Queering the MBA

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Dani Piergallini

Editors’ note: It is common for students to attend business school for the purpose of making a major career change, and there are myriad programs and support staff in place to help facilitate this sort of transition. But a second year at Owen, Danielle Piergallini, is undergoing a much more profound change. OwenBloggers is proud to present the first in a series of lifestyle pieces written by Danielle chronicling her experience as a transgender student at a major American business school.

It started with a long, uphill walk under the glare of the late morning Atlanta sun. Wearing a black suit might have been a mistake, especially since it was unseasonably hot for the end of March. But the heat wasn’t why I was moving slower than molasses – I was walking in three-inch heels to the hotel where I’d interview as female for the first time. This was the only interview attire I’d brought with me since I didn’t want to give myself the option to chicken out, and I was starting to question whether that was the right decision.

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The Case for Case Competitions

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

In my time at Owen I’ve had the opportunity to compete in 4 case competitions. I would encourage all students to take part in at least one case competition. The depth of learning and the experience gained are completely worth the effort. The competitions I’ve done have all been real estate-related, but I’m sure that my takeaways hold true for just about any competition.

Deep Learning – Most cases in business school, with a few exceptions, are read, analyzed, discussed, and put to bed in just a few hours. It might have taken your group a week to write that paper, but how many hours during that week did you actually spend thinking about that case? Two? Maybe Three?

A few weeks ago I spent just about every waking hour during a 72 hour span dissecting, discussing, and analyzing a real estate development case (and there weren’t very many ‘sleeping hours’ during that time) Nowhere else in business school I have spent as much time on a single project. It forced me to explore concepts and learn new things about real estate development which I wouldn’t have learned anywhere else at Owen.

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Excel Tip of the Week: Check Box

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

Today’s topic is how to create a check box.

Check boxes are technically an advanced Excel feature and somewhat hidden in Excel. But once you know how to create one, it is relatively simple to use.

Before we jump into creating check boxes, the first step is to enable the “Developer” tab in the Excel ribbon. By default this tab is hidden, and it is where you’ll find the check boxes among many other useful advanced Excel features. Here is how to enable the Developer Tab:

Windows:

  1. Click the File tab.
  2. Click Options.
  3. In the categories pane, click Customize Ribbon.
  4. In the list of main tabs, select Developer.
  5. Click OK to close the Options dialog box.

Mac:

  1. Click on the ‘Excel’ menu in the menu bar
  2. Click on Preferences
  3. Click on the Ribbon icon
  4. Select the Developer Tab
  5. Click OK

Check boxes give you the ability to toggle between two scenarios. For example, I’ve used them to toggle between a simple or detailed assumption. Or you could use it to turn things on and off. Let’s look at an example. First download this spreadsheet.

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Excel Tip of the Week: Pivot Tables

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

This week’s topic is pivot tables.

Pivot tables are for organizing and summarizing large amounts of data in a quick and easy fashion. Anything you do with a pivot table can also be accomplished with formulas. However, pivot tables have a couple advantages over using formulas. First, it is quicker. Pivot tables allow users to drag-and-drop their information into a summary table without having to know a single formula. Second, pivot tables allow for greater flexibility. If your data is not arranged to your liking, then a few clicks of the mouse can completely rearrange the data. This is much more flexible than rewriting several formulas.

Let’s walk through an example that highlights some of the most basic pivot table features. Please download the example spreadsheet here.

When you open the spreadsheet you’ll notice that there is a large amount of data arranged in columns with column headers. This is how data needs to be arranged before using it in a pivot table. The information in the example spreadsheet is a list of over 2000 “green” cars along with information about those cars such as: fuel type, number of cylinders, air pollution score, etc. Follow these steps to create a pivot table for this data:

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Excel Tip of the Week: AND & OR

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

This week’s topic are the two logical functions AND and OR.

The past two week’s we’ve looked at the IF function and the IFERROR function. This post will finish up our “logical series” with two functions that aren’t very useful on their own, but can be very powerful when used within an IF function.

AND & OR are very similar. Essentially you feed these functions any number of logical tests and the function will return a TRUE or FALSE depending on the results of those tests.

When using the AND function it will return a TRUE if all of the tests are true. It will return a FALSE if any of the tests are false. Thus, you could have 10 tests that are true but if the 11th test is false then the result of the AND function will be FALSE.

The OR function works sort of opposite from the AND function. It will return TRUE if a single test is true. It will return a FALSE only if all of the tests are false. Thus, you could have 10 tests that are false, but if the 11th test is true then the result of the OR function will be TRUE.

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