ESTIEM Magazine | Autumn 2009 | New dimensions of outsourcing

New dimensions of outsourcing

Virtual Business

European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management Issue 37 2009/2 | ISSN 0874-5242 | Price 0 Euro | www.estiem.org

Searching for people to take flight at Brose!

Are you overflowing with creativity, motivation and dynamic? You can apply yourself with us. These characteristics have helped us reach 7th position among international family-owned automotive suppliers. Objective-oriented students and graduates with enthusiasm for technology can take on challenging tasks and quickly assume responsibility in our company. More information is available in the Career section of our homepage.

www.brose.com – More comfort and safety for a mobile day-to-day routine

28

INTRODUCTION Editorial President’s Speech Introduction to ESTIEM Board 2009 - Thoughts of the Vice President of Activities INside Estiem Projects & Committees That’s what Europe 3D is about A chat with the big cheeses What’s up with Vision An IT - Coordination Meeting in June ESTIEM Alumni Meeting in Zurich Holland 3D My Summer Academy Story Put yourself in the shoes of a Council Meeting Grenoble organizer I don’t know, but I’ve been told...

Brain Trainer - The Kick Off Event From Ex - Project Leaders What’s happening in Sofia

4

4 5 6 7

8 10 13 14 15 16 18 20 21 22 23 24 26

28

29

30

36 Career Studies completed -Studies resumed 38 Working within Bosch 40 Internship at Oerlikon 41 My start @ Oerlikon 42 Engineering - A skills shortage ensures demand for engineers across Europe.

43 Chatting your way to a successful carreer start 44 Interview with Martin Schimpke 45

FOCUS Just a Bunch of contracts - Introduction to Virtual Business Virtual Business - Built to last The next revolution in interactions Food is Love- A Virtual Business story

48

49

51

52

Student Guide Featured Story Education System in Portugal Featured University Cultural Prejudice: on FinnsAGENDA 50

AGENDA

35

54

54

4 Editorial imprint

Virtual - the way of today!

Project Leader Isidora Strboja

Layout Andrea Deutsch Sezen Sayoglu Design Public Relations Committee David Christian Berg Sezen Sayoglu Article Acquisition Isidora Strboja Andreea Sabo Melania Mateias Seyen Sayoglu Geoffrey van IJzendoorn Advertisement Acquisition Andreea Sabo Antti Mattila Sezen Sayoglu Tobias Hemmerlein Contact magazine@estiem.org ESTIEM Permanent Office Paviljoen B-6 P.O.Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands Fax: 0031-(0)40 2473871 info@estiem.org www.estiem.org Disclaimer The contents may not always reflect the opinion of the publisher. Any reproduction or copy is permitted only with the permission of the editors.

Our Partners

Virtual pets, virtual friends, virtual communities, virtual cities and worlds...

Isidora Strboja

Editorial Staff Isidora Strboja Thibault Maffei Andreea Sabo

The meaning of the word „virtual“ can be explained as something which is not real, yet seems to give out an illusion of actually existing. I wouldn’t go as far to believe that ESTIEMers were unacquainted with the meaning of the adjective, but how many of you can draw the line between online business and its virtual version?

Deeply rooted in entrepreneurship, virtual business seems to foster creativity and bring new ideas on the scene. Thanks to the well-known concept of business incubators, virtual business has found the space to grow and develop. Still, less and less are these “patrons ” developed in the traditional way. Nowadays and thanks to the development of Internet, you can found your company under the wing of someone who can provide the advice and venture capital, without having to come to the venue of the business incubator.

On the other hand, having been based on the concept of outsourcing, this conduct is something that perfectly reflects the managerial spirit – export fragments of your business, have the others shape it in a way you cannot or will not do, for whatever the reasons, and then you sell your, now, modified, product/service and move further in the economical chain of events. Is this actually the next generation of outsourcing?

Having all that said, you ’re probably wondering now, where is ESTIEM in all of this? It could also be seen as a virtual organization, with all of their members physically distant but keeping their communication over an intangible line and managing to create something unique and of great value – the ESTIEM Spirit. You might think that this is a many times repeated phrase, but don’t underestimate it; stop and think, why are you a part of this and where could this exciting network of open minded students with a professional approach could take you in the next five years! Until that time comes, and a bit sooner, enjoy reading the issue before you!

