Overview of summer classes

This blog post is about the various mandatory classes that LGOs take during the summer. To preface my blog post I want to let you know that MIT students like to refer to courses by their number and not by  their title (maybe it is more efficient?). I'll refer to both the number and course title for each of the courses I write about below.

15.761 Operations Management: As LGOs this course is mandatory (I guess that should be obvious because of the O in LGO) and necessary for most of the other courses most of the LGOs are going to take in subsequent semesters. We're learning about very interesting subjects like capacity, inventory, queuing theory, and others. We have a very engaging Professor (http://web.mit.edu/~zlisto/www/) who is actually about the same age as Susan and I! We recently had a class on risk management and as a case study we read and discussed the positive impact Wal-Mart had on New Orleans post-Katrina. 

15.064 Probability and Statistics: This is a unique class that all LGOs take. What makes it unique is that we learn from one Professor (Arnie Barnett) for the first half (Probability) and from another Professor (Roy Welsch) for the second half (Statistics). We all survived (I hope!) probability and are now learning Statistics. Statistics is very interesting and very applicable in this day and age of big data. I've used Minitab a bit in my previous job (at GE), but here at MIT we use JMP (another statistical analysis software package). As a six sigma black belt I learned statistical tools as part of my job, but his course has really helped me learn the theory behind the practice. I now understand (dimly but better than before) why I used to run F-tests, T-tests, and other analysis in Minitab! 

15.317 Leadership: Similar to Operations Management this is a mandatory class because of one of the letters in LGO (L). Leigh Haffrey facilitates this course and helps us think deep about leadership and ethics. We recently had a very enlightening discussion about the use of fear in the work-place (think Niccolo Machiavelli). Our class was split on the use of fear in the work-place as some of us thought there were appropriate reasons to do so while others disagreed and thought fear should never be used in the work-place. 

15.066 Systems Optimization: This is the most engineering of our courses (at least I think so). Professor Itai Ashlagi teaches us and he teaches us very well. We're learning about linear programming, non-linear programming, and other things as well. This is a highly applicable course for us LGOs for our internships and future jobs. It is cool to be able to use Excel Solver and @Risk to analyze business problems. 

ESD.60 High Velocity Systems: I read The High Velocity Edge (when it was called Chasing the Rabbit) http://www.amazon.com/The-High-Velocity-Edge-Operational-Competition/dp/0071741410 a year ago while working at GE (someone recommended it to me). The concepts in the book really resonated with me because he wrote about how Toyota and other high velocity companies LEARNED faster than other companies. Lo and behold at LGO I get to take the course about this system with the author of the book! WOO HOO. This course helps us really learn the material from the book via cases and discussions with the Professor and other classmates. I think this course motivates me to learn more about operations and other high velocity corporations (besides Toyota).

Overall I am very happy about the choice of summer courses that we LGOs are taking. Even though I have not been in school since 2006 all of us (LGOs) help each other out to learn subjects we are unfamiliar with. Five courses in one abbreviated semester seems like a lot for me (at Stanford I only took 3-4 courses at a time) and it is a bit, but the  highly technical courses (like Statistics and Systems Optimization) are well balanced with case heavy courses (Operations Management and Leadership).