Management
I am a math major student, so it is kind of awkward to take a business class that has nothing to do with math but everything to do with human’s relationships. Aha, management is a social studies!
First, I should confess I am not a person strong in communication, as I did not participate very much in the classroom. Maybe it is because I am not interested in the topics. Maybe it is because I speak a poor English and afraid it will be revealed when I speak it. Also, I realize myself to be a dry person in the sense I usually do not give others compliments. After coming back to USA, I have been pleased many times when others give me compliments. But, it has been hard for me to come up with ways to give them back.
I hope and believe these weakness can be compensated by my hard-working habit and analytical mind. I have studied very hard, as I was raised to do so by my Chinese family. Continuous hard-working is essential to math-studying. I am an analytical person who believes that math is always the best approach. I expected this management to be a hard class because management should has something to with convex optimization, linear programming, operation research and game theory. But this turns out not to be true as far as this class is concerned, so I was little disappointed. Explanations in the textbook are very intuitive but do they have mathematical or scientific foundations?
But, I am strongly in agreement with the opinion you made on the chapters 16 and 17 when you said “Japanese companies really need to understand the importance of life-balanced working styles.” I think this is a very insightful statement, nothing judgmental at all. Working styles in Japan are very unproductive and ineffective due to its high-stress and authoritative environment. When I was in Tokyo, I had to write a long research paper on game theory. My advisor simply asked me to read as many books as possible. I was always pushed by him to do so. But given the nature of math, quality is superior to quantity and understating 3 to 4 textbooks in depth is more meaningful than skimming 30 to 40 related works. Also, job hunting in Japan is not a school-balanced style at all. Japan companies adopts simultaneous recruiting, a rare system in the whole world, and most of college students have to start job hunting when they become seniors. Lots of them cannot come to class because they need to go to job-related