciate art as much as anyone, but did she really need to major in it?
Professor Elam
Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
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11 responses to “The Importance of Math”
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Well what I grab from this is that we must learn the concept behind each transaction in accounting and not try to simply memorize the entry. Is a company going under because its current ratio is .98? Well we need to llok at what industry they’re in. What is their inventory comprised of? etc. As you say Dr. Elam, WMT operates at 1.1 and no other retailer can match it. I often try to inculcate (how’s that for a word) in other students in all fields that it is the concept and not the definition professors are hoping to instill. I never understand why students get so anxious about tests and papers. I say understand why a particular scenario is handled that way and you can handle most any entry that pertains to that scenario.
Its much the same with Ethics. Its the spirit of the rules and not the just the rule. Enron and AA could have used a lesson or two in that.
As this author proposed, math is not simply calculation rather what is behind the calculation?
To your Dallas Interm students:
Know your statements. Income, Balance sheet, Cash flow.
Learn them well and you will do well. Know what goes where and more importantly, why? In my experience I’ve found that most student memorize the entry but when asked why it is that a certain account was affected they don’t know. It might get you thru class but wont get you thru an interview at Valero, ATT,exxon, IRS, or any accounting field interview.
In fact I am scheduled for an interview this week and I’ve been asked to review my CVP analysis knowledge as I am expected to recite break-even and profit margin ratio on the fly.
Good luck,
Jerry
JerryLikeLike
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What’s more is that I’m lucky to have recieved the inside information leading to the interview. Imagine sitting before an interview panel and when asked to discuss CVP analysis, I say I dont know. How does my 3.94 GPA look now?
JerryLikeLike
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Honest class, he posted that on his own, but the point is well taken, your ability to discuss this in context will determine your eventual success.
Actually there is little to no math required in an MBA course, I think they just require calculus to give make it sound more sophisticated. The closest I ever got to calculus in MBA was watching Mr. Pareto take a partial derivative in a price graph.LikeLike
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Jerry
Inside information??????????????????LikeLike
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I can relate to Linda Craib, even though I am not working on my MBA yet, I am seeing more and more women who in their late 30’s and early 40’s going back to school once the kids are old enough. We all want a better life for our children and I believe that education is the way to go. I personally started off in college right out of high school and quite once I was offered what I thought was the dream job. As time goes on, you see that you can’t always advance like you want to in a company because you do not have the education to go along with it. I was passed over a couple of times for a promotion because I did not have my degree yet.
I can also relate to Ms. Craib by it had been fifteen years since I had a math class when I started college again. And of course it was a requirement for me to have a college algebra class. I struggled through the class, but always remember to go to the learning lab. There is no reason for you to not go, swallow the pride and get help. Once you finish that class you think you will never use math or algebra again. Boy was I wrong. I use algebra all the time in my accounting classes as well as my finance classes. So a word to the wise, make sure your always brushed up on your algebra.LikeLike
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Dr. Mary Hannigan will appreciate Kelly’s post, she is teaching our TI scholarship math classes.
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Inside information:
What I meant was that it wasnt known to the interviewee he/she would be asked about CVP, profit margin, etc. A friend in HR accidentally slipped that to me in a conversation about my hotel reservation in Houston where the interviews are being conducted.
JerryLikeLike
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One of my friends used to describe what he called the psycological testing center. Typically this is one of the big tests in your life, so is it somewhere familiar,no way, it is across town in a basement, the fan makes a noise as though a bearing had failed, the temperature is all wrong, hot outside, cold inside, someone is constantly moving the blinds up and down so light comes and goes across the room, in short there is every distraction imaginable, and in a lousy place,
so I assume they will interview you on the loading dock of a warehouse….LikeLike
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I can also relate to what Kelly wrote because when I graduated from high school almot 9 years ago I too whrn to collegr and whule I was during my intern for this company I received a job offer. So I decided to stop going to school and take the job full time, that was not a good ideal because I really was not making the same amount of money as the people around me who did have thier degree, but I decided to keep on working. By then it had been about four years since I had been a full time collge student and decided to go back to school full time. When I came to UNT I too had to take collge algebra and the last time I had taken a math class was back in 1997 and this was 2004. I was scared at first but I was also happen when the teacher told us that we would have a SI teacher who will work with us when we needed the help. I think I was the only student out of 60 students who went to the young lady for help.
To get back on the subject, you do need some type of math in whatever you are doing, if it is for work or at home you will need to know math. I was talking to my sister-in-law the other day and she was telling me that she has decided to go back to school and she is having to take some developmental math class because in order for her to get her to move up in her upper level classes she has to take thoese classes to get her degree, and she is really having a hard time because she is 35 and she has been out of high school for a long time and it has really been long time since she has taken a math class but she hopes that her developmental math class will help her.
Also on the news last week they were talking about how a lot of collge student are taking developmental math classes and they are trying to see what is the problem.LikeLike
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I can also relate to what Kelly wrote because when I graduated from high school almot 9 years ago I too whrn to collegr and whule I was during my intern for this company I received a job offer. So I decided to stop going to school and take the job full time, that was not a good ideal because I really was not making the same amount of money as the people around me who did have thier degree, but I decided to keep on working. By then it had been about four years since I had been a full time collge student and decided to go back to school full time. When I came to UNT I too had to take collge algebra and the last time I had taken a math class was back in 1997 and this was 2004. I was scared at first but I was also happen when the teacher told us that we would have a SI teacher who will work with us when we needed the help. I think I was the only student out of 60 students who went to the young lady for help.
To get back on the subject, you do need some type of math in whatever you are doing, if it is for work or at home you will need to know math. I was talking to my sister-in-law the other day and she was telling me that she has decided to go back to school and she is having to take some developmental math class because in order for her to get her to move up in her upper level classes she has to take thoese classes to get her degree, and she is really having a hard time because she is 35 and she has been out of high school for a long time and it has really been long time since she has taken a math class but she hopes that her developmental math class will help her.
Also on the news last week they were talking about how a lot of collge student are taking developmental math classes and they are trying to see what is the problem.LikeLike
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Dwana
I placed out of algebra and trig as a college freshman, then I had to take a calculus course to go to grad school, gee I sure wish they had told me that and I had made that decision as a freshman, as Dwana says, when I still was fresh on math. I had to go to the library and bone up on algegra all over again.
DLELikeLike
Professor Elam 
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