I am not very good at Corporate Finance

I thought I'd enjoy Corporate Finance, and I do, but over the last eight weeks I've realised I'm just no good at it. Equations, breaking problems into parts, looking at the big picture, and taking views on things: these are all the things I'm good at. ("One of the world's top copywriters", remember?) But somehow I just haven't gripped this subject. I don't feel the relationship between Rd and Re in my bones; don't have an instinct for what beta does, can't remember the Capital Asset Pricing Model offhand. This'll all change in the next two weeks - it HAS to with an exam coming up - but right now, everything's nowhere near as solid as it should be.

Which means the presentation today is going to go REALLY well. A class audience including two lecturers (the aforementioned Teutonic and Italianate ones) after a week of 4am mornings. An audience who, like me, have spent a lot of hours recently trying to understand the case study and are itching to ask questions on where we went wrong.

The principle of such things is: DON'T just 'take them through the information' - take the information THROUGH THEM!!!

I run through the numbers, about HALF of which my addled brain gets fully. Assumptions, views-taken, and arbitrary rationalisations are the order of the day. Then the questions start. Here's how I'd LIKE the question session to go:

"Why is the risk-free rate 8.95%?"

"LOOK - it just fucking IS, alright?! So sue me!"

"Why did you choose Quinta as the base for working out divisional WACC?"

"That's a very, very good question. Let me answer it with a question of my own."

And so on. We handle the actual questions as a team, and it all goes fine, but I'm concerned at just how few of the calculations I have committed to memory despite spending seven hours on this (and that's just me; probably 30 hours all-in from the team.)

But as this second MBA term draws towards its close, that's another hurdle leaped. Even if I'll never be able to use the word 'hurdle' again without linking it with 'rate'.

Power to the People

When they cut the power, the People must make Power of their Own.

Beard-stroking liberals aren't a common sight on commercially-focussed Warwick University - and least of all at the ultra-capitalist Business School - but when the electrons stopped flowing today, things got uglier than a hairy leftie on a bad hair day.

Yes, there were power cuts across campus. Possibly connected to the 'quake last night, where 5000 students woke up and... fondly thought they had company. In the dusty aftermath, this top-tier university acquired a third-world electricity network for the afternoon.

In the MBA section, the lesser syndicate groups were walking out in disgust, stripped of their power by... lack of power. Hardier syndicates gamely stayed on, forgetting the PCs and PowerPoints and resorting to... actual conversation, can you believe it.

There were demonstrations of undergrads in the darkened corridors, chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT? NET PRESENT VALUE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!" in Chinese accents. OK, only joking, but the point is made.

The coffee machines were off. The security-carded doors were open to all. (Yes, ALL. Undergrads in the postgrad wing. Science people taking shortcuts back to Lakeside. Even... shock horror... LIBERAL ARTS TYPES?!!) Civilisation, truly, neared its end today. It was a strange kind of chaos: quiet, accepting, yet utterly apocalyptic, like the 2000 neocon takeover of the US government that set the USA's respect in the world back 75 years.

And when at last the power came back on, we felt... cleansed. But at the same time, slightly disappointed. Our NPV and ROI focussed lives had been given a taste of what it's like to live... off the grid.

And some of us, perhaps, liked it a little.

Quaking in anticipation

I thought something happened last night! Remember waking up to a shaking room, dazedly concluding someone was under my bed shaking it, and drifted back off to sleep.

(It's perhaps a measure of how thrashed I was that I didn't consider the fact of someone being under my bed to be worth further exploration.)

Sheesh, a 5.3 earthquake in the UK after 25 years. Just what's happening under the Earth's crust these days?

I think my mask of sanity is starting to - whatever

Is it possible to be more tired than me tonight?

Last night was a strange one, to say the least. First a pigeon came into my room (this was a dream) then a crowd of people started honking outside from a Volkswagen camper van (still a dream) then sun rose and one of the rainbow-clad hippy chicks in the van was inside my room and I realised I was having a dream.

