This week was incredibly concentrated and full of impressions. To start with an amusement park: short and tall revolving attractions quickly grew up across the road. Day and night they shine and reproduce fancy songs, disturbing overwhelmed MBA students. Attractions are calling and I hope to reward my inner child, before they move to another destination. By coincidence, our infantile festive spirit showed up on Monday with a team exercise on Innovation. We worked in new groups and the experience in terms of team collaboration was much easier and a bit more efficient than that during the starting days of our first groups. I don’t believe that the reason was in personalities, but rather give importance to the fact, that we have been together as a class for more than four months, and also hope, that we’ve learned a lot on what does it take to work in teams. On Tuesday, our innovation professor Cyril Bouquet concluded the course by, first, heading a fantastic innovation contest, then giving us another out-of-box group assignment and, lastly, each of us has got a unique souvenir of self micro-prototype (now I can practice my self-analytical talks even better). Every conclusion of another course is a bitter treasure. In return, a new course on International Political Economy started. I enjoy deepness and width of the subject and our class discussions.
During a Strategy class discussion, my friend made a comment, that an issue in question had been studied at a Finance class several weeks ago and, interestingly, through another conceptual argumentation, we derived to the same conclusion. That was my moment of excitement: I realized the first fruits of my learning experience at the IMD very tangibly and felt the difference in the way I and my classmates think now. Practically, I have more tools and flexibility to challenge my business reasoning and decision making. I need to mention that our Strategy professor, Mikolaj Piskorski, turns our thinking habits and attitudes, even in the way we read cases, upside down.
This week we were hosted by the EPFL president, Patrick Aebischer, a man, who turned around a good technical university into a great academic and research power and a global innovation gravity center. An Everyman of the World, an Entrepreneur, a Leader. It was a great luck and an honor to get to know him and his story.
Finally, once again I appreciated importance of making well-rounded and solid choices, and taking self-responsibility, accordingly. I imply career planning and job searching. Doing individual home-work on self reflection in terms of personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as turns and passions, personal life choices, networking, company analyses and many other criteria is very demanding, but having serious long-term aftermaths. I’m going to discuss it with my prototype))
Greetings from sunny Lausanne and the best business school in my life!
Till soon,
Aysylu
