A message from MBASA for the first cultural event of the year:
Dear ESADE MBAS
Don’t miss out on getting your ticket TODAY, for our first cultural event of the year… happening next week!
Event: Flamenco show and 3 course dinner (price all inclusive)
To clarify the questions that many of you asked me yesterday: You will not be asked to dance or dress up in traditional flamenco outfits :)
Date: Saturday, 6th of February, 21.00 – late
Venue: El Tablao de Carmen in Pueblo Español (close to Montjuic).
Deemed the most authentic show in Barcelona !!!
http://www.tablaodecarmen.com/
Special Esade offer: € 38 including show and three course dinner
(the regular price is € 69 !!)
Tickets will be sold outside the cafeteria on level 2 from 13.00 – 15.00.
We need to collect the money in advance to take advantage of our special offer, so please let us know asap if you would like to attend put cannot make it tomorrow at those times!
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Update [31.01.2009,21:37h]: I think that the points have been made. I have taken the comments offline for now and now it is time for a dialogue. Everybody involved has been informed.
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Today somebody explained the Career Week quite well in class: “Career Week was a good branding exercise for the companies…!“
ESADE itself did a great job! The networking tent was excellent and the video conferencing presentations worked really well. They also did well in attracting quite a good number of interesting companies and there where somegood positions available without a doubt. That however applied to only a few company presentations I attended!
From a lecture point of view some of the company presentations were very interesting especially the questioning session.
From a presentation skill or assessment point of view, they failed! Not all but many of them failed the whole point of Career Week. A French luxury goods group was a good example!45min company presentation in Spanish, 20min questioning session. In the 65th min (5min overtime) one student finally asked the most important question: why did come you to ESADE? Answer: Oh yes, btw. we have a position in Portual but you have to speak Portuguese and preferably French! Mission of branding accomplished. Task failed!
If you give a presentation at a Career Week you should at least have a vacancy, mention the job profile at the beginning and sponsor visas in case applicants are non-residents! How about a job vacancy in Korea and you need to speak Korean! That applied to 1 student at entire ESADE. Thank you very much!
I still wish everybody applying to those companies a lot of luck and best of luck with your own job hunting in case you are also looking outside!
(For those interested in working for the French luxury goods group, I can confirm that everybody present had a handbag from its own company, men included!).
The online discussion with e-learning experts about the use of social media in higher education takes place today at 12.30pm (GMT+1). This virtual “discussion aims to share best practices, experiences and interest in the use of social software technologies in Higher Education”, as explained by Margarida Romero (Twitter).
The dicussion will take place on Facebook, Twitter (#09CD10001) for external experts and on Nexusfor Esade’s experts.
On Nexus, some ESADE IT staff joins (Raquel Boza, Manuela Calatayud, etc.) and ESADE’s DIPA members (Learning Innovation Department, Albert March, Cristina Martin).
In Facebook the participants will be the Esade PhD Students in Management and worldwide researchers and experts in elearning such:
Pirkko T Hyvönen (Uni. Oulu) – CSCL Researcher, Finland
Esteve Almirall – IS Researcher, Spain/Taiwan/Finland…
Niki Lambropoulos – CSCL Researcher, UK & Greece
Damien Clauzel (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) – IS Researcher, France
According to my blog statistics the comparison and choice between ESADE and IESEhas be one of the main interests of my readers. Therefore I decided to dedicate an article to my choice of ESADE over IESE.
IESE simply was never an option to me!!! It never made it to my radar. ESADE’s reputation was being the school with great people and culture and that reputation had reached me. Nothing alike about IESE. So i never considered IESE to be quite honest.
I met many of the schools at the MBA fair in London in 2008 and I based my choice simply on gut-feeling at the end of the day! LBSfor example had some students present and the contact with them was terrible. After seeing how they were reacting to each other, talking to applicants, it was clear that I had no interest whatsoever in applying to them!
