MasterCard Visit


By Saket PANDIT, Global MBA 2014-2015, India

You know you're pursuing a top MBA when you get to spend 3 hours listening to the passionate CEO of MasterCard France about his company and their business strategy. Yes, you read that right. The Global MBA cohort recently visited MasterCard France headquarters and had the opportunity to interact with Regis FOLBAUM, who at 37, is one of the youngest CEOs in France.


Company visits are an insightful complement to our classroom learning. Over the past 4

months we have honed the business fundamentals of Strategy, Management Accounting, Economic Policy and more. When we visit an organization and speak to its top management, we can instantly see the application of what we just learnt. 
Most of us always thought of MasterCard as a company that simply processed payments. This visit taught us that in fact, MasterCard is a technology company!
They have invested significant resources into technologies that will make the processing of trillions of dollars of payments safer, simpler and more secure.


The presentation itself was extremely detailed, and we witnessed first-hand a CEO who is completely in charge of his organization. It was truly wonderful seeing Mr Folbaum speak so knowledgeably and passionately about his work and how MasterCard is redefining the way payments work across the world.

All of us were delighted to have visited MasterCard and look forward to the next company visit.

The End of Term 1

By Constanza Barrena, Global MBA 2014-2015, Chile

It seems like yesterday when we started this journey we call the Global MBA at ESSEC. So much has happened in the past 4 month and it went by so fast that it doesn´t feel like it was possible. It's true...time flies when you are having fun and learning. There's nothing else to say but that these have been in my personal opinion, 4 of the most exciting and challenging months full of knowledge and great memories I have had in my life. The first day of class, Professor  Peter O'Connor  and Claire Gaudissart from Career Services told us about how big of a journey we were about to start and that we would take out of it as much as we put into it…and it has been even more full-on than we expected.

We started with a boot camp at St Cyr which enabled us to start getting to know each other. Through the term and through group work we accomplished to overcome challenges and developed strong bonds and friendships not only among a few of us but as a big group of 21...how could we have managed to succeed on Stats or Macro any other way?  We visited companies and had career events, met alumni, mentors and even filmed our own Elevator Pitch just in case we met our dream job CEO and had just 2 minutes to achieve that interview.

In 4 months ESSEC has already given us impressive knowledge of Statistics, Macro Economics, Financial and Managerial Accounting, Strategy and Communicational Management, but most of all the opportunity and the space to meet interesting people, learn from each other, and create bonds that for sure will last after this whole experience ends. Is has not always been easy, sure, but the positive overcomes the negative by far. I am looking forward to seeing where this ‘path’ in term 2 will take us, with new exchange students that will come along, the Singapore segment of the trimester, a field trip to Shanghai to connect with and visit lots of interesting companies and more  experiences that will bring us closer...I can't wait for it to start!