5

In ESTIEM a lot of work is done virtually. All European-wide projects are coordinated by people from different countries writing dozens of emails and attending chat conferences.

ESTIEM is nothing else than a so-called virtual organisation/”company”. Virtual companies can be characterised by having abandoned the traditional way of working together face-to-face in offices and consequently, its employees are solely connected through the internet. Lately a lot of businesses have been started following this idea.

The advantages are obvious: reduced overhead costs, higher flexibility and the independence of the private from the professional life (people don’t have to build their lives around the company anymore, e.g. having to move to a different city in order to get a job).

On the other hand some challenges have to be faced. With people not meeting each other daily it is difficult to build a strong corporate culture and the requirements for employees are being able to work independently and efficiently in a virtual environment.

Tobias Hemmerlein

President’s Speech

Editorial

ESTIEM has successfully overcome those challenges. Our members learn about difficulties in online communication and how virtual work has to be structured. From the very beginning we have managed to create a strong and thriving organization culture: Our unique ESTIEM spirit stands for overcoming borders, being open minded and combining work and fun.

Virtual companies are only a small aspect in the big field of virtual business. Large investments show the increasing importance of it and maybe you might even end up working in this area.

This magazine will give you an insight in the latest trends in virtual business and the opportunities connected to it. Have fun reading!

6 Inside ESTIEM Back in 1990,

students from five different countries founded an organisation, which they named ESTIEM: European Students of Industrial Engineering and Management.

Its aim was and still is to establish and foster interrelations among European students of industrial engineering and management.

tracted many active students, and the organisation has seen rapid growth since its foundation. Major activities on the European level include the case competition TIMES, the seminar series Vision, this Magazine and Europe3D seminars, which introduce the countries where they take place in.

In 19 years, ESTIEM has grown into an organisation reaching 45 000 students from 61 universities in 25 European countries, and is still growing. All these universities offer courses in industrial engineering and managment. Based on this structure, ESTIEM forms links between students, academics and companies in order to create a Europe-wide, multi-level network.

Most of these activities are coordinated by the Board and by Project Leaders who are elected by the General Assembly of ESTIEM. Besides taking leadership positions in the Board and as Project Leaders, students can also assume more responsibility by working in one of the Committees. The Committees work together closely with the Board and the Projects, supporting and guiding them.

With lots of teams and tasks to choose from, there is a place for everyone.

Through involvement in ESTIEM, students get the opportunity to experience different cultures, take part in international projects and become friends with other students from all over Europe.

Our belief is that the activities and projects of ESTIEM give the studetns knowledge and experiences, which are important for their personal development and the realisation of their future goals. The students involved in ESTIEM incorporate both the skills required for modern business and an open-minded approach towards other people and cultural issues.

ESTIEM has continuously increased the number of its activities, and thus offers a great variety of events to students of industrial engineering and management as well as other European students. Due to these activities ESTIEM has at-

For more detailed information about our organisation and its activities, please visit our website at www.estiem.org. Here you can also find everything you need to know if you want to get involved. So don’t hesitate and start moving… you won’t regret it! 

7

Inside ESTIEM

The Board 2009 Thoughts of the Vice President of Activities

We created a huge digital mind map with personal and global ESTIEM goals and asked all Project and Committee Leaders about their goals and matched them with ours. We did that for two months. Sometimes I asked myself whether it makes sense to have endless discussions about abstract goals and the meaning of them within ESTIEM. Reflecting this whole procedure I can say it helped to understand the structure and working processes within ESTIEM. This and the handover from Board 2008 made us well prepared to tackle the upcoming challenges.

The game started with celebrating New Years Eve with the Board of 2008 and many other ESTIEM friends in a typical manner for ESTIEM: Party as hard as you can! After one day of recovering we switched from “party hard” to “work hard”, from abstract talking to getting things done. Hence, we started our first official Board Meeting in Eindhoven, received a professional training about team working, wrote hundreds of personal welcome e-mails and crashed into the operational part of the board work. Having chat conferences, creating the board pages, answering e-mails, making travel plans and discussing about

the optimal behaviour and occurrence of us, the Board.