And in these cases, there's only one thing you can do: have sex before you wake up.

There was a red mobile phone that kept making an appearance, too, but I didn't spend enough time asleep to discover its true significance.

I have vivid dreams at the best of times, but this one left me exhausted upon waking: lucid dreaming (where you realise you're having a dream) is no more restful than Real Life, so I managed about an hour of regenerative natural sleep between 5am-7am. Then almost late to Strategic Advantage or whatever the fuck this morning's class was, with only a cereal bar fuelling the a.m., then hit the pool at 12.30 to do a couple of km before the next class at 2. Bad idea. (Although I blew off a couple of wannabe fishlike undergrads who thought they were ready for the fast lane. Dream on, kiddies.) Running on empty, and I need a full tank.

I'm a bit worried about the way life is going. I don't sleep much; expend too much energy; spend the intervening moments in odd trancelike states. Is my mask of sanity starting to slip?

Trading horses for courses

Starfire, I'm in a bubble of Beethoven and realising he was like me with greater talent. I've never felt so lost, so frustrated or at odds with the world.

Spent countless hours recently trying to grip seven equations - not for passing exams, but for their deeper meaning - and largely failing, even though I'm presenting the fuckers in a week. What the hell; nobody fails these exams who doesn't deserve it, and I'm hardly among the losers. They won't DARE flunk ME.

But outside the actual work, I'm still having a problem FEELING anything.

I thought coming to Warwick would answer some questions; it's ended up raising new ones. What do I WANT? I know what I want day-to-day: the freedom of Route 66, the feel of a wild horse between my thighs across the Sahara, the joyous clanging of Beethoven's 5th. Experiences. But experiences are momentary. What's the larger narrative of this life?

I've had so many experiences, over so many years. A decade expatriating; another six as a lone wolf in London. Stood on the Great Wall with an orchestra; slept on hard sand in cold night deserts; watched Borobudur rise at dawn. Watched Cebes glitter in the darkness, eight hours a day. It's been the best of all possible lives: wanting nothing, needing nobody, and answerable to no-one.

But it has a side-effect: you stop FEELING things. After touching the extremes, everyday life seems flat and colourless, especially now, when I'm spending this year amidst the textbooks and towers of a University. (I actually enjoy it here, but there's no ACTION. I'm having to jump out of aeroplanes just to retain a will to live.)

I've met some great new people, but human beings have never been a priority for me. I'm just not a pack animal.

I suppose I'm trying to be answerable again, responsible for something, like a Ronin trying to find a new master. The Strong always looks for something to look after. Something to give his life meaning and purpose.

And when he has nothing to protect, he is truly Lost.

I've never felt so conflicted. So lost. I think I'll go outside at midnight and watch the swans. The swans are the greatest couple I know. Swans are cool.

Always been so free, now wishing I'd been more chained.

The Sunday Times on the old young thing

Several guys back in London forwarded me this link about men over 30 passing the 'age of reason' and never settling down. The male half of my London crowd is much the same as me - 30s and single and somewhat intrigued about why they never got past the teenage mindset - so anecdotally at least the trend seems genuine.

A few months back I was invited onto a famous TV talk show as an example of the 'kidult phenomenon' (no prizes for guessing which one: think a younger husband, older woman, and a famous blooper involving a loosely-buttoned blouse). Which raises a question: am I 'past the age' at which I'll ever settle down... and society now accepts this?

I mean, I'm hitting my late 30s and I haven't even the slightest desire to share my space (UNTIL I DIE is the constraint here) with one person: I'm beginning to believe I'm now 'over the hump'. Cold-callers no longer ask if I'm 'single'; they ask if I'm a 'bachelor' (a word with truly horrendous undertones of regret.) Admittedly the 'space' right now is a student room in the postgrad dorm - and hence physically impossible to share with ANYONE unless you're (a) under 22 (I'm not) or (b) extremely athletic (I am.) But the principle remains.

