EMBA Orientation week – my impressions

My name is Sam and I just started EMBA program at CEU Business School, Budapest with 33 other brilliant classmates. I’m sure we must all be awesome, the city and the school are great as everybody during the introduction said, “I’m happy to be here”. Our program started off with an orientation week.

Day1 was quite informative. We got to know not only about our course but also a couple of other programs being launched at CEU. Lot of introductions followed, the Dean and the professors gave us a glimpse of what was in store for us. All students spoke and tried to give as good a first impression as they could at that moment. For all of us, this was the moment of getting a feel of the class. Am I supposed to work with these people or compete with them? Will I be able to fit in? Who can be my ally? Damn he/she is so good! I’m sure we all must have have done some sort of self reflection after that round but there is nothing to worry about. An engineer won’t even last for 5 min in a court room, a historian probably can’t sell very well, a lawyer can hardly write a simple computer program. We all have different qualities and we should be proud of them, just be creative and present the effect of RF parameters on EVM and BT-WLAN crosstalk in baseband processors in a sexy way. By the way, alcohol is a great catalyst to flow of creative ideas. Believe me, a classmate and I tried that evening and it worked quite well!

Day2 was another day full of information. IT stuff, library, e-learning moodle, doodle etc etc. One key thing though was the knowledge of own learning style. Maybe hard to believe, but not everybody knows what their learning style is. It was like Prof. Buzady showed us a mirror. Neat stuff.
We finished the day on a high note by sharing a drink at Central Bistro, where some of the EMBA ’15 students joined as well, thanks guys for sharing your “insights”!
And by the way, thanks also to CEU for this cool gadget that I’m going to us extensively 🙂

Day3 was very promising and we rightly had high expectations of it. The first day I could just see 34 successful, smart and intelligent individuals each with a different character. How is Prof. Buzady and his colleagues going to make us work like a team, was one of the questions that crossed my mind. I know, “team work”, is easier said than done. How are we going to function as a team when everyone thinks his way is the right way? That is exactly what we had to “figure out” on day3. After all, our way has worked till now in our current roles to some extent and we’ve accomplished a lot of success with our approaches, so why should one listen to other smart ass that brings in a completely different idea? And most likely a wrong one, because it doesn’t match with mine.
After a full day of intense arguments, differences, personal interests, egos, disappointments, frustrations and basically going through an emotional roller coaster, we finally started listening to each other, started accepting, in some cases even agreed to disagree and most importantly, we survived the tests as a team. My personal accomplishment? I now know the names of all my classmates and I’m really “happy to be here”! Jokes apart, during the course of the day, we’re all able to reflect a lot upon our strengths and weaknesses. With the mindset I came into the course, I would’ve said, short term, let’s just build upon our strengths and forget about the weaknesses for a while. But we’re students now, we’ve a chance to learn again and over the next 2 years at least I promise myself to work on my weaknesses.
Another key thing on day3, we learned to help each other and I was very happy to see how naturally it came. Not all of us may realize the importance of helping each other but over time (I hope!) we will. Remember, this is no race where one wins and everybody else loses. There will be no winner or loser at the end of this program, we’ll all learn a lot, go our own ways and continue to do great things in our chosen profession.
We even attempted a case study on day3. I cannot emphasize the importance of identifying correct problem more. Imagine the following; A couple is walking down the road and they notice a naked boy asking for food. They stop and the woman says, look at this poor boy, we should buy him some clothes. The man immediately buys new clothes and hands them over to the boy and they move on. The boy was later found unconscious due to weakness as he hadn’t eaten for a few days. The couple solved the wrong problem! They should’ve probably asked what his most urgent problem was. This was a little dramatic but in my point of view, a problem correctly identified is a problem 90% solved. We’re going to be managers, leading large organizations, if the team is given wrong problem to work on, we cannot expect right solutions. And as we learned at the end of the case analysis, no two teams will look at the problems in the same way and that’s the beauty of this learning style. It was so much fun, I’m looking forward to more of these, bring them on!!

If you wanna know more about me, please hold on for a few days, one of my upcoming blogs will reveal everything I can possibly tell you about myself. Till then, continue learning, help each other and have fun!