Another very important factor to me is the teamwork! I love teamwork and team focus and don’t like the cut-throat mentality of many other schools. When you have a school with a bell-curve grading system I assure you that you will feel enormous horizontal pressure. ESADE students are competitve but we are teams at the end of the day and not competitors. The feeling I got from IE, INSEAD and LBS namely showed me the exact opposite.
But at the end of the day you have to make the choice that feels right. you should definitely look beyond rankings though and consider the soft factors as well. I example only applied to HKUST, RSM and ESADE because these are the ones I had the best feeling about!! it is not only about ranks for me but about whether it feels right…
One last thing that I can recommend is that you ask to attend some of the classes when you visit the schools. And speak as intensively with students while on campus as possible!!! Keep asking and asking and asking!!! The responses and the way people respond will tell you a lot!
Overall i can say that I am very happy, I amazed with the selection of colleagues and definitely enjoy the experience!
I hope that helped you a little with your choice and let’s stay in touch!! Good luck with your applications!
Today the ESADE Winter Career Week begins and will take place as well on Monday (25.01.10) and Tuesday (26.01.10) on the ESADE Campus Building 3. This will be great recruiment opportunity for all MBA students graduating in March 2010 and the first year students looking for summer internships.
There is a great line-up of companies presenting on campus as well as video presentations and workshops. Today the Career Week was kicked off by LVMH followed by PepsiCo LatAm this afternoon. Other companies coming are the following:
ALFA CONSULTING
ALTAIR MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
AXIS CORPORATE S.L.
CENTRE DE RECHERCHE PUBLIC HENRI TUDOR – TECHNOPORT
COCA – COLA FEMSA
DISNEYLAND PARIS (Business Case)
DISNEYLAND PARIS (Presentation)
DSM
EVERIS
GE LATAM
INFOSYS
JOHNSON & JOHNSON
LOEWE
L’ORÉAL ESPAÑA S.A.
LUXOTTICA
LVMH
NESTLÉ
PEPSICO LATAM
ROCHE FARMA SPAIN
SK GROUP
TECH DATA ESPAÑA SLU
TECHNOPAK
TRADEBE
WERFEN GROUP
WILLIAM J. CLINTON FOUNDATION
WIPRO
ZURICH FINANCIAL SERVICES
This is a great line up offered to us with plenty of networking chances so we have to take advantage of it. I wish everybody a successful recruiment process!!!
As you all are aware, January 12, 2010 marked a series of earthquakes devastating Haiti. There are currently at least 300, 000 people without shelter, thousands of families separated from each other, the injured are countless!
Let us recognize once again that an MBA is not there only for personal advancement but also stands for servicing humanity. ESADE Entrepreneurship Club encourages you to help the emergency relief and recovery efforts in Haiti by donating money to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
We kindly hereby request your cooperation and contribution of a small donation of at least 1 euro (<1 cup of coffee) as we believe small gestures can make a difference. Please donate in the next 48 hours; representatives of the Entrepreneurship Club will be gathering money on Planta 2 at lunchtime on Monday and Tuesday and making the bank transfer. Apart from these time slots, you can hand your donation to Christian and Zorina from Section A, Ahmed and Rahul from Section B and Saurabh and William from the 2nd years.
Your contribution can help save lives and give emotional support to real people in despair!
The Microsoft campaign “The ultimate steal” or “Da el golpe” is available for ESADE students. Under this student special offer, ESADE students can buy Microsoft Office 2007 for only €52. To get your own copy of Office 2007 click here to download. This “Ultimate” version includes Access, Excel, InfoPath, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, Publisher, Groove and Outlook.
As of now the Office 2007 version is in Spanish however you can buy the language pack for €12 that converts Office in any language you want pretty much. I am still waiting for the feedback from Microsoft whether I can get an English version despite being a student in Spain. I keep you posted!
With the ever-growing needs for a better IT infrastructure, ESADE figured it is time to use the Christmas holidays to work on the IT. This is great news as it seems that our IT improvement roundtable in November is bearing fruits.
In the month of November the staff members who are related to the IT as well as 8students (4 with IT background and 4 without) sat together and held an IT improvement workshop. We raised all the pressing issues, prioritised them and started working on them.
