Greetings from Maastricht!

Nine EIU business students, accompanied by Dr. David Boggs (Management) and Dr. Richard Flight (Marketing) arrived safely in Brussels, Belgium on Monday morning, May 11, 2010, after successfully flying around the ash of Mt. Eyjafjallajokull on their overnight flight that departed Chicago. As a result of the detour due to the volcano they flew right over Greenland and Iceland, both very interesting and icy places to see; it was far enough to the north that they saw no darkness at all, despite it being an "overnight" flight. Upon landing, the class passed through customs quickly before taking a train to Maastricht, Netherlands, where they will be based until early June. Monday evening the group was given a tour of Maastricht, along with lots of information on its unique and interesting history, by Donn Wiltschut, a local resident and friend of Dr. Hank Davis (Accounting), who will be joining the class in about two weeks. (A picture of the students, professors, and Mr. Wiltschut taken during the Maastricht tour accompanies this post). Tuesday Dr. Marko Grunhagen (Marketing) visited the morning class and provided additional orientation and information to the students, with special emphasis on Germany, his country of origin and the destination of the students their first weekend in Europe. Wednesday the class visited Amsterdam and toured a flower market and Heineken operation. Thursday, the class topic was international marketing, led by Dr. Flight. All is well here and the students, many of whom are traveling out of the USA for the first time, are learning lots about international business, and are making friends and having a great experience at the same time!

David J. Boggs, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Management

School of Business

Eastern Illinois University

The Link (Update 1)

Many students fail to see the importance of their collegiate education and how it relates to the 'real world'. My goal, in a series of posts starting here on out, is to link the academic world experiences to that of the work world. First though I feel a little bit of background would be appropriate.

My name is obviously Tony Zipparro, and I am 21 years old with a BSB in Finance and MBA from Eastern. While at Eastern I started the shells of a Hedge Fund entity in August 2008. During that time I slowly got my ducks in a row so that upon December 2009 graduation me and the 3 other partners I brought on could go full-speed. Since graduation we have been running our business operations out of Vernon Hills, IL and the experience has been exciting to say the least.

The LINK that most prominently comes to mind is that of knowing your Microsoft Office package through-and-through. Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access are invaluable tools for keeping our business running and thriving. For this post I will be selfish and focus on an area of Office I have always loved: Excel.

EXCEL...CASE & POINT:

Our company is a leading player in the industry and attracting much attention partly due to the speed and accuracy at which we can analyze and pick investments. We can take complex processes and break them down to less than 1 minute calculations and visuals. How do we do this? Excel. I have always been an avid user of excel. The charts, spreadsheets and other basic functions are immensely useful. But what few people know is that it has the power to do pretty much whatever you want. Through the use of Macros/VBAs, you can upload live data from he internet, have the data analyzed in the spreadsheet and see exactly what you need to see.

While these advanced uses may seem trivial, it is not just these functions that are useful. At Eastern all business students take an introductory course to Word, Excel and Access. Most blow it off. But the major advantage when going out into the world is in these Office product competitive advantages versus your peers. Businesses consistently look for savvy young individuals that can plug out an Excel sheet to show them what they want. Conditional formatting is HUGELY important for putting a visual to numbers. Utilizing simple formulas and pairing them with others, drastically reduces the time you need to spend doing the 'grunt work'.

The bottom line is that with a well-versed background in Excel, you become a great threat to others trying to get the job. Not only will you provide the company with a more efficient way to analyze their hoards of data, but you will make your first few years out a lot less 'number-intensive'. It took me years and studying beyond the classes that Eastern offered to get to my current level, but my level of expertise should not be yours. The first goal you should set for yourself is to learn the basics and actually listen to what your BUS 1950 professors say (EVEN THOUGH IT IS ONLY YOUR 1st OR 2nd SEMESTER IN).

My life is inexplicably easy (in terms of sifting through data) when all I have to do is click once and I automatically get over 2,000 correlations between 50 different stocks. But it took hard work to get there.