The operational work kept on until the Council Meeting in Grenoble and we hardly had the strength to spend an enormous effort in pursuing our goals. However, just by working off our tasks as good as we were able to we already reached some smaller goals that we set up in our first meetings such as transparency, stability of the portal, contacts to more prospective Local Groups, good and problem-solving-oriented communication with Local Groups and so on.

The real work on our goals started after the Council Meeting. We focused on finding a new partner, head sponsor for projects, developing a more sophisticated training structure and other huge goals. It is up to you to decide whether we succeeded in the above mentioned goals.

At this point we would like to thank all ESTIEMers that directly or indirectly worked together with us and made this organisation develop itself. After one year of working as a Boardie it is still a huge honour to work for ESTIEM together with its great people.

Keep on moving ESTIEM forward! We wish the new Board all the best and hope that they will have a great time between travelling, team work, representative tasks, presentations and small talk.

Thanks also to my friends that I worked so closely together with, for one year.  Tobias Hemmerlein - President Luís Godinho - Vice President of Finance Andreea Sabo - Vice President of Public Relations Verena Hohn - Vice President of Administration

Sebastian Katzung

For already one year we, the ESTIEM Board 2009 members, are working together as a team.Right after the autumn Council Meeting 2008 in Famagusta we came together for our first online conference.

After all those good wishes and the celebrations after the elections we got a motivational boost and felt a strong need to prepare our board year in order to do our job as good as possible.

Inside estiem

8

&

Projects TIMES

Committees

The Tournament In Management and Engineering Skills (TIMES) is today considered the largest pan-European case study competition for Industrial Engineering and Management students. This prestigious, highly acclaimed event is the flagship project of the Europe-wide student organisation ESTIEM. Two qualification rounds are required to be selected for the TIMES Final.

The Final eventually brings together the winning teams from each Semi-Final to determine Europe’s “IEM Students of the Year”.

Vision

Vision Seminar Series aims to improve the personal skills and capabilities of the Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students in Europe. The seminars contain a balanced mixture of academic lectures, workshops and company visits, which are combined with cultural and freetime activities of the organizing city. Through those activities the participants of a Vision Seminar develop theirselves both personally and professionally. Each year’s Vision Seminar series focuses on one main topic to which all Vision seminars are connected. However, every individual seminar focuses on one particular aspect of that main topic.This year the main topic is Vision - Efficiency in Communication.

Europe3D:

Within a 5-day seminar series the participants should get a basic picture of the hosting country.

A special focus thereby lays on national characteristics in politics and economy. Lectures given by experts from politics, science and economy shall provide the participants with a theoretical insight. On the other hand the Project’s aim is to integrate our guests actively in this seminar.

Especially to include the practical aspect, the Project wants to cooperate with companies for excursions and lectures.

ESTIEM Magazine

ESTIEM Magazine, the official publication of ESTIEM, provides the perfect platform to reach a target group of approximately 45000 students of industrial Engineering and Management at universities all over Europe. The magazine is one of the most important PR tools of ESTIEM. The ESTIEM Magazine is published twice a year and is distributed among Industrial Engineering and Management students, graduates and also professors and employees of companies across Europe, through the ESTIEM network. The magazine is free of charge. The issues are released in time for the semi-annual Council Meeting.

Summer Academy

Through the Summer Academy Project, ESTIEM recognises the importance of and takes esponsibility for providing knowledge of ethics and sound leadership among future leaders of Europe. It was set up to bring international students together during summer holidays to engage in open discussion, group work, debate and private study under a senior Academic Leader.

Student Guide

The Student Guide is a bridge between European students who wants to share information. The Project has two main goals: Firstly to provide study and cultural information on countries, cities and universities to students of industrial engineering and management and secondly to give an overview of differences in education in different countries for students, universities and other interested organisations.

