Organisational Behaviour

The second course which I have taken for my MBA degree is in Organisational Behaviour (OB). I thought that this would be a relatively simple course after the rigours of Accountancy, but I was mistaken. It is clear that some courses are maths based (accountancy, economics, finance) whereas others are word based (ob, sales, human resource management). I am definitely maths orientated, making those courses which are considered to be 'hard' easier than those courses which are supposed to be 'soft'.

It's not that I don't understand the material; a fair amount seems to be self-evident. It's more that it seems that one simply has to remember a large amount of material and regurgitate it the exam, as opposed to learning a set of rules and how to apply those rules to differing sets of numbers (accountancy). The ob material has to fight for valuable real estate in my memory and needs a larger area than the abstract rules necessary for accountancy.

When I was young, I was blessed with a prodigious memory, and this memory helped conceal the fact that I wasn't used to synthesizing knowledge from what I had previously learnt. This became apparent at around the age of fifteen, and for a few years I floundered until I acclimatised, taking in basic facts, abstracting from them rules, and then using those rules to apply the basic facts in new settings. This is basically what I have been doing at work for the last twenty years and is the basis of my professional 'fame'.

This approach isn't working with ob and I am becoming slightly worried about how I am going to perform in the approaching exam. To add to my worries, I checked the MBA timetable. The ob course is scheduled to finish at the end of January, but the exam will be in March. My third course, Economics, will start in the second week of February. So there will be a two week period when I have no studies and then a three week period in which I will be studying one course but revising for a previous one. This might have been acceptable when I was a full time student, but now it's going to be difficult, especially as I have a mentally challenging full-time job which occupies me during the day.

How can this be? I assume that the following theory is true: the exams for the semester beginning in February are held in June. Counting back to allow for fifteen lectures and a short revision period means that the course has to start in February. Heriott Watt University has determined that exams should be held in December, March and June (basically every three months). So there is a small overlap in February and March. Ok, I hear you ask, why can't the December courses last longer or start later than a few days after the previous semester's exams? Because the students have already started a new course, and because the lecturer teaching the ob course has embarked upon teaching yet another semester of ob. 

I am tempted to attend the first few lectures of the new semester's ob course whilst simultaneously studying economics, in order to help retain the material. Fortunately there is no time table clash, but on the other hand, it means carrying on making two journeys a week to the college (economics will be at my favourite time, Friday mornings between 8-11am, whereas ob will be on Wednesday evenings, 6-9pm).

In an attempt to help me study and remember the ob material, I am about to attempt a technique described in the book "Brain Rules". I am going to dab a little perfume on the back of my right hand and then read the material. I am going to do this every time I study. I am going to do this prior to the exam. The theory is that the brain makes a connection between the perfume and the ob material, or as we could call it in database theory, the perfume serves to index the ob material. Thus smelling the perfume is supposed to cause immediate recall of all the material.