A Short But Intense Week!

Gloria Nogales, Director, Global Sales Operations (Sales & Marketing) at Intel speaks at IE Business School

What a week!

In a span of three days, I found myself buried in group meetings, practice sessions for a major presentation at Communications Skills class, and tackling accounting and valuations for Apple... and let's not forget Spanish classes! Luckily, I have very supportive and competent group mates who are 1000% invested in this program. So technically, things went without a hitch.

In the midst of everything, I still managed to attend a session from LinkedIn and an insights sessions with Intel. The session with LinkedIn was quite... well, not as useful. I actually received more insightful tips and tricks from their counterparts back in Singapore. The session from Intel, on the other hand, was a complete joy to attend. Our school invited Gloria Nogales.... a Spaniard~ but currently works in Intel in their global operations team. Her workshop served more as an interactive Q&A session for MBA students who were interested in moving to the high tech industry. She gave valuable tips on how people can transition / make themselves more competitive or attractive to companies in that space.

She shared a portion from the book Freakonomics, and how resource scarcity actually applied to landing yourself a spot in a certain company. There has to be something you can bring to the table. Or... well, there must be something that is in high demand somewhere that you have. That set me thinking~ and in that same framework I thought about my career path in the future.

After the session, I approached a representative from the Career Management Center and thanked her for organizing this event. It's really helpful that we're able to get high-profile individuals to speak at our school... all for the benefit for gaining insider insights. Previously, they had also invited people from Telefonica, Bayer and Kraft. I think I'll attend these sessions more if time permits!

Something changed~ the walls!

During this week, there were new changes that also happened to the school... physically. The school installed these blue glass-like panels on the pillars to allow students to have a student board of sorts. I personally think it's quite helpful. As for the photo above, Dave (one of our class representatives) was thinking of creating a personalized jersey for our intake. I think it's a pretty good idea to build solidarity / identity within everyone. I'll personally give it a shot to make a logo (coz I do think it's quite cool)~

Venture Day (Screen capture taken from Smore.com)

Anyway, that's that. Tomorrow and Friday are actually both holidays... but tomorrow I'm attending this IE Venture Day session. It's a whole day session where VCs will conduct workshops for budding entrepreneurs or would-be investors on certain topics. The key speakers seem to have plenty of experience... and one of the Managing Directors of the IE Venture Lab (Paris de l'atraz) will be there too (I attended a session from Paris de l'atraz back in Singapore and I found his session very insightful). A number of my classmates will be there too... we'll see how it goes!