Four months into the Global MBA

by Gianluca Errico, ESSEC Global MBA Student Ambassador 2017-2018 | Finance Major

Over four months have passed since a new chapter of our life unfolded for our Global MBA cohort at ESSEC. When I arrived in September to begin this new adventure at ESSEC, I had doubts at the beginning if leaving my job and my comfort zone behind was the right choice and wondered if I could learn things that would be applicable in my next job within a 12-month program. 

Now that 4 months have passed, I can say without a doubt that I had made the right choice to embark on this journey. Within this short period, we:

• Learned within a military boot camp what it means to work as a team or be a team leader.
• Experienced how important it is to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of our team to be able to achieve different tasks.
• Developed a business idea and talked to entrepreneurs as part of our Entrepreneurship class to learn what an affordable bottom loss line is, how important it is to generate cash flows or how game-changing it can be to have the right business partners on our side.
• In the same class, we experienced which skills are important to make the perfect business pitch to convince the investor to invest in our business ideas.
• Within our Digital Marketing class, we learned about the concept of Google AdWords and how to develop a budget plan as well as a timeline for a marketing concept.
• We also learned to analyze financial reports as part of our accounting class to be able to determine if a business is doing well or not.
• Last but not least, within our Finance class, our professor taught us how to calculate if a project is profitable or not, and in what kind of timeline the investment will have a positive return.

The thing that I appreciate the most about the experience is that no matter what the next step of our careers might be, we have all learned something that we will be able to apply in the real world, regardless of whether we choose to pursue a career in marketing, finance, accounting, human resources or even if we decide to be entrepreneurs. The coursework was so tangible because we did not just learn the theory behind different concepts, but also experienced them within case studies and learned from our classmates when they shared their previous work experiences.

I’m so glad that I can say that my MBA experience thus far has not just been about learning theory and concepts from books, but that I actually learned something that I will be able to apply to my future job.

Interested in finding out more? Get in touch with Gianluca for any questions you may have about the program.