My graduate school experience at ECU - 3rd semester: ITEC6406 Cost Analysis for Technology

All I can say is Wow! This was probably my most difficult class. Matter of fact, I ended up dropping it the first time that I took it. In the end, I suffered through it and made out with an A.

My instructor was Dr. Paul Petersen: http://www.tecs.ecu.edu/departments/technology_systems/faculty_and_staff/petersen.html

Dr. Petersen was one of the most debated professors in my program so far. Some students loved him and a lot had problems with his methods. What stood Dr. Petersen out in the program was his willingness to record every classroom lecture and post on ECU's Global Classroom site. He taught an undergraduate level course on the same subject which is the lectures that he recorded. What was hilarious was that in the recorded lectures he often spoke of his graduate class with some less than flattering remarks. I can't remember any specifics but they were funny. Some of the students in my class took exception to these comments. I believe these were the students who didn't do so well.

This the text book that we used: Canada, John R., William G. Sullivan, John A. White, and Dennis Kulonda. Capital Investment Analysis for Engineering and Management, 3rd Edition. Pearson Education, 2005. ISBN 0-13-143408-X

Funny thing about this was that John Canada either taught or was a student at NC State. A guy that I used to work with went to classes with Canada. This book was not well received from some of the comments in Amazon. I found the book hard to follow - it was not well written in my opinion. It made the course even more difficult.

We also were required to download case studies from Harvard Business Online: one was Destin Brass Products case study and the other was The Super Project. Each case study counted towards 20% of the final grade.

We also had a few take home exams and a final group project. I was lucky enough to get in with a good group. I had a smart guy who worked in Wilmington for a chemical laboratory. We did a cost analysis of 3 different vendor's mass spectrometer instruments with the goal of recommending one.

Here is a breakdown of the rest of the topics we studied:

1) Costs - incremental versus fixed costs. Direct and indirect costs.
2) Compounding interest - finding out when you will triple your investments, continuous compounding
3) Calculating capital recovery for purchased equipments - MARR
4) Calculating internal rate of return and external rates of return
5) Calculating inflation - speaking in terms of today's dollars versus future dollars
6) Determining how much money you will have to invest to pay for expansions.
7) Activity based costing

This is the class that I will need to review very hard for my comp. exam.