There's a point in most people's lives where they get 'resigned to it', i.e. they take whatever they can get and resign themselves to that (disappointing) life. I never reached that point and I'm now past it - successfully hurdling the 'good enough' problem into the stage of confirmed solo-dom.

I haven't particularly thought about; I'm cool either way, and I'm nowhere close to the extremes of the comments in the linked article: not the mysogynist rantings of certain British males about women over 30, nor the truly awful Sunday Times columnist India Knight (who's been known to bemoan stereotyped male expectations of the female form, then shamelessly plug her new diet book... in THE SAME COLUMN.) But I'm pretty sure I'm now past the point where it ever mattered.

And I may - just may - signal the effective end of the educated white male as a major force in this world. We just don't breed enough.

The bear pit

In the last five minutes of the Corporate Finance lecture, the room erupts into absolute chaos!

The scheduling for an assignment handed out is tight, and this late in the term everyone's fighting to keep up with the work, so nerves are on edge. But time isn't the fundamental problem: scheduling is. Everyone here is a member of at least 4 syndicate groups, each a different set of people (I'm in 5) and there is NO commonality of calendaring.

What this means is that everyone in the room has to agree a meeting time. And they have to do it RIGHT NOW, no question, because if the decision slips into email or the weekend it'll be impossible to get answers. A frenzy of shouts and gesticulations rises to fever pitch in seconds, not helped by the fact that not many people know who's in their designated group.

Shouted back row: "Yo! Can we talk a second?"

"Need to negotiate! Let's do this deal now."

"How's everyone fixed for Monday evening?"

"Monday?"

"How about Monday afternoon?"

"I've got POM!"

"There might be a session Wednesday morning!"

"Wednesday afternoon! I bid Wednesday afternoon!"

"Thursday evening reports poor third-quarter results!"

"Pork Bellies! Pork Bellies at 81 4/32!"

OK, I made the last two up, but you see my point. It's like being in the bear pit of the New York stock exchange! For a full four minutes the 'trading floor' is a nerve-jangling web of palpable tension and frustration, alliances and trading positions being formed and re-formed second by second, as factions and raiders mount their assaults on each other's calendars. Shouting down the weak and filling their boots with the strong.

My opening bid to acquire Monday evening gets rejected by a determined duo of asset-strippers in Row 2, but my exploratory Put option on midweek yields a head-and-shoulders shape on the graph. I short-sell Wednesday afternoon in the hope of talking up the less liquid Wednesday morning, and suddenly everyone's buying Wednesday before lunch (which everyone will miss, of course, lunch being for wimps). I cut my losses on Monday - if you can't take your losses, you shouldn't be in the market - and fill my boots with Wednesday morning. It's agreed. The culture of the Bear Pit has produced another result. Wow, that was INTENSE!

Where are my red braces?

Everyone is giving the Corporate Finance lecturer a hard time today

A room full of inquisitive and intelligent people will always have questions when being taught new concepts, and the MBA crowd is a pretty gregarious bunch. We've switched Corporate Finance lecturers for the second half of the course, and she's never more than thirty seconds into an explanation before half a dozen people butt in with questions.

This is, of course, THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN THE WORLD.

Did Isaac Newton drop his quill formulating s=ut+(0.5*at^2), and switch to calculating the effects of sunlight and wind resistance on the bloody falling apple, before he'd pinned down the underlying simplicity of the concept? NO. The whole point here is to understand the THEORY first, clean and untouched, so you can recognise it through all the dirt of the real world that obscures it later. But nobody is getting this.

Can we - just TRY - absorbing the fucking THEORY first before complicating it with irrelevant fudge factors? Why is everybody trying to include the whole world in the model before gripping the basics? Are they really that much smarter than me? GET WITH THE PROGRAMME, PEOPLE.