9

Public Relations Committee

Financial and Legal Committee

The aim of the Public Relations Committee is to care for ESTIEMs outer appearance. The Committee is responsible for communicating the brand of ESTIEM and increasing the awareness both inside and outside of ESTIEM. The PR committee, PRC, works with several different tools to achieve this, for instance designing PR material, creating design guidelines, and working on press visibility. The work is done both on Central and Local level.

The Financial and Legal Committee predominantly consists of former and current Vice Presidents of Finance and the Financial Controllers. In general, the Financial and Legal Committee has an advisory function and deals with how to perform the financial responsibilities of ESTIEM.

Knowledge Management Committee

The Knowledge Management Committee (KMC) does two things; Updating/creating Best Practice Documents containing guidelines – from organizing a project to how to be a leader – by documenting the collective experiences of ESTIEMers throughout time (available online on the ESTIEM Portal). Providing trainings on ESTIEM events and on local level to stimulate a continuous development of ESTIEM ánd ESTIEMers through knowledge transfer on a personal level.

TIMES Committee

TIMES Committee has three main aims: 1) Continuous improvement of the quality of TIMES; 2) Building and maintaining relationships with key partners – head sponsor and key side sponsors such as travel companies, media, universities 3)Development of the rules of TIMES. The Committee works in corporation with TIMES Project.

Corporate Relations Committee

The Corporate Relations Committee coordinates the relations between ESTIEM and companies jointly with the board. The Committee’s work covers a number of fields with the aim of improving and simplifying ESTIEM”s relations with companies, such as updating marketing material, improving partnership processes and preparing company surveys. The Corporate Relations Committee also plays an active role in supervising and supporting projects and other committees with regards to sponsors.

Members Committee

The ESTIEM Members Committee supports the member groups of ESTIEM and provides information for those students who are interested in joining the ESTIEM organisation by forming their own local group. They guide the interested groups through the whole process, starting from establishing contact – via the guest and observation period – until fully pledged membership. Also, Members Committee takes care about Local Group Exchanges, Requirements that Local Groups are obligated to fulfill, tutoring Local Groups that are already accepted to ESTIEM and provides LG Servicing for Local Groups that have issues about any possible topic (HR, PR, Recruitment, Fundraising) and with that tries to foster connections between Local Groups.

Information Technology Committee

The IT Committee maintains the mail, intranet, and web servers of ESTIEM and coordinates all IT-related development in the organisation, such as regarding the IT backend system (.NET platform/C#). In addition, its members offer troubleshooting services and technical advice to ESTIEMers. 

Inside ESTIEM

Inside estiem

10

MAGIC! That’s what

Dana Nastase

I keep on rediscovering it every single time I get to present it and describe it to other people! It’s a warm feeling to see their eyes shining when they understand its concept and to see their heads nodding with admiration when they hear about its accomplishments.

Charlemagne Youth Prize Award Ceremony

Recently I had the chance to experience this feeling again. Europe3D was present at the Award Ceremony of the Charlemagne Youth Prize Competition supported by the Charlemagne Foundation and the European Parliament. The Charlemagne Foundation activates for over 50 years now and has been grounded in Aachen, Germany.

“We have the honor of proposing annual presentation of an international prize for the most valuable contribution in the services of Western European understanding and work for the community, and in the services of humanity and world peace...” This was the first proposal that Dr. Kurt Pfeiffer made on 19th December 1949 and this is what was to become later the “International Charlemagne Prize”, the most important and coveted award for services to European unification. After 1989, the democratic movement in Central and Eastern Europe was also reflected in the award of the prize. The distinguished list of Charlemagne Prize winners reflects the history of the European process of unification. It has been awarded to the founding fathers of the United Europe such as de Gasperi, Schumann, Monnet and Adenauer, and to those who have embodied hope for integration such as His Majesty Juan Carlos I. Other representative examples of what the Charlemagne Prize means: in 2002 the prize was awarded to the euro, represented by the European Central Bank, in 2004 to His Holiness Pope John Paul II as extraordinary

is about! award, in 2007 to Javier Solana and in 2008 to Angela Merkel.

