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Javier Solana joins ESADE!
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!
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Hectic Term 1!
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!!
A day at ESADE
07:00 am – James Brown wakes me up with “I feel good” on my alarm…well not so good! Time to get ready for the day!
07:57 am – After a proper breakfast while checking emails and the latest news on the net, I grab my stuff and head to school.
08:12 am – Daily coffee meeting with group and other classmates in the cafeteria up on floor 2 to catch up while skimming through the daily newspaper.
08:45 am – Head down into the classroom and get ready for the Marketing lecture! Our professor sure knows how to make the class interesting with his humour.
10:37 pm – 20 minutes of break. Second coffee of the day plus yummy “bocadillo”.
10:51 am – Back in class for the second half of the lecture. Discussion of the case study analysis we needed to prepare for the class.
01:05 pm – Class is over, got less than an hour to have lunch before spanish language class begins!
01:55 pm – Spanish class. We get the “unfortunate” news that we need to prepare a 15 minute individual presentation of a company for next class…IN SPANISH! PANIC!
03:30 pm – 15 minutes break during which we practice our “spanish skills” together with my classmates. The result doesn’t sound that spanish, but we perfectly manage to understand each other.
05:00 pm – Language class lecture over. Quick 10 minute meeting with my career advisor to go through my cover letter for the application I need to submit and then rush to group’s study room to discuss the accounting assignment for the next day.
05:25 pm – Haven’t reached an agreement yet on what the next step for our hypothetical company will be.
05:50 pm – Still no agreement. Everyone is so involved in using their persuasion skills to convince the rest of the group.
06:25 pm – After having analyzed about a million different situations, guess what, still haven’t agreed.
06:55 pm – ..and 30 seconds (we have a german in the group), we finally manage to agree, after totally changing what we agreed 20 min back, and to finalize our paper. A group mate tried to express a last minute opinion but didn’t get to finish his idea…his life was at risk.
07:00 pm – Consulting Club meeting. Today the two candidates for the Consulting Club President position are pitching in front of the club.
07:20 pm – The two candidates made it very hard for us to make a choice. They were both so passionate and serious about it. Case interview simulations follow for the rest of the meeting.
08:16 pm – Just got home. Eat a snack and hit the gym!
09:30 pm – Back from the gym, dead tired and starving, dinner time.
09:58 pm – Need to read the emails accumulated during the day and work on the Economics project for tomorrow’s group meeting
00:25 am – I’m crashing here… goodnight Barcelona.
Fall MBA Career Week is here!
Career week is here…the past few days have been very busy because of extensive company research in addition to the already heavy classroom workload. Three days of non stop company presentations and networking sessions await us. Health care is one of my sectors of major interest, and I am eager to participate in the presentations of Abbott and Novartis.
The latter is also organizing a marketing competition, the Novartis Masterminds Challenge, open to several of the top European business schools. Teams from each school will have to come up with a strategic marketing plan for a specific product. The best teams will be given the opportunity to present their project in front of Novartis’ executive board, and the winners of the contest will have chances to join Novartis for an internship. Forming a new team for the contest is exciting, but also challenging, because the number of different teams I work with goes up to three and each one is so different than the other.
Time to suit up and head to the first presentation! Stay tuned for more career week related news!