Admittedly, some of it may be due to the previous lecturer's Teutonic roots and the current one's Italian heritage: there's rather a difference in teaching styles. Accuracy and precision are an ingrained part of the German national character; among Italians they're - er - perhaps not seen as quite so fundamental. Attention to detail on the lecture slides is more 1970s Lancia than BMW X5 (4 of 7 slides contain numerical errors.) But that's not what's causing the problem. The problem is Us.

And to pick one isolated example - let's just say that when two Italians are talking from different perspectives, "Can I just finish my sentence" is something of a futile request.

What's odd is that the concept being taught is, at heart, REALLY SIMPLE. It's nowhere near as complicated as IRR or bond valuation; it's more intuitive and real-world. This should be one of the easier lectures, yet it takes forever to get past each slide.

My colleagues are going through an exercise in MISSING THE FUCKING POINT here, and it's exasperating. Or maybe - since I'm the one annoyed by it - the one who's missing the point here is ME. Just wish I knew what that 'point' was.

Management Accounting is a lot like... making love to a beautiful woman

Guest lecturer today, and he's rather good. Articulate, affable, intelligent and personable with relevant experience in the financial field up the wazoo.

Unfortunately, he also looks exactly like a a famous character from a 1990s British comedy show and the Brits in the room spend the hours in the shaking silence of barely suppressed merriment.

Now, when you sit in the front row most of the time this does NOT come as a welcome touch of humour in the tortured second term of an MBA; it's terrifying. Every minute, every second, I'm on the verge of corpsing into fits of helpless laughter.

With an iron will I steady myself. (NO! NOT an iron will! That sounds like something Swiss Tony'd have! "Stopping yourself from laughing is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman... you need an iron willSTOP!!!) The next case study numbers come up on the big board.

I am hoping - fervently - that the business won't be a used car dealership. If that happens I won't be able to stop myself.

Luckily it's a hotel chain. ("Running a hotel is a lot like...STOP!") I DARE not glance around at the other Brits; I'm certain EVERYONE is seeing the joke here, but they're protected by a row or two of people. Why oh why do I always have to sit at the front?!!

He's got all the traits Swiss Tony would have if he were a real life person: i.e slightly more authentic and less exaggerated. He's possibly the actual person Swiss Tony was based on: a certain suaveness and assumed gravitas that are easily parodied, just on the right side of caricature and ripe for pushing over the edge into comedy. Which of course makes it all the more comical. Help me, I can't stand it!

After about 1000 years or so it's time for the coffee break, and five adult males collapse in hysterics. Only 90 minutes to go. We can make it, I think.

Management Accounting. You've got to keep your figures in shape, plan your activities for maximum payback, and drive down deeply and repeatedly into the relevant areas. In fact, it's a lot like making love to a beautiful woman.

8pm and an evening to read

I've actually got an evening to myself!


OK, well technically there are a million things I could be doing, but with 1 meeting, 1 Economics Summit lecture, and 2 of the Term's presentation's off sketchpad and into team draft, there's nothing else I absolutely positively HAVE to do tonight. It's just after 8pm and I'm going to read something that isn't MBA-related.

China, girls, and undercover economists

Just back from a talk by Tim 'Logic of Life' Harford at the Warwick Economics Summit. As he explains the strange wisdom-of-crowds groupthink behind subjects as diverse as speed dating and prison populations, I'm looking around the room and noting further evidence of two trends in British education: girls and China.

Most of these kids are Economics students. Now Economics isn't quite as much a 'boy' discipline as physics or chemistry. But it still feels vaguely masculine.... yet more than half the students in the room are female. It's in keeping with a general decline in males participating in higher education in the UK.

What does this mean for the next generation of British males? There'll be a surfeit of highly-educated women fishing in a shrinking pool of educated men; this means an increase in women 'marrying down' and a rise in the existing trend of males feeling underpowered, directionless, and trapped. It looks like Fight Club got it right. What I'm seeing in this room today could lead to a breakdown of society within 20 years.

