Bidding

Bidding is the system St Gallen uses to allocate courses to students, and is quite possibly the strangest thing I have ever experienced. I had a meeting with my business advisor last September to discuss courses I could take abroad. 2 credits at St Gallen translates to 1 credit at USC so basically I have to take 24 credits in order to transfer back to 12 USC credits. We selected 7 classes that I could take to earn my credits, as well as 3 alternate classes. The official Spring 2014 course listing was not available so we selected these classes from the Spring 2013 courses.


Flash forward to mid-January. Spring 2014 courses have been released and I am now sifting through all the classes, trying to find the ones I had selected with my advisor all those months ago, and making sure that the class times don't overlap. Many of my classes were scheduled as "block seminars" during the university's two-week Spring Break. Some of the classes I had selected were not even being offered again. Two days and many headaches later, I finally found 24 credits worth of classes that did not overlap, were offered in English, and could transfer back to USC as IB and Finance classes. 

On January 30th, the bidding began. Each exchange student is given 1000 points to place on the classes they want to take. I've learned from talking to St Gallen students that some classes are more competitive to sign up for than others. So while for some classes you may only need to bid 100 points to get in, others you might have to bid 300 points. Unfortunately, I had no idea which classes were competitive and which weren't. I decided to place more points on the classes I either really needed and didn't have an alternate for, or had only a few spots available (the smallest classes had 5 spots, the larger classes had 20). When the first round of bidding ended the following Wednesday (Feb 5th), I discovered that I had gotten all five of the classes that I bid on! I preceded to run around the house jumping up and down, I was that excited.  

Round 2 of bidding began that same day. Each round of bidding gets progressively shorter, so this current round only lasts until Monday the 10th. I also now only have 600 points to bid on my classes. The amount of points I have is determined based on how many points I had to use to get my first round of classes. (This is a bit confusing, so try to stay with me.) For example, let's say I bid 300 points on Corporate Finance, a class of 20 students. The students with the top 20 bids get into the class; however let's say that the student with the 20th highest bid only bid 100 points. I then receive 200 points back to use to bid in the next round since 100 points was the cutoff. Like I said, it's very confusing and I'm still figuring it out myself! I only need to secure 2 more classes to have my ideal schedule. I leave on the 10th for St Gallen so hopefully I am awarded these 2 classes and don't have to bid in the 3rd round! The five courses that I secured in the first round are: Risk Management and Insurance, Corporate Financial Management, The International Financial Architecture, Global Leadership, and Financial Markets and Financial Crises in Historical Perspective. 

This is my final post before I leave for Switzerland! Stay tuned for some interesting adventures from the other side of the Atlantic!