First day back. Yay?
I admit this maybe seems like a lukewarm reaction to the first day of the last semester of my program (20 weeks to graduation!) but… we lost 6 people in the last semester, 4 from our set and 2 from Set B. We started last semester with 32 people and we’re down to 26 now. That’s a 
nearly 20% attrition rate (18.75% if we’re being precise). Kind of a shock. I mean, we’ve been through three semesters of this and I was expecting a couple of specific people not to return but somehow, having a set of 11 people seems a lot smaller than one of 15 people. We’ve lost nearly half since the program started a year and a half ago, it’s kind of mind-blowing. You don’t really notice at university when people don’t make the grade on a course –you see a lot of the same people but not everybody’s in every course and not every course is necessarily a prerequisite for something else.
Anyway, Term A is shaping up to be very interesting since we’re pretty much down to the courses that are purely Ops – Lean Synchronous Systems, Entreprise Resource Planning, Entrepreneurship, Labour Relations, Forecasting. It’s looking like it will be a pretty engaging semester. Labour Relations so far has been “Unions, yay!” which I’m not sure I’m exactly thrilled with but we’ve only had one lab and the actual course seems to be more in line with what I thought it was – managing people in a union environment – so I’m withholding judgement at the moment.
As a student who has been accepted into the Operations Management program for this upcoming September enrollment, finding your blog here was certainly a great thing (in addition to being very informative, it has also convinced me I cannot work a part time job while enrolled in the program as I had originally planned!)
I was curious – do you have any advice for students like myself who are going into the program blind, to prepare myself for the intense workload and high drop-out rate?
Are there any time-management strategies taught in class, or are the students expected to adopt these skills over time by trail and error?
Thank you :)
Hi Jonny,
Congratulations on getting into the program. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.
It is possible to work a part-time job while doing the program, just be prepared not to have much of a social life outside your set if you do. I did so in the first year and still really enjoyed it. Work basically became my social life, which was fine because I liked the people I worked with. It does require time management (I did a lot of homework on the 1.5 hour bus ride home) but it’s doable. I worked in industry over the summer and made the choice in September to concentrate on school this year. As they keep telling us “the work expands to fill the time available”.
As far as advice goes, I’ve been writing some up and it no longer fits in this comment box – so look for a blog post in the next couple of days to answer this. In the meantime, check out: http://apics.bcitbusiness.ca/ to see the resources available to OpMan students.
They don’t teach time management specifically in the program except in that you have to figure something out or the work won’t get done. There’s lots of resources available to students, though. The Library and Student Association run time management workshops pretty regularly and there’s advice for the asking from the instructors. Our year has been building some time management tools and strategies, as well, that we’ve been trying to pass on to this year’s first years. More on those will be coming when I finish writing the advice post that I’m working on. I’ll link it here when I post.
Thanks for commenting. It’s great to know that my blog is reaching out beyond the school to new students.
Thank you so much for your reply – again, it is much appreciated. I’ll be looking forward to the next entry :)
Jonny, you can learn about time management and getting things done if you read “Getting Things Done (GTD) ” by David Allen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
This book helped me very much. I recommend to read it. Since last term I have been trying to teach our Op Man students how to use Google docs and collaborate using Calendars and Google docs. Check out our Op Man club website http://apics-bcit.ca/ It is basically about Operations Management students and our program. You have done a great choice of the program. Our instructors is a tremendous asset that we have. The program is challenging but it is very fun and rewarding!
Thank you Elena, I’ll check those sources out :)