I live in a rather nice flat right in middle of Shanghai. It’s a very well laid out 3-bedroom apartment that’s warm in the winter and, as I am just finding out, surprisingly cool in the summer. It’s got 2 balconies and an excellent view overlooking Suzhou Creek. It’s cheap and the water heater works perfectly!

I love this place; everything is great about this place – everything except the furniture. It’s horrid. It’s faux 18^th century French country in a ghastly array of curves and carvings, plastered in white and silver. It’s the kind of furniture that your grandmother would feel old in. Contrasting it with the minimalist feel of the kitchen and the bathrooms, the sofas and the dining set fit in about as much as roaring flatulence does at the orchestra.

To try and alleviate this situation, I made a quick visit to IKEA over the weekend and got myself one of those nifty 3 section dressers that only come in one color: wood.  Did the trick; was amazed at being able to put in all of my life’s possessions into 3 cubic meters.

The bottom shelf space I allocated for my MBA stuff – books, binders, handouts and CDs that I’m sure will come in handy one day. I even managed to save a special space for my copy of Financial Accounting, signed by none other than K-Schip herself, Katherine Schipper.

Sifting through those 3 million kilos of learning material, I was surprised at just how much we’ve managed to intellectually digest over the course of the last 10 months. However, what I found even more surprising was the amount of material that we DIDN’T even mention (not even tangentially) in class.

This isn’t to say that the work load was trivial – au contraire! – we, or at least I rather, have actually on more than one occasion physically felt my brain rap against the inside of my skull telling me to “Stop! For the love of God, stop!”

We’ve so far gone through 6 sets of faculty-generated class slides and you can basically cruise through the program studying just those handouts. Mind you, cruising and doing some actual learning are 2 different things altogether, but it’s amazing how much you can learn if the study material was made by your professor specifically for your class.

This is my first exposure to “proper” Western-style education; I’ve never had the opportunity to have everything laid out in front of me with simple, one-sentence explanations. I’ve always had to slog through 20 pages from the course textbook only to find out the next day that the Prof could explain things in 45 minutes. No class notes though!

Here, with the Fuqua CCMBA Program it’s almost too tempting to not do any real work and just depend on those pre-prepared slides. Makes you think though, if this program is timed to be exactly like the regular Daytime Duke MBA Program – in the greater scheme of all things business, just how much are we all really learning?

Not nearly enough, I’d say. But then what we’re currently going through is already more than enough. And what we’re learning, we’re learning properly. I can count on one hand the number of open-notes exams I’ve had in my life -  and the number of heated arguments I’ve had with my undergrad professors (“So, what you’re trying to say is that when I’m already working, my boss is going to hide all my books?”) I nary have enough digits.

This experience with the Cross Continent MBA has underlined what I’ve always thought important about education – understanding the theory behind the process, not memorizing the process itself. Books don’t give you learning, good teachers do. Or at least those who take time to create class slides.

As for the books that are now neatly stacked one on top of another (again, except for my signed copy of Financial Accounting which has its own slot), I’m a bit disappointed that the 120K USD tuition covered them and I wasn’t even able to properly use them but I think I’ll have to get myself some proper shelving space and keep these readily available or the next 64 years – as I plan never to retire and die suddenly, and without warning, at the age of 92.

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