WGU MBA IT Management - The Journey from the Beginning to the End

[albinosmurf]

Good Luck!  I started the program on Sept 1st with the goal of finishing in under a year.  So far I've completed the following courses:

C200:   Managing Organizations and Leading People
MGT2:  IT Project Management
C202:   Managing Human Capital
C212:   Marketing

And I've enjoyed them all withe the exception of marketing.  I just started working on C213:   Accounting for Decision Makers and I'm enjoying it as well, but it is a bit tedious.  

I'm hoping that with the aggressive pace you plan to keep you'll blow by me quickly and have some good tips for me.   My best tip so far is to use the information in the "Course Tips" section; It's there for a reason.  And for Project Management specifically, keep it simple.  If not you could end up having to write a lot more than is necessary.

Oh, and just and FYI, I think Ethical Leadership only requires a performance assessment now, not both a performance assessment and an objective assessment.

Good luck to you too Kima! So you finished four classes in your first month. That is great and gives me great hope. I look forward to exchanging updates and tips with you over the next year.

Kima - You may already know this, but for C213 you should get an HP 12c Platinum financial calculator. It is on the WGU allowed list of calculators. It will make life much easier.

Thanks for the tip!  I'll head over to Amazon and see if I can order that now.  I'm hoping to take the exam next week.

It will help with Financial Management too. Personally, I had never used a financial calculator before and it took some getting used to. I YouTubed how to use it for specific problems. You will want to practice/learn to use it before you need it.

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Thanks!

I looked that up last night as well after seeing the initial message. I also did some web searches and from what I gather it seems like the WGU text uses the TI BAII Plus for some of the examples, but I didn't see any HP examples (for 10bII or 12c). That probably doesn't matter but it could make things easier.

In any case, from what I can see via web searches people recommend the 10bII and 12c for bachelor's level accounting & finance courses and recommend the HP 17bII for more advanced stuff like MBA coursework. But then again, others say that excel is more useful for MBA material and any calculator will work for the calculations on exams. Of course, those comments are not WGU specific, but MBA courses in general.

I'd love to use my TI nSpire CX, but its the CAS version. Not sure why CAS matters outside of algebra; business classes will mainly use the financial solver and that is not CAS based.

All of the textbooks for my undergrad finance courses used the BAII in the examples as well. Some professors also gave examples in excel, but BAII was by far the norm. My undergrad work was online from a B&M school, and the publisher was Cengage. I've also seen a few McGraw textbooks with the BAII calculator.

I would wait to see what calculator your textbooks use before purchasing one.

So I had never used a financial calculator before. I did not use one for my TESU BSBA. I discovered the tip from someone's blog on how they completed their WGU MBA in 300 hours.  The blog writer was a CPA and for the Financial Management class he highly recommended using the HP 12C. I purchased one and learned how to use it for calculating various problems such as variance and I could see the benefit immediately.

Here is the link to his blog below. That being said, I don't know which calculator is the best one for the MBA....I just went with this guys blog recommendation.

(highly recommend reading) and also the text specific to Financial Management:
https://www.paretoguide.com/journal/

C214 – Financial Management


Resources used: HP 12c Platinum (financial calculator), textbook

Time spent (in hours): planning 0, study 11, assessment 2, total 13

Approach:

Planning – none, this is my day job

Study – I took the pre-test cold to assess my capability against the material and passed easily on the first attempt. I used the coaching report and key concept notes I took during the pre-test to focus my review. The biggest learning was the need to obtain a financial calculator. Seriously! This test had far more calculations than any other test in the MBA to this point. The right calculator made some questions quite easy. Without it, manual calculation is brutal and a waste of mental resources and time. Also, this course covers a broad set of financial concepts in detail. If you don’t have familiarity with these concepts previously, add a lot more time to your study expectations.


Assessment – Objective Assessment, 93 minutes to complete 69 questions far above the required passing score. Get a financial calculator and learn how to do the required calculations.

- AlbinoSmurf