Post Study Visa for students in Belgium

I have been doing some research on Post Study Visa for students in various countries in order to understand it better because Belgium does not have any unfortunately. US, UK, France, Netherlands, Australia etc provide 1-2 years of "Post Study Visa" to all Masters students with varying degree of flexibility.

To my surprise this thought never crossed school's mind even when the school is pushing so hard for internalization.I am trying to speak to the school management and the alumni association to highlight and push this issue further. One of the reasons I see for this issue is the relatively small number of foreign students(non-EEA) in Belgium.

Negotiations - a different perspective

This has been due for a long time. We had an amazing course on 'Negotiations Skills' by our Program Director, Dr David Venter. Dr Venter was one of the twelve negotiators in South Africa to facilitate the transfer of power from Apatheid regime to democracy.

Before this course, I never thought that 'Negotiation' is like an art that could be mastered by practice. Dr Venter is an amazing speaker and with his real life examples he made the course very interesting and engaging.

Key learnings from the course:-

- Before the negotiation, do a through home-work on the problems at hand, other party(ies) involved and your own bucket of options.

- Enter the negotiation with your 'Aspiration Base'(Where to start the negotiation), 'Real Base'( upto what point can you go in negotiation) and 'BATNA'

- Make the first move.

- Approach it with the idea 'Win-more' 'Win-more' .

We practised many simulated 'Negotiation' problems and it was really possible to apply the above learnings in practice.

Cacophony in the breaks...

Normally a lot of non-Belgian classmates including myself make VoIP calls to people back home or else where in the breaks of the classes.The other day during a break I was sitting in the class working on something and I realised there was a virtual cacophony of languages in the class auditorium,which I had never noticed before. Somebody was speaking Spanish,somebody Russian, somebody Bengali and faintly I could hear some Greek too.

It was quite a change from all in English discussion to a cacophony of langauages :) Internationalism at its best!!!!!

Language - How important role it has?

Lately we have been interacting with a lot of companies,Vlerick alumni and other recruiting partners and one thing that has come out clearly in the discussions is the necessity of fluency in Dutch/French for about half the companies. Before starting in Vlerick I was aware of the language factor but my assessment was that about one fourth of the companies are particular about local language.

Most of my classmates are taking classes for Dutch/French alongside the course including me. I must emphasise that firms that have typically European operations are more particular about local language than those that have global operations. However knowing the local language comes handy if you plan to work in Europe. The requirement of fluency in local language definitely makes it more challenging for non-Europeans to find suitable jobs.

Lets hope for the best.

Networking - the core part of doing MBA

Before coming to Vlerick I was quite cognizant of the importance of networking both during the course and after the course. I remember from an interview of Joseph Stiglitz that the three core parameters for a candidate to choose a b-school should be 'Networking,Networking and Networking'.

After starting in Vlerick I must say I have realised more closely how important networking is. I am glad Vlerick emphasises a lot on the importance of networking and provides students many opportunities to meet the alumni, industry people and entrepreneurs. Vlerick has innovated a 'Mentor-Mentee' concept in which there is a mentor for every two students. I have talked more about this on my previous post.This program seems to be working nicely. We had our second mentorship session today.

Looking forward to a promising new year with many networking opportunities.

One typical day in the MBA life

Human adaptation is an amazing thing. I am quite amazed at the adaptation that all my classmates have undergone and now we sail through a day which typically looks like:-

7 hours of class in all its intensity that requires prior preparation too.Few industry or class presentations in the lunch breaks/after class hours. 2-3 group meetings for all the assignments at hand.There could be a networking event/alumni meet late in the evenings. Normally the day ends with few beers discusssing stuff with fellow classmates/industry speakers/alumni or the InBev lounge bartender only to be followed by more reading for the next day.

Did I say I even said oh or oooph for the passed day, oh hell I enjoyed every bit of it. Guess MBA definitely helps us redefine our own boundaries....

10 weeks in the course...

We are in our 11th week of our course.Time has just flown by. It has been quite an experience till now and I thought it would be a good idea to summarize few key takes:-

- Prioritization is the indespensable part of the course. There are umpteen things to attend to, seemingly all are important and relevant. Until one can prioritize it is very difficult to cope with the 'course flow'.

- Learning and unlearning is happening simultaneously,although the former dominates the latter by occurence ;) Imagine one is put in a room with 42 other bright people to brainstorm on a subject/issue. One is constantly challenged to grasp new ideas and suddenly recalibrate his thought process . I must accept sometimes it leads to futility also.

- The group seems pretty intermigled now compared to initial days.We now know reasonably well about each other, which is quite a remarkable thing,however each day is a new discovery for me.

- Anxiety about the recovery of economy is palpable. Although we are more than 9 months away from graduation I could sense the anxiety in the group. Seemingly the Belgian market is not quite internationalized and that is making a lot of non-EEA folks to explore other markets.

If I would want to put a score to my satisfaction level with the course until now I would say 8/10.

Kobus Neethling 's creativity workshop

Yesterday we had a workshop on 'Creativity' by Dr Kobus Neethling He is the president of South Africa Creativity Foundation and a very known name in the world of creativity. I would say the presentation was not spectacular but worth the time. He introduced few new paradigms to look at creativity,which I found convincing.

Dr Kobus has written 88 books as yet, and has written one book of 110 pages in four and half minutes. Quite a feat, ain't it...

Hoping to have a creative weekend...

Open Innovation Forum kicks off in Vlerick

On the 4th Nov, Vlerick Innovation Forum was kicked off. Open Innovation is quite an interesting area and there is a buzzing interest in the students to explore it. Few students got together to form the forum in the school. We got a person from academia Prof.Wim Vanhaverbeke and one person from industry Mr.Phillipe Cardinael to address us. It was a good beginning.

We are hoping more students to come onboard and make the learning better for everybody interested.

The pressure in the cooker just got abnormal

In one of my previous posts I had hoped that the work pressure would subside in coming days,but I got it totally wrong. I did a counting today and figured I have ten subjects to take care at the moment, phew even I am surprised how am I managing this.On top of this, there are umpteen other equally important things such as career services,networking,social life etc etc. I am already sleep deprived and caffeine addict.

I have at least 5 groups to do assignments for various subjects. I have to use 'Congestion Control Algorithms' learned during my engineering days to manage all the group activities ;) I think this term and coming term is going to be heavy on work load... C'est la vie...