Going back to school 10 years later feels like walking on legs that have completely fallen asleep. Those daunting words ‘This will be on the exam’ sets off all the right alarms and suddenly you know just what to do when those bluebooks come out. Here are the top takeaways I learned in my first semester of Business School at Rutgers University in 2024 and how it applies to my career in marketing.
Statistics
I took Statistics in undergrad, back then I learned about bell curves and axes, but was unsure how to apply it. If I did learn Standard Deviation, there is no memory. This time around, the application was obvious. It was easy to grasp that at any time you take multiple rates or data points, not only can you identify the weighted average, or mean, you can identify the units of Standard Deviations (which is the space/variance between two points that fall on equal sides of exact midpoint in your data). So you can list all your conversion rates/open/click rates tied to a direct/email/ad campaign and look at the standard deviation between the rates over time. A low standard deviation means consistency, a high standard deviation means inconsistency, or high and low rates.
Macroeconomics
If you did not know, I was an English Major in undergrad. A cultivated fascination with revenue, brand performance, and money markets emerged as my career in marketing took off. To me, economics is a combination of mathematics, psychology, history, and probability, if you approach it with an only computational lens you’ll miss the essence of theory and social constraints that led to creating a working formula, if you only view economics through a historical lens, you miss the connection to how growth and decline rates offer more concrete evidence than can support specific theories. The most striking takeaway was Keynesian theory which emerged out of the Great Depression. Simply put, ‘societal books and newspapers’ at the time did not indicate the unraveling of an employment/monetary crisis, but Economist Keynes was the first to base theory off of what he could observe with his own eyes. Observing more and more people looking for jobs, affordability of groceries, tax rates sky rocketing, banks closing their doors, this was happening all around society but it was not being reported. From there Keynes devised Keynesian Theory, heavily rooted in infrastructure ‘multiplier effect’ plans to support rail road systems, bridges, high ways, transportation systems, which proved to stimulate enough of the economy through the creation of jobs and innovation.
Executive Leadership
It is difficult to pick the biggest takeaway, but here it goes (it was a tie with innovation and disruption theory, you can reach out to me separately if you are curious about my takeaways here), and BATNA in negotiations. BATNA stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Negotiations are all around us all the time, it is not only when you get the first offer, or ask for a raise, we negotiate with friends, family, in our everyday errands even, making large purchases, or making large agreements. Regardless of where the negotiation is taking place it is worth taking a pause, and truly assessing what the offer/agreement in question is, what is the trade-off, and at what point am I willing to walk away. Shortly after taking this course I took a day off and wandered around Manhattan’s Financial District, I left my phone charger at home, I stopped in a convenient store asked how much a basic iPhone charger was, the guy told me, “$25”, “$25!” I said, nervous about my phone dying I began to reach for my wallet, but then I remembered, ‘How many places sell chargers around here. I could probably get it cheaper down the street and I’m not in a rush, so I’m willing to pay $15’. I turned to the guy and said ‘Hey you have a cute shop here, but I’m only willing to pay $15 for it and know there are plenty of places around here that sell chargers’, he smiled reached out his hand and took my card.
Business Law
The business law class was incredibly thorough. In five classes we covered what first year law students cover in one year and the lecture style was a storyteller format allowing us to make applicable connections to the real world or even our everyday jobs. One thing the professor said in the first days of class that I know will stick with me forever is, “You are the master of a good name, once it is lost it is lost forever”. For an essay of reasons that I won’t go into here, I invite you to interpret what this statement means to you. From trademarking to copyright infringement we dissected cases like Apple vs the FBI in the CA, San Bernardino Shooting where the FBI tried to force Apple to unlock the perpetrator’s iPhone, sprouting implications and concerns around privacy rights of civilians, even in the event of a national emergency.
Education can be a double edged sword, you pay to learn, and to learn professors must test and ensure information is retained, but sometimes I personally would love to sit in a lecture hall and be completely present with the professor, not be worried about how well I can be tested on the material, just enjoy the spoken words and what is written on the board that day. To be swept away by the asides, story-telling, personality and journey of the subject matter. Anyways, until the end of Spring 2025 semester, thank you for reading.