As we embark on a new term, I want to look back at our first. A week after integration at ESSEC, we found ourselves participating in a leadership camp at Saint-Cyr. It took a lot of sweat, determination and hard work to get through. In hindsight, I feel this was a very important moment, as it not only taught us about teamwork and leadership, but also brought us closer together. Since my friends have already written about the St Cyr experience in this blog, I won’t go into detail, but if you haven’t read their posts you should scroll down and read them NOW. There couldn’t have been a better start to the term than this!Who would have thought that pursuing an MBA would land you in a class on “Decisions & Negotiations”? This one week, intensive class involved live negotiations in many formats, such as one-on-one, multi-party, etc. Picture this: a bunch of MBA students battling each other out, negotiating to get the best deals, keeping both parties’ interests involved. Pure fun!
Group work is a huge part of an MBA. After all, we aspire to be business leaders and group work teaches us to manage people and projects. This term also witnessed a great deal of group work. What we didn’t see coming were the long nights, the multiple group meetings, the never-ending Google hangouts, and the numerous email exchanges leading up to presentations. We also collaborated with students from the MBA in International Luxury Brand Management in a few courses; that just meant more group work! Soon we’re going to have to start scheduling meetings to schedule meetings to make sure there are no conflicts…When I enrolled in an MBA, I never thought I would write an entire case by myself, which I ended up doing for a strategy course. A business game was an engaging way to learn accounting from a new perspective. Finally, what if I were to give you the two following statements and asked you to find the confidence interval to reject the null hypothesis in favour of the alternate hypothesis?
Null Hypothesis H0: “GMBA students hardly worked this term”.
Alternate Hypothesis H1: “GMBA students worked very hard this term”.
Got it? If not, not to worry. After a Statistics course with Professor Vinzi, you should be able to answer, “I reject the null hypothesis in favour of the alternate hypothesis with 95% confidence,” unless you have someone like Ting Ting in your class saying, “Your sample size is too small to draw a conclusion.” :-)
The last two weeks of the term turned out to be the most exhausting. During these two weeks, every single one of us burnt the midnight oil working on case studies, presentations, assignments, and prepping for final exams. NTT Europe Ltd, a subsidiary of NTT Communications, visited us in the final week. “Cloud Computing,” “Big Data,” etc.; these terms are no longer meaningless jargon for me, thanks to NTT’s presentation.If you think that all this hard work left us with no time for fun, think again. Ever heard of the phrase “work hard, play harder”? From in-class birthday celebrations with cakes and pies baked by Arnaud, impromptu get-togethers at Cergy Le Haut, long poker nights at du Port, an all-MBA holiday party, barbecue at Ingrid’s, potlucks at ESSEC, la Nuit Blanche in Paris, and many visits to Foy’s, these were some of the good times that we enjoyed as MBA students!
A selection of Global MBA baked goods and good times...
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