Throughout the month of December on of the most pressing issues of wifi signal strength have already been attacked and new, stronger wifi routers have been set-up all over the campus. Hopefully this will have effect as of next January, as there was no noticeable improvement as of December 16th, the last time I was on campus.
In addition the printing services have been upgraded. Now the student ID, which can be topped-up with money, replaces the printing cards and simultaneously makes the log-in process to the print jobs more efficient. (Insider information: soon there will be a major push for using the student ID for paying in the canteens instead of using cash. That makes the serving a lot faster and therefore everbody should have the caffein level boosted much faster in the morning. There will also be top-up facilities outside the canteens, as I have heard from reliable sources ;)
The internal social network NEXUS has been launched in the recent days, which also indicates new ways of communication and networking among the students, professors and alumni. This is a great move and hopefully the communication becomes easier and does not need to be hosted on external networking services such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Tip: Nexus could also become a better meeting place for ESADE candidates, newly-recruits and applicants with current students.
Apparently there is major work being undertaken on the Intranet, as the new Intranet “Moodle” is undergoing maintenance as I write. Hopefully the ergonomy of the Intranet improves and the Moodle replaces the old Intranet in total.
As I am part of the think-tank I can assure you that there are many more issues being improved on and that ESADE is working hard on making student life easier from an IT point.
Insider information: there is a good chance that the ESADE application process will improve and that soon there will be an online submission facility of the recommendation letters. This would make the applications a lot easier. It seems that the ESADE is one of the last MBA schools that still has the paper-based only system but that hopefully should change in the coming months.
I wish you a Merry Christmas from Perth, Australia. A typical Aussie Christmas with 37 degrees celsius, swimming pool and a cool wine as refreshment! Couldn’t be better after having been in the snow chaos of the European airports. Glad to be home with the parents and enjoying the sun, while finishing off the assignments.
All the best to you, your families and friends. Have a great time and lots of happiness!
Saurabh Mishra, former president of the ESADE Entrepreneurship Club, just pointed out that Barcelona Radio reported about the Elevator Pitch Contest. To listen to the report click here.
If anybody wants to make a transcript feel free to add it here ;) Did they talk about the three winners and what did they say about the system of mobile payments if mentioned at all?
A message from Mary Granger, the Associate Director of the ESADE Admissions and Career Services, APAC Region:
Dear all,
I am pleased to let you know about ESADE’s upcoming trip to the APAC Region for Information Sessions, Interview Days and Company Visits. Please let me know if you are able to attend the nearest Information Session, have company contacts, or want to attend an Alumni dinner…
The competition of LetsBuyIt.com for “the (second) best job in the world” is coming to an end in 3 days. I have previously talked about this competition but to quickly summarise again:
€5000 salary for one month, €10,000 shopping budget, 5 star hotels, business class plane tickets, all major shopping destinations (London, Berlin, Milan, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Japan, etc.) and a lot more.
All you have to do is advise, report and blog on the latest fashion trends out there! This is the official description on Monster.com:
- Find and visit the best shopping districts of each city
- Find products that you simply can’t find anywhere else
- Find products that are cheaper than other countries
- Present the latest trends in a variety of products ranging from fashion to electricals.
Check out some of the application videos because they are extremely well done sometimes!
If you are asking yourself why I am posting this job offer, I do so because I used to work LetsBuyIt.com so I am more than happy to support this company ;) I LOVE it…
After there has been a lot of confusion and different dates floating around concerning the graduation I verified today. The date of the graduation for the Full-Time MBA and the One Year MBA Class 2010 is:
Friday, the 26th of March, 2010
Note down this date and forget all other tentative or rumour dates. I hope that all your families and friends can make it on this date.
In the last few days everybody has been talking about one thing only: the MBASA Elections.
Representing the ESADE MBA School as president of the MBA Student Association is a large responsibility and therefore several candidates were running for the positions of President and Treasure. On Wednesday night all candidates presented themselves and held a speech why they should be elected and what there plans were. The elections took place yesterday and the results have just come out. Congratulations to everybody and best of success for the year 2010!!!
