End of an era

We started the last day of Building Block classes with Professor Phil Rosenzweig rounding off the 'Critical Thinking' stream. This mini-stream has cut across a number of different classes such as marketing, strategy, operations and finance. Today's class summarized what we had learned in the previous sessions and aimed at preparing us for the ICP projects by reminding us of the traps that are so easy to fall into when we are collecting and analyzing data.



Just before lunch we had an interesting speech and Q&A session with Mr. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which he has been associated with for the past 36 years. TCS is specialized in IT services and business solutions and is today a USD 6 billion company employing 140,000 people accross the globe.

In the afternoon we had our very last class of the building blocks and it was Leadership Professor Jack Wood that had the honor. The atmosphere in the class was very light. There was a feeling of relief. We are not quite there yet - there are still some exams to go - but we are no longer staring at a distant light at the end of the tunnel. We are actually so close to the exit that we can see what is going on outside the tunnel.

Lisa Bridgett [UK/South Africa] and Walid Sahyoun [Canada/Lebanon/Italy] had arranged for champagne for the whole class in order to celebrate that we had reached this important milestone. Here is a few pictures from that event.

From left: Kornelius Thimm [Germany], who by the way is celebrating his birthday tomorrow, Vladimir Korobkin [Russia] and Christian Cuenot [France].


From left: Paul De Hek [The Netherlands], Stefano Cazzulani [Italy], Karim El-Koury [Austria] and Sylvain Cabalery [France].


Eu gen Cha [Korea], Ricky Zhu [China] and Alejandro Salcedo [Mexico].



Fathers and neighbors! Andres Akamine [Peru] and Walid Sahyoun [Canada/Italy/Lebanon].


We had the tailor Vijay from Thailand come by to take measurements for shirts and suits, which he then will go back to home and have made. A great share of the class stopped by, so we will be looking sharp when we start our job hunt in a couple of months!!

The Polar Bear club is steadily growing. Here are yesterday's participants before they get in. Although the water temperature has increased several degrees over the past two months it is still very cold, so it takes a while to get everyone in as you can see in this video.

Polar bears in the water!

Have a great weekend!
Thorsten