For few years now, the Foundation together with the European Parliament initiated the “European Charlemagne Youth Prize Competition”, an annual competition on EU development, integration and European identity issues. The European Charlemagne Youth Prize is awarded to projects of young people from all the EU Member States, which “promote the European and international understanding, foster the development of a shared sense of European identity and integration and serve as a role model for young people living in Europe and offer practical examples of Europeans living together as one community”. The competition works on two levels. First there is a national phase where the national juries from the European Parliament choose the best project from each country and then the 27 national winners are invited to take part at the huge and sumptuous award ceremony in Aachen, Germany. In the third ceremony day, from the 27 national winners, three are awarded with 5000€, 2000€ and 1000€.

This year, Europe3D was also designated as one of the 27 national winners and had the honor to be present on the same stage with other glorious European projects as well as with important names such as Hans-Gert Pottering, the former President of the European Parliament. While being there I met young European people with high visions and high beliefs in their projects, but most important of all, I got to realize once again how special Europe3D is. The ceremony is more of a spectacular show with V.I.P.s discussing European matters, with artistic dance and singing moments, with a lot of lights and a lot of press, with a lot of tension and overwhelming emotion when announcing the three

11

projects that are to be awarded. As far as I am concerned, I was extremely nervous in the ceremony day, I had all my blood running crazy through my veins. Luckily Jan Knutzen, former ESTIEM Board member and convinced supporter of Europe3D, and Sebastian Katzung, Vice President of Activities of the 2009 ESTIEM Board, made it to Aachen in the ceremony morning. For me it meant a lot to know that there were some friends, ESTIEMers and Europe3D supporters along with me in the hall.

We didn’t win the award. (And I don’t really want to talk about the projects that did.) The experience though, was a wonderful one and we are definitely going to be there next year as well and hopefully not only with Europe3D.It would be amazingly beautiful to see all the ESTIEM projects on the same stage as national winners. According the statute of the competition, there is no problem in having more projects supported by the same association present there as long as they are winners from different national entities; and this would considerably raise our chances to bring the glory of the Charlemagne Youth Prize to ESTIEM. Europe3D 2010

In the beginning of this summer the moment came when, after long discussions, the next organizers for Europe3D were to be chosen. The judging criteria are rather hard to quantify and they regard mainly: the number of participants that the organizing country is ready to host, the time of the year when the organizing country could schedule the event and the covering of the three dimensions of the project (politics, economics and culture). In 2010, Europe3D is proud to be present in Finland, in Sweden, in Poland and in Belgium! This Europe3Ds will host minimum 40 participants out of which 20 ESTIEMers - and they’ll be evenly spread across the year.

The project will make its grand debut next year in February in Scandinavia! It starts in the beginning of the month with Europe3D Finland, hosted

by Local Groups Helsinki and Tampere as their traditional winter event and continues in the end of the month with its second Scandinavian experience of the year: Europe3D Sweden, hosted by Local Group Stockholm!

I n spr i ng, Warsaw orga n izes t he t h ird Europe3D of 2010, Europe3D Poland! It will take place around the Students Celebration Days in May and will be the best opportunity for participants to better understand the controversial polish history.

The fourth event next year, Europe3D Belgium will be hosted by Local Group Brussels in the autumn of 2010. It will be very interesting to learn how this country has attracted European Union, or how it works as a mix of Dutch and French culture.

With these four events, Europe3D will reach in the next autumn its 10th edition and it will be celebrated accordingly. So come and discover how it feels like to be Finnish, Swedish, Polish or Belgian for a few days!

Europe3D Project Future Perspectives

I was asked a lot of times lately what are the development strategies of Europe3D on a future perspective and, since the project is not so young anymore and has already gained some experience, where does it aim to arrive in the next few years.

We’ve already tried several different types of Europe3Ds: the one with ESTIEMers only, the one with even ESTIEMers - nonESTIEMers number, the one with fewer nonESTIEMers, the one with 60 participants, the one with only 20 participants, the one organized by single Local Groups, the one organized jointly by two or three Local Groups...

