The ESADE MBA Student Blog · ESADE Business School · Barcelona

Archive for December, 2009

Beginning of December (I know it’s been almost three weeks, but the MBA has kept us quite busy during the past weeks …) about 20 of us went to London to visit different consulting firms. The ESADE Consulting Club had organized this together with Career Services .

The purpose of the trip was to see different consulting companies that were not able to participate in our Fall Career Week. Also we tried to get in touch with smaller boutique companies that usually get less coverage during application periods but provide excellent opportunities in either certain industries or geographies. I liked the fact that we were able to learn more about these companies that covered a wide range of what is out there in terms of consulting:

• Bain & Company
• Navigant Consulting
• Solon Management Consultants
• KPMG
• Bearing Point
• Analysis Mason
• Oliver Wyman

Of course we also seized the opportunity and got a couple of pints while in London. Thursday night we met up with ESADE alumni and former collegues of some classmates working in London now. Besides the fact that it was a fun night, it was also an excellent networking opportunity, which one of us was able to convert into an interview in January!

Another upside was that I was able to get some Christmas shopping done between company visits (and that really paid off as I had no time to do so ever since then, but more about exam week after Christmas…)

Merry Christmas to everyone!

ESADE and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) have won a pan-European bid to launch a groundbreaking project on innovation in sustainable energy. Known as InnoEnergy, the project will entail an initial investment of 450 million euros over the next four years and has been inspired by the recently-created European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The EIT itself was based on the example of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, world benchmark in the field of innovation. Please read our news release for further information!

Yesterday, during the final Finance class we experienced a shocking and unexpected surprise! Javier Solana, former High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Secretary General of the Council of the European and Western European union has joined ESADE.

During the second half of our class, he joined us and we had the opportunity to briefly introduce ourselves and discuss with him about several of the world’s most important issues.

Mr. Solana will be the President of the Centre for Global Economics and Geopolitics of ESADE Business school. This great MBA experience, just got better!

I cannot believe we are already close to the first term’s end! Time flies amazingly fast. The workload has been even bigger than imagined. Works clustering, deadlines overlapping and term finals just a week away!

For this term’s class of Finance, we were assigned a group project where we were asked to analyze the financial status of two companies.  Later we had to prepare a presentation, and a random group member would have to present in front of the class! Apart from the finance related learnings, seeing my group working together to make sure everyone was up to speed and ready to present if picked, added to this being a great experience. Even though this has been the hardest project so far, I’d say it is the one I liked the most.

No time to rest though, Economics project presentations are due early next week, plus term finals, plus Spanish language exams…oh lord!

Thankfully Christmas, the nicest period of the year, is just around the corner and it will be perfect to refill our batteries and face Term 2 and the Winter Career Week!!