The other influence is China. Approximately one in four students in the room is of Chinese extraction. The economics of China itself, of course, answer this - mainland China long ago outstripped Hongkong as the UK's source of foreign students - and its growing middle class, a natural tendency towards education, and the sheer gravitational pull of a country short of a million accountants (to quote one example) will keep Britain's business schools chocka with Chinese for decades to come. There are economic reasons for top universities like Warwick to accept them, too: they pay international student rates, which are much higher than it can charge locals.

So there are economic outcomes and drivers for both the situations I see in the lecture hall this morning.

But what does this bode for Britain?

A new elite of female leaders, but an underclass of sub-educated men, and the birthrate dropping to zero among ethnic white British as a result? And will the gap be filled by immigrants from India and China? I don't think so; those countries have enough opportunities at home for bright young graduates. Much of Britain's population growth at the moment is due to recent immigrants having larger families; unfortunately, the sectors of British society having all the kids aren't the ones creating wealth. The unemployment rate among British Muslims is three times higher than the general population, yet they have many more kids for the taxpayer to support. The incidence of NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) is growing, yet the chav sector, too, has higher birthrates and they have their kids young.

So it's a depressing snapshot of Britain's future. A shrinking labour pool in the middle, a foreign elite at the top, and an expanding Bottom Thirty Million being supported by the State. It looks like life for the UK's hard-squeezed middle class is only going to get tougher.

I think my first evening out with the Skydiving Club went surprisingly well

After my first social event with the skydiving club, I have learned several things about today's undergrads.

1. 87% of the conversation is about alcohol. Unsurprisingly.
2. Only 9% is about sex. Surprisingly*.
3. The entertainment possibilities of helium-filled balloons are truly endless.
4. They use the word 'random' approximately 6 times in each sentence.
5. They don't run for midnight buses, even when the driver is jolting forward impatiently.
6. After a few drinks the fact I've got nieces their age becomes immaterial.
7. Even those who've accidentally triple-booked for Valentine's Day are pretty nice.
8. Coventry town centre isn't a bad place when you're in a group.

But the Skydiving Club are a pretty good bunch: surprisingly un-jocklike for what's after all a fairly extreme sport (jumping out of aeroplanes.) I'd trust any of them to pack my chute any time (except perhaps tonight, when most are the worse for wear.)

Roll on first jumps course...

* Although the Terminator story almost made up for it.

Doing my dirty laundry in public

In this case, literally. It's stupid how fast you build up a suitcaseful of clothes when you're studying / working / doing stuff up to 18 hours a day, even when you wake up at 3am (as I've been doing, for some odd reason, the last month or so.) In the meantime, the pile of textbooks awaiting reading is too huge to contemplate. What is this, school or something?

Concern over loitering teens reaches a high pitch

I've heard of a dog alarm, but a teenager alarm?

I am The Resolver

I resolve things.

It's just what I do.

Communication problems in an MBA module. A valuable guy the class somehow isn't gelling around, lots of surface friction preventing value being unlocked. I get people talking, then try to get past the personalities and search for the problems. Feeling around blindly on the dark ocean floor of base human behaviour swilled through the imperfect sieve of language, I slowly bubble-sort the issues. Then start to unpick them.

And sometimes when you unpick issues, they can be quite simple. A bit of talking, a day of polling, and what needs to be done is clear. So I do it. Invest a few hours, out-of-hours, diplomatically politicking between parties, gradually seeing the problems for what they really are: just typographical errors on the page of life.

And it works. The comments and emails post-resolution are still coming in.

I am The Resolver. I resolve things. It's just what I do.

I can resolve anything.

Anything except the endless conflicts within myself.

They're BACK! Yaaaay!