Inside ESTIEM

Inside estiem

12

By now, I believe we have enough past experiences to which we can refer to as DOs and DON’Ts. Through discussions with some of the people who have always been truly devoted to the project, we realized that Europe3D has the potential and the possibilities to become a huge project on European level, to start being open every year to more and more participants. Maybe in some few years it may reach 80-100 participants and become one of the most well-known projects for students across Europe. It may sound like utopia, but Europe3D has this potential! Europe3D 2010 has started towards this idea through organizing events with at least 40 participants in the year to come (20 ESTIEMers, 20 nonESTIEMers). The external communication ways that we now have for promoting the event - and together with the event the name of ESTIEM - are able to reach enough nonESTIEMers to ensure a high number of applications from outside of ESTIEM. And there is still a lot of room for improvement in this area, the possibilities of finding new promotion

canals outside of ESTIEM being various. We are aware that this would mean a great challenge for the ESTIEM Local Groups who are willing to organize an Europe3D event, but I believe that, through its concept, through the instruments it now has and the ones it could develop, through the motivated people working behind it and through the support of ESTIEM, Europe3D has the potential to attract the people, the proper interest from European and national institutions, the best companies and the funds it needs in order to become this great project that we believe in.

This was only our thought, our dream, our vision about the future of Europe3D. This is no given path for the continuity. Still, I do have the trust that the people to come, who will choose to get involved in the development of the Europe3D project and the ones who will stand behind it, will always discover the best ways to support its growth and to keep the Europe3D MAGIC sparkling! 

13

Inside ESTIEM

A Chat with the Big Cheeses

As I am typing this article (July 2009), I have nearly interviewed all of the current “big cheeses”, the Committee and Project Leaders (there are three more to go including myself – I sometimes seem a bit schizophrenic, but it would be quite difficult to interview myself. Right? Right…). It gives one a good perspective into what the whole organization looks like, you might say. But it is

International Business Linkage Program

a bit trickier than that. It only gives a tip of the iceberg. Though the knowledge of not knowing is better than thinking you know it all.

However, the information gained with this had been quite useful. With the questions about the Committees’ or Projects’ organization, what tasks they fulfill (or plan to fulfill) and how they are placed within the ESTIEM Network, it already shows what these sections within ESTIEM know and expect from each other. Quite soon it was already interesting to see how they were sometimes conflicting. It just showed to me the importance of having the strategy of ESTIEM discussed at the ESTIEM College.

Geoffrey van IJzendoorn

At the Council Meeting in Grenoble it was (publicly) suggested to start discussing about our route to Elevated ESTIEMism; in short, the ESTIEM Strategy.

But how can you discuss about the route, when you do not have a map? (Please do not try to answer. It was a rhetorical question.) Then I thought it might be a good idea to “map ESTIEM”, so we all know exactly what we are trying to improve (and possibly where we might want to improve)!!! It is Organizational Strategy 101. They even have it on Wikipedia.

Where all of this is taking us? Ask the Strategy Task Group at the Council Meeting in Zurich! 

Venturing

Strategy

Leadership Teamwork Friendship International Business A Year in Finland

www.businesslinkage.net

Yearly application deadline May 15th

Inside estiem

Belgrade

14

Efficiency in Communication

What’s up with Vision?

November, 10th - 15th Communication for the Future Karlsruhe & Kaiserslautern

Antti Mattila

November 29th - December 5th Me, You and the Machine Lappeenranta January Communication over Borders Lyon

Vision, one of ESTIEM’s longest running projects is starting once again. Vision Project consists of a 20person team, which is ready to work for improvement of the seminar series. Here follows a short introduction of what the Vision Project team is currently doing. But first, what is ‘Vision - Efficiency in Communication’ really about?

February Convincing People Trondheim February, 16th - 21st Communication Solutions of Tomorrow Vaasa

In a world of today it is every day more and more important to communicate efficiently. Either it is technological communication or social communication; we are always trying to say more with less effort. Especially now when the economic world is changing rapidly, it is valuable to save resources and be more efficient.

March, 9th - 14th Developing Communication Skills between Business Partners Novi Sad March Anytime. Any place. Do it wireless.

Linköping March, 22th - 28th

That is Vision – Efficiency in Communication.

