Inter Culture Communication as a subject and its implications...

I particularly wanted to write about my experience of one of my first papers in MBA curriculum,'Inter Culture Communication'. This paper was taught was by Dr Bruce Stening, Dean of our Beijing Campus and a phenomenal person.Dr Bruce took us through an experience that I feel is one of the most important takes of an International MBA.We were put in a group of five people, deliberately made as diverse as it could get and asked to work on a project together.I had an Indonesian girl, an Argentinian, a Hungarian and a French-Belgian in my group.

We were made to do a lot of class assignments in the group along with the group project. Working for the group project was initially difficult as people had their own set of ideas about how to go for the project etc etc. My group became a cohesive one pretty soon and we had a ball working together.However in many groups, there were a lot of disagreement and adjustment issues.We did a role-play as part of our presentation for the project.Many groups presented videos as part of their presentations, which were so funny that we actually had a get together watching these videos over beer.There was a lot to learn and share in this project and I feel quite enriched with this experience.

In essence this paper provided a real time experience of working in a cross-cultural scenario with almost unknown people. The bottomline is one has to be open-minded and ready to learn and unlearn to be successful in a cross-cultural setup.

First Corporate Get Together

We had our first corporate interaction on the 23rd Sep. Although I didn't find the discussion session worthwhile, the networking cocktail session was definitely good. Met people from Deloitte, E&Y and other consulting companies and spoke to them about the industry in general and sought their advice on how do make my way towards a career in Biz Consulting. The Consulting recruitment time is normally in Oct-Nov, in the beginningof next month we have a career fair on Consulting and Finance Jobs in Ghent(our another campus).

Another thing which I think could be changed is mixing MBA and Master students together in the corporate events. The need for Masters and MBA are different and few companies are only keen on recruiting Masters,which is frustrating for MBA students and vice versa.

Pressure cooker days....

I would refer to my first three weeks in Vlerick as 'Pressure Cooker Days'. It suddenly felt that I was bulldozed with information from all directions. I thought I was good at multi-tasking but boy I have to get much better.Most of the time is spent in classroom and doing the readings for the next classes.

On top of it there is no dearth of assignments. Most of the assignments are group based and I feel it is the most wonderful part of the MBA experience. The school makes sure that one is not with same people in all the groups, this way you get to interact with almost everybody in the class. Initially there were few difficulties in working with people from other cultures and background,things are fine now.Did I tell you, reportedly there were heated discussions in few groups ;))

Seems like the steam of the pressure cooker would ease a bit in coming days. I already have a Corporate Interaction Session in few days from now, the clock is ticking real fast :))

First days of school

The first day in the school started with a sumptuous breakfast followed by formal introduction of Dean,Program Director and other staff members.Our class consists of 89 participants from 41 countries, isn't that a pretty international group? We were divided in groups of five to know the members of the group and then introduce the group members to the rest of the participants. It was a very useful exercise.The profile of the students seemed quite impressive.

We were given a lecture on 'What is MBA' by the PD on the second day and it turned out to be a very informative session. Then we went to Ghent,for official opening of Vlerick's academic session. The school's effort to make our experience enriching is appreciable. I am hoping to have a great year in Vlerick.