CONTINUED - A Look Back at the Semester Spring 2007

Posted at 2:37 PM, Sunday, September 30, 2007

Hmmmm, I’m really enjoying this 3-day holiday. Right now am at home. It’s 12:50pm and I’m listening to the wonderful song “Amazing grace how sweet the sound” by Chris Tomlin. Can’t tell you how relaxed I feel. I thank God for his mercy and love and pray that the Lord will be with me always.

Here is the continuation from last Friday’s entry...........

System Analysis and Design by Dr. Bollou, like the other courses, was a very important course for my major. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, especially the project. I was very glad when the instructor gave us the option to choose our own group members. My group was totally cool! I had Nousheen, Saima, and Oma in my group, which made work a whole lot easier, phew! We worked on doing an analysis of the bookstore here at the university.  We stopped at the design phase because the course was not supposed to go into coding, implementation, and testing. On the whole, I loved it! Some of the amazing things that we learnt in the course were doing a DFD, an ERD, and cost-benefit analysis. There were lots of other topics like systems planning, requirements modeling, data & process modeling, development strategies, output and user interface design, data design, system architecture etc. I guess I learnt a lot of important stuff in this course. I loved the exams, especially the questions where we were required to do a DFD and ERD on a case study. I didn’t like the multiple choice questions too much. And oh, Dr. Bollou promised us lunch at the Faculty club, but due to one thing or the other, it didn’t happen. I hope we have one this semester though. I do like Dr. Bollou a lot because he makes sure that his students know what they are doing. During the project he scheduled meetings with the groups so that we would know what we were doing, why we were doing it, and how we should do it. I mean he wasn’t required to spend that time explaining things to us, but he really set time apart only so that we would understand the whole thing well. I am really grateful to God that we got a good grade on the project, and in the course! I guess it wouldn’t have been so good if Dr. Bollou hadn’t taken time to explain and guide us. Thank you Jesus for such wonderful professors

Dr. Felix Bollou

QBA 201 was pretty much like Intro to OS in terms of the flow of the course. Dr. Botchway was the instructor for this course. He made everything so very easy for the students. I mean he went through each step again and again just to make sure that every student understood what was happening. He did try his best and I was very pleased with that. Dr. Botchway is one of the nicest persons I’ve met. Anytime anyone of us had a problem we just went to office with our concerns and he was always there to listen, help and even adjust his own schedule to help us. We learnt about descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, graphical & tabular techniques, sampling techniques, probability, probability distributions (random, discrete & continuous) etc. The course text was also wonderful; I think one can learn a lot from the course text alone because it’s very self-explanatory. I think I’ll also go over the course text this Christmas holidays to refresh my memory, I will be needing lots of stuff from that text in the near future.

Dr. Benjamin Botchway 

And lastly, MGT 201 was a very different course from the ones I had taken previously. It was a pure business course. Dr. Buera took us in that course. The best thing about this course was the class session itself. I really enjoyed listening to Dr. Buera because it felt like listening to some argument or story rather than studying in a class. His examples were just wonderful. He focused on problems in Nigeria in most of his examples. Some of those were very funny too, especially those that about corruption in Nigerai. He would always question “Why, why is it like that?” I can understand that, I mean it’s true. Most people here don’t care why things are bad in Nigeria, they just continue to live their lives. Anyways, back to the course – Dr. Buera also emphasized discipline and obedience in class, which I really liked. I also liked the idea of the extra point assignments. Furthermore, he gave the choice that some students could do a project instead of the final, this helped lots of students to catch up. I however, chose to write the final cos he adviced me to do so. In the course, we learnt about functions of management, evolution of management thought, principles of management, managers, planning, ethics & social responsibility, organizational culture, communication and negotiation, diversity, human resource management, organizational control etc. Dr. Buera was concerned about the students and always gave them advice in a fatherly manner. I think I’m going to miss those class sessions with Dr. Buera. At least I can go over the course text to make sure I remember the important concepts (if not all) before next semester.

 Me, Dr. Abubakr Buera, Saima, and Nousheen (left-to-right)

Well, there you have it, every course I took last semester. I was very pleased with all the grades I received. All the glory belongs to the LORD because without Him, I could never have had those grades. So "THANK YOU JESUS FOR EVERYTHING!"

I kept to my plans this week and have updated my blog. Why, isn’t that surprising? My next entry will be on the good news I talked about in my entry last Friday. That'll be followed by "the summer I spent in Yola" (with loads of pics). Thanks for your time and God bless