Wimbledon, The Royal Henley Regatta, a heat wave, Shakespeare in the amphitheatre, long English summer days and watching the sun set over the cricket field at Worcester College… With the awareness that we will only travel to Oxford together as a class one more time, these paint what I will remember as a romantic English backdrop that sets the stage for our summer electives.

On offer for our EMBA V class during modules 12 and 13 were Capital Raising, Theory and Practise of Negotiation, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Branding, Business in China, and Business State Relations and Political Risk. With a total of nine summer electives from which you may take four, how does one go about choosing which of the courses to take?

Within our class, a number of considerations emerge in how to answer this question. There are the people who opted to ‘build to their strengths’ by taking courses in which they have considerable experience and aim to advance them further. There are those who had the foresight to look at the timetables in advance and choose the courses which best fit their own professional and personal calendars. So whilst some have deliberately condensed four summer electives into two weeks (which is no trivial challenge I might add!), there are others who chose their courses so as to spread the work load evenly across the four weeks.

Then there are people like myself who, on the principal of maximising the value of my education, took the courses where I have had no earlier experience. For example with the core electives earlier in the year, I opted for Finance II in favour of Technology and Innovation Strategy. Given that I work for a Silicon Valley software company and have been in the Internet sector for fourteen years, it could be arguable that the TIS class is more directly relevant to my career.

Whilst this is a valid point, I’m happy with my choice to focus on the finance and global business courses. I may never be a finance director or work for an investment bank, but Finance II and Capital Raising have taught me new ways of thinking… They have offered a very captiviating view into a world I may otherwise never have seen from an insider’s perspective. And not surprisingly, they have stretched my capacity to learn, work and manage my time.

At the end of the day and as arrangements for the End of Course Ceremony in September start to take shape, I note that the EMBA is in fact not so different from the final set in a tennis match. You may lose a game here and there – miss a lecture, submit an uninspiring assignment or earn an underwhelming mark…  You find that your opponent is not nearly so desirable as Andy Murray, Andy Roddick or Roger Federer; on the other side of the net is in fact the inner anxiety which could threaten your stamina and undermine your focus.

But just as in Wimbledon, it’s the big points which matter, and when we do finally submit our last assignment and (fingers crossed!) receive our passing marks, we will cherish the victory for having defeated a very formidable opponent indeed.