A rush of hope re-enters my life. The swan couple, which I thought had been cruelly cut in half over the winter, has reappeared! Yes, instead of one bereaved swan, there's now a pair again, sailing up and down the lake as a couple.

Maybe the second swan was late back after its winter break, or just had some stuff to take care of down south and told the other to go on ahead. Maybe they had a tiff, and are back together after some me-time. WHATEVER. The swans are a couple again, and that's all that matters.

Order has been restored to the lake. Yaaaay!

I cannot understand where this pain in my shoulders came from

My shoulders are killing me today. I couldn't even hit the pool. A deep muscular ache deep in the deltoids, as if I've been lifting weights (and this week I've only made it into the water twice.)

I've a feeling today is my monthly 'crash day'. I get these about once a month, whether I want them or not: a feeling, usually after a burst of bad humour, that I've been overdoing it and need to relax for a day. My planned day of Corporate Finance fell completely by the wayside; instead I've read, snoozed, enjoyed a Guinness down Varsity, all the stuff a second-term MBA shouldn't really be doing. I'm at a total loss for what to do this evening. But it feels good.

A new dawn

OK, after a great Friday I've bounced back a bit; it's amazing what the buzz of the City around me, a real release of pent-up tension, and a few glasses of wine in intelligent company can do. Getting there and back in a day really blows the budget for a student, but I just need to do this stuff once a month or I really would go under. Life is about having opportunities, and every time my train pulls into Euston I get that tingling sensation of Possibility Everywhere.

The day made a difference. I was glowing so much that back at Coventry Station a guy asked to share a taxi back to the University, thinking I was "a second year". Which would make me about 21. (At which point I almost offered to have his children.)

But this weekend I've GOT to knuckle down to those Corporate Finance questions, with only a burger at Varsity likely to break the monotony. Life is hard. As it should be.

Nearly went under... but not quite

It sucks to be me this week.

My work, study, and personal lives are all COMPLETE crap right now. I'm down to about a third of my usual energy, the sheer frustration of scheduling projects and meetings is leaving precisely zero hours for actual study, I'm more undecided about the future than I've ever been. Not to mention I've lost a WHOLE THREE MINUTES from my 1600m time and my heart's stuffed with a writhing mass of blackness even a twenty-year-old Executive Stress Relief Consultant from Latvia can't cure.

Life sucks this week. And then it got worse.

There's a pair of swans on the lake near the postgrad block.

Only one of them returned from its winter break. Plowing forlornly back and forth beneath the little bridge, lost without its partner, unable to take Warwick Lakeside any other way.

And it all but broke me. I stood there for five minutes, quietly sobbing.

I can deal with all the project work, the hundreds of pages of reading, the demands of clients back in London, and the - let's face it - that 'other thing' that happened this week. But the death of a swan just pushed me over the edge. It was the sight of its bereaved partner, and being reminded of what my suddenly-solo avian friend had just realised: life has no purpose, no reason, no goals or targets or Key Performance Indicators, save those we impose upon it. Life is without meaning.

The cold, infinite, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.

Tonight I'll buy a small bottle of wine and pour it into the lake, remembering what shouldn't be forgotten. I hope those swans had at least a year or two together before tragedy struck.

Goodbye, my aquatic friend. You helped me feel something.

I'd really like myself if it wasn't for all the uncertainty and self-loathing

The trouble is when you enjoy the pain more than the pleasure.

I told her. How I felt. In my usual hold-it-back come-what-may style. Of course, it led to the expected response (zero) which in some way is what I wanted. To slash myself across the stomach with a sentence, and let the foul foetus of self-loathing crawl out spilling its insipid blood across the carpet before dying, unloved and unwanted, barely a stain on the footprints of life rushing past.

Some class themselves as seekers after truth. I'm just a seeker after pain. At least it's real and lets you feel something. Anything. Maybe that's all life is: a desperate attempt to feel.

Googlers dancing in the streets

Google troubled by Microsoft move? Oh pur-leez. Microsoft blowing £23bn on Yahoo! is the best news Google could have.

