Choosing Courses

I'll probably be putting up more posts on technical finance concepts for the next little while. As it was when I was thinking of coming to Rotman, I used this blog to flush out and articulate ideas on what interested me. This was supposed to provide me with a voice and a place to review some of the ideas I was thinking about and help me decide (initially) whether I wanted to gun for Management Consulting or Finance.

Currently, we are in the process of picking what courses we want. Looking at the electives that might be offered next year (Balloting or "giving a heads up to the PSO regarding what we *might* take next year for scheduling purposes" was due last week) I'd want to take:

• Corporate Finance
• Financial Management
• M&A
• Options

However, as you can expect, these are some of the heavier finance courses. I was warned by every second year I met that it would be a bad idea to take more than three finance courses together in one term, regardless of how much we keen first years thought we loved finance. Especially any of the first three, which I'm told are the core courses for a "specialization" in Investment Banking.

So I find myself posting outloud again to both prep for the CFA exam as well as put some thoughts into writing for me to review as I select my electives for next year. Technically, with the credits I already have, I could get away with only taking three courses, but it seems like such a waste. A - We paid too much to come here to start taking "spares" and B - the profs are good and the topics are interesting. I guess it's just a matter of balancing workloads.