Sunday 23 September 2007

The first week

The first week is now over and I enjoyed every bit of it. It was a slow start with introductions and a few classes. Most of the time was spent in interacting with class-mates and knowing each other better. Even though I cannot remember the names of 149 of my class-mates yet; I can remember something (e.g., name, country, industry or background) about each of my class-mates.

The three most inspiring and cool session during this week has been

1) Team building - Complex High Performance Teams with Mark de Rond (JBS Staff who worked closely with Cambridge's rowing team): A wonderful insight into teams and performing in very difficult situations.
2) Branding a City through Olympics with Lois Jacobs (President International Operations - Jack Morton) - An inspiring talk about how Jack Morton managed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics with about 4.5 million people watching the event.
3) Simulating Innovation for a More Competitive Europe by Prof. Around de Meyer (JBS Director) - The presentation had some very interesting numbers about outsourcing and how Innovation is viewed from the European perspective (Even though I don't concur to some of the finer details presented:)

The first two weeks will be a bit slow, but after that it going to get really busy starting October.

We had an Alumni meet on Saturday (22nd) and it was a Black-Tie event (The first black-tie event of my life). I chipped in £48 to attend this dinner. At first I was a bit sceptical about the huge amount (especially when you are student) for a single dinner. However, after attending the dinner and meeting the people at the dinner, I realized that it is not about the food. It was more about networking and getting one-self acquainted with formal dinner events. There were about 30 odd people from my batch who had attended, and it was real cool to see everybody dressed so wonderfully. I will post some pictures of the event at a later point of time.

Next week we have a few Case Study boot-camps conducted by the Career Services team.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how things have transpired so far. So much fun and what a wonderful batch of new friends.

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