Busy days

Katty Ooms Suter and the rest of the Career services office kicked off the process of writing our CVs today. The sessions we have had with Career Services over the past couple of weeks have helped us define our individual Interests, Skills, Style, Values as well as the career destination we dream about. Now it is time to compress all of that into the bullets that will get us there. First step is to define our individual 'value proposition'. As simple as it may sound, it is not easy to compress everything about yourself into 3-4 lines. It forces you to really get to the essence of who you are, what you want and who you want to address. I will undoubtedly be writing and rewriting that statement many times over the next weeks. It is great to get started, though. It helps you clear your head.

The marketing cases on Zara, Easy-Jet and Swatch that we have done over the past two weeks have all been relatively simple as the subjects were clear and the companies easy to relate to. Today Marketing Professor Martin Koschat threw a case on Colgate-Palmolive at us and we quickly found ourselves struggling to develop a marketing plan for the global tooth brush market. Not a market we really knew anything about despite we all are consumers in it. I guess there is more to marketing than first anticipated....

I know 90 people in Lausanne that have a very busy weekend ahead of them. Most of the start-up teams are visiting their startup-companies tomorrow. Many students have lined up the first interviews with the therapists that are part of the Personal Development Initiative. I have three interviews lined up saturday afternoon myself. On the basis of these relatively short interviews each of us will choose the one therapist that we will work with for the rest of the year. On Sunday afternoon many of us will attend the Responsible Leadership Seminar that is held on campus. And in between all that we will find time to do the Leadership paper that is due monday morning. That's MBA life!

And now I am off to the train station to pick up my girlfriend. She is visiting for the weekend and I am already late.

Thorsten