CORe has been a nice addition to my holiday schedule, giving me a sense of purpose while I enjoy some time off before beginning work at the Boston Consulting Group in September. But the past couple of weeks have been somewhat more frenetic than usual.

I started CORe within a week of completing my PhD, and last week saw me officially graduate from Cambridge (finally!). It was a wonderful commencement ceremony and I had my family over from Malaysia with me, which meant that I had a busier than normal few weeks showing them around the UK to savor sights such as the ancient Roman baths in the historic city of Bath and the white cliffs of Dover. In addition, the academic papers I had submitted for journal publication had been reviewed and so there were a few things I needed to finalize as well. Therefore, I really did need to plan my HBX CORe time carefully around these activities and indeed ahead of these activities to ensure that I didn’t fall behind.

I found myself staying up a little later every night and even sneaking in some library time while I was back at Cambridge for my graduation to catch up on CORe. Here’s some photographic evidence:

Cambridge University Library

It was a rather intense couple of weeks that made me realize that this course really does require a certain level of commitment and perhaps equally importantly, stamina. The course content gets progressively more complex and difficult, and true commitment from the very beginning is imperative. Much of the rest of my cohort is taking CORe whilst being in full-time employment. Some even have the added responsibility of raising a family, being young parents themselves. I can only imagine how busy life must be for them. My cohort is probably superhuman.

However, it has been an incredibly rewarding experience so far. I measure my progress not by the quiz scores I score every week, but by the true practical value CORe aims to deliver - how well-versed am I in the language of business?

And I have quite literally been astounded by the results. Earlier this week, I came across the news that Deutsche Bank had settled allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission over an accounting scandal that the bank was involved in at the height of the 2008 financial crisis:

Prior to CORe I probably would not have understood the details of the scandal, but now, I completely understood how Deutsche Bank violated the accounting principles of conservatism, materiality and consistency by omitting a risk called gap risk from their financial statements, which led to their penalization.

Another relevant example is a recent viral article making the rounds on the Internet on how a German scientist fooled millions into thinking that eating chocolate helps weight loss. Among the myriad of techniques to produce the hoax was “p-hacking”, which thanks to the Business Analytics course on hypothesis testing and false positives, I completely understood.

It has been a really fun few weeks and I am enjoying every minute of my summer holiday. I will sign off for now with some pictures from my week. Enjoy!

The Roman Baths, Bath

Dover Castle (on the left) and The White Cliffs of Dover (on the right)

PhD Graduation, Cambridge University

I enrolled in CORe having high expectations for a course that Harvard Business School was willing to put its reputation at stake for. Three weeks in and I can honestly say that it has surpassed all my expectations. Below are three things that I have found most impressive about CORe so far:

Inductive Learning 

Prior to CORe, I had mostly been exposed to a passive style of learning, whereby knowledge is transferred through consumption. So it was quite a surprise when I was made to explore intuitions and to think rationally about concepts before even being introduced to them. CORe calls this an inductive style of learning and I absolutely love it. We are made to think and to make mistakes, which although can be a little unsettling at first, definitely makes for a healthier and more effective learning experience.

Cohort Camaraderie

The online nature of CORe collapses geographies and enables the assembly of a truly diverse cohort. The home page of CORe captures this notion perfectly. It is a world map with pulsating dots that indicate who else in your cohort is online with you. It is through features like this that CORe begins to feel like a real classroom, and your cohort, real classmates.

There is plenty of “classroom interaction” whether it is through Peer Help, where you pose questions to your peers and help them with their queries, or Shared Reflections, where you get to examine how every one else answered the same question.

Naturally, collaboration is another important aspect of learning in CORe as concepts are reinforced through your interactions with your peers. There is a real sense of camaraderie between everyone, and as you can probably imagine, camaraderie and diversity make for a very powerful combination.

Quality Content

I had taken Economics courses at school before and as an engineer by training, I am pretty comfortable with numbers and analytics. However, growing up as a science geek, I had limited exposure to accounting. Therefore, of the three modules covered by CORe – Business Analytics, Economics for Managers and Financial Accounting – I was most excited about the third.

What surprised me most was that whilst it is true that everything I have learnt from the Financial Accounting module so far has been entirely new, I am also learning quite a bit from the other two modules as well, despite thinking that they would merely serve as refresher courses. From learning how to use Excel functions to build a confidence interval around sample means, to fully understanding the origins of the demand curve, I feel like I underestimated the value of the Business Analytics and Economics for Manager courses coming into CORe.

I also love the case-based learning method employed by CORe. It really gives you an appreciation for the concepts being taught. For instance, hypothesis testing and A/B testing were taught in the context of Amazon’s efforts to improve the customer experience. Conjoint analysis was introduced through the lens of The New York Times when in 2010 they had to decide how to package their digital offerings with the launch of the iPad.

CORe is to me what I would think the future of education looks like. It is an amazing resource that integrates education and all the benefits of technology effectively. I cannot wait to see the revolution in traditional education that CORe will surely shake up in the wake of its launching.