First, it'll reduce Microsoft's cash mountain - and if Microsoft is any danger to Google at all, part of it lies in its ability to acquire with cash.

Second, Yahoo! is a bit crap. I haven't visited a Yahoo! resource since 1998. This company is in no state to compete with Google; it's an AOL for the noughties, used briefly by newbies then discarded.

Third, two mediocrities don't make a winner. You can't take two slow learners, put them in the same class, and hope for a genius.

Fourth and last though, and most importantly: Microsoft will screw it up. Redmond culture is not about integrating and celebrating, it's about engulfing. Yahoo! will become MSN, underweight and underused. And Redmond won't know why nobody loves it.

So Googlers should be celebrating the news, and enjoying their moment in the sun. After all, Google itself is only one good idea away from failure; it should enjoy its success while it can.

Warwick climbs the rankings... again

According to the new FT MBA survey, Warwick's MBA programme is now in the world's top 30. Edging past longtime rival Cranfield and leaving famous names like Carnegie Mellon, Imperial College, and Thunderbird in the dust. A great result, especially considering Warwick's egalitarian admissions policy, which looks for 'interesting' people (often older and with esoteric backgrounds) rather than thrusting one-dimensional young banker types (Hi, Oxford Said!)

Warwick treats the FT list as key, although I prefer the Economist's, which uses slightly more esoteric criteria but 'feels right' somehow. Nobody outside North America bothers with the Business Week rankings; whatever anyone says, they're COMPLETELY American biased, with even the 'international schools' list concentrating on... Canada.

But the FT ranking is great news, and you know what? It's only going to get better.

Today I'm submitting an assignment for the strangest of the compulsory modules, Practice of Management: a new course in 'soft skills' designed to answer the complaint that MBA graduates are too quantitative and not people-focussed enough. Like all newly-introduced courses, POM is rather obviously not bedded-in yet, and grumbling among the cohort is continuous.

The lectures - delivered by outside consultants including the great Nicholas Bate - are often individually very good; the problems here are with coherence. There's no strong sense of each session being part of a larger whole. There's a bigger issue with the project part; if you've got some years of business experience already, the briefs are insultingly simplistic yet labour-intensive, reducing the value-add: it's just busywork. The 'real world experience' is all very well, but most of us came here to escape the real world for a while and learn something with academic rigour without the goo and dribble of the real world intruding. But all this misses the point.

The point is that POM is a work in progress. Every year it'll get tweaked and tuned, and in a decade it could be a world-beater, capable of putting Warwick into the top 10 all on its own. I hope WBS takes every opportunity to make that happen.

I have not had a hangover like this for some considerable time

Grurp. Stonking hangovers are a very rare event for me these days, and I suspect it's connected to the vodka shots that I participated in after red wine over at Heronbank last night. (These things always seem a good idea somehow at university flat parties.) Gotta clear this up or I'll lose a whole day.

The volume of homework given in Corporate Finance class is really quite amazing

Make no mistake, Corporate Finance is a difficult module for a non-quant. Of course this is why City types get paid so well - finance is that killer combination of both difficult and boring. It's serious 'hard work'.

And it remains hard work even when you're getting it right. I got most of last week's set correct, making me feel like a Master of the Universe in class today - but getting to grips with the concepts strongly enough to answer the questions took SEVEN HOURS on Wednesday, and that's in addition to the textbook readings, re-readings, and revision plus of course the lectures themselves. I estimate Corporate Finance takes about three times as much time per week as any other module.

Or four times if you concentrate on this week. The next problem set is TWELVE questions long, some with up to eight parts involving multiple subcalculations. Now assuming the NPV of the course is on the SML as applied to MBA modules, the yield of the module over the 10-week time-to-maturity is only slightly more than 33% of the expected return if calculated in accordance with second-order Taylor and discounted at a constant rate...!