In the ongoing seminar series we will concentrate on topics such as presentation skills, international communication and catchy advertising. There will be 13 seminars, held all-over Europe from the beginning of September 2009 until June 2010. After the individual seminars we will sum up the results in the Final Conference, and create a Vision booklet out of them.

Presentation Skills in Focus St. Petersburg March / April International Communication. Lost in Translation Hamburg April Catchy Advertising – Get your Message across!

Eindhoven May / June Final Conference (Vision - Efficiency in Communication)

But if the Vision Project consists of individual seminars, what do the Project Leader and the Project Team do then? As with every ESTIEM Project that organizes several events, we have problems with being visible enough. The reason for that is, that the work for the Vision Project is mostly aimed towards the Vision seminar organizers and their teams. But we still do work, mostly in order to reach a higher academic level within the seminars, and to promote seminars for potential participants.

As it has already been said, promoting the seminars is one of our main tasks. With the help of several tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, common e-mails and posters, we are trying to increase the overall awareness of the Project, as well as accumulate participants for individual seminars.

We are also creating high-quality PR material in order to help raise funds for the Project.

Quality is one of the main themes in the work of the Vision Project team. We want to help the seminar organizers to increase the level of the academic content, and support them in every way we can think of. To give you an example, this far we have created a central Vision Feedback Form, in order to monitor and analyze the current quality of the seminars. We are also continuously updating the Best Practice Document for Seminar Organizers, so that we can give tips and hints for the following organisers.

Good knowledge management is one of our challenges for the future. We have seen great and highly academic Vision seminars organized, but the information is lost afterwards. Therefore we want to find a way to store this valuable information and to ease the work for the future organisers.

Hopefully we will find a solution for this during the Council Meeting in Zurich.

If you have ideas, propositions or interest for any of these topics mentioned, or if you come up with ways to improve the whole Project, please contact us at vision@estiem.org. You can also ask questions straight from me at Antti.Mattila@estiem. org. We hope to see you soon in Vision - Efficiency in Communication Seminars! 

15

Inside ESTIEM

What, an IT Coordination Meeting in June?

A story about Tampere dinner of 60 (or was it 80?) chicken wings and a nice pre-party, we headed for Tampere’s biggest nightclub. You probably recognize the rest of the story: the club closed, we got some pizza, went to an after-party and headed back home in the light of the sun.

Sunday: party consequences, Portal development and swimming in the ocean

On Sunday we managed to get the work of

Friday: installation, preparation and getting the weekend concluded. As the guys were flying back on Tuesday, we had decided to go to locked out in a towel

Running and developing the Portal is probably the biggest task of the IT Committee. (More recently, also the content of the ESTIEM Portal is the responsibility of the IT Committee.) Right now, there is a new version of the Portal under development – the EstiemPortal4. The work on Friday focused on getting the development environment up and running for everyone, as well as making sure the development process would be as easy as possible for new ITC’ers.

The entertainment on Friday was hosted at ex-boardie Kimmo’s place. There was sunshine, barbecuing, and beer. What more could you want? Being in Finland, you would want sauna. The sauna was a big success, as you can see from the picture. Unfortunately, the changing room was behind a time-lock, which resulted in us searching for a key in our towels. Fortunately, a nice guy from Securitas came to our rescue (for 35€, of course), and we got our clothes and wallets back.

Helsinki for the rest of their stay. And we wasted no time during the two hours car ride: we got the event module for Portal4 mapped out.

Once we had gotten to Helsinki, I took the guys to my parents’ place, where Verena made us nice (and a lot of) pasta. Then it was time for what became an all-night sauna party. We had a lot of fun and got to know each other rather well. The events of the night included pictures with a combined sauna and IT theme and a night-time swim in the ocean.

Monday: Until next time

After a day in Helsinki (ironic that this was the only rainy day of the Coordination Meeting), it was time to get everyone home. During the Coordination Meeting, everyone got familiar with the development of the new portal, we decided on a battle plan regarding the servers, we got the work of the Committee more structured and we Saturday: Servers and stuff and the night-life had a lot of fun in the process. of Tampere

On Saturday, we got to full speed with our work regarding the Portal. The focus was, however, designing the servers for better availability and speed.

At the time of writing, we are following this up. We also have another Coordination Meeting planned for October to implement the required changes (reinstalling the servers from scratch is the main focus).

Thank you Harald, Lars, Birger and of course Verena for attending this Coordination Meeting.

And thank you, remote supporter, Alexander.

I am very happy about all of your efforts at the Coordination Meeting, and even happier to have all of you great people on board in the IT Committee! And of course, I want to thank Local Group Tampere for organizing this great event.

We worked until late, but luckily we did not miss Paulina, Terhi and Kimmo: we could not have the famous Tampere chicken wings. After a satisfying done it without you! 

Eric Selin

Oh, the things we do for you, dear ESTIEMers! It seems that people are inherently busy these days, and the good people of the IT Committee are no different. This is why we decided to have our second IT Committee Meeting in the middle of June (12th-15th). And although the venue – Tampere – is located in the cold of Finland, the weather was more suited for beach volley than IT work. But with a great group of guys and a girl working together, the summer could stay outside all it wanted!

Inside estiem

16

ESTIEM Alumni Meeting Zurich 2009 Bart van Asperen Vervenne

Karin Arnefors

What’s in it for me?

Before getting to the point of this article, let me shortly introduce you to the new ESTIEM Alumni Board: In the first place, Karin Arnefors, originally from Local Group Gothenburg, Sweden, living and working now in Frankfurt, Germany. Next is Anton Golubev of Local Group Saint Petersburg, living and working now in Bad Schönborn, Germany. Also, René Heunen, from Local Group Eindhoven, worked in London, United Kingdom, until recently, just moved back to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and finally me, Bart van Asperen Vervenne of Local Group Eindhoven, now living and working in Paris, France, after having worked in Germany, Portugal and Poland.

During the last Alumni Meeting in Zurich (a big thanks to Regina, Nina, Ignacio, Frank and baby Karl for the excellent Swiss clockwork-wise organization!) we were elected to represent the ESTIEM Alumni for the upcoming year and guarantee the financial and organizational continuity of, the mainly virtual, alumni company. There is a big chance when you are an active

ESTIEMer that you will meet one or more of us during one of your activities in the year 2009/2010, so you can get a better idea of what the Alumni network can mean for you!

As you have noticed, like a lot of other ESTIEM Alumni, we all have a quite international profile and furthermore, we have at least one more thing in common. This is not a coincidence. Sooner or later during our studies, we all came in contact with the organization called ESTIEM, where we made great friends, participated in exciting projects, had the best student parties, and not to forget; were singing the ESTIEM song for the thirtieth time during the General Assembly!

After finishing our IEM studies, would it not be fun to stay in touch with all these people and continue this experience?

But why?

After graduating, having found an interesting job, being more or less settled with an apartment and fixed partner(s), the rest of your life starts to unfold and this period of your life, where you were wild and free,

17

Inside ESTIEM

These examples have been taken from real-life situations by the writer, and are not imaginary. The names are real names and have not been modified. To apply for alumni, connect to our site and go to the application menu, don’t forget to fill out all the information fields and your ESTIEM history and click “send application”, we can’t make it easier

When being on a business trip, in a far away country with people who do not speak your language, where you do not know any place to eat at, would it not be great to be able to log on to the internet, look up someone who knows the place and make an appointment to have dinner and drink some beers together?

What would it be like to meet old friends that you have not seen for a long time, connect with them through Facebook or Skype and discuss with them your mutual latest professional evolutions and exchange ideas and job opportunities and finally plan to meet during next summer holidays in an exotic country?

Feeling stuck in your company and desperately looking for a new challenge, would it not be exciting to be able to contact a dozen fellow engineers through LinkedIn or XING who might have ideas where to find a new job opportunity or get recommended for an interesting position?

This is why there is hope: The ESTIEM Alumni Network is a network enabling ESTIEMers to keep in contact after having entered the professional life. We meet, much like during study times, at so-called “round table” get-togethers, sport events, during holidays and once every year at the ESTIEM Alumni Meeting.

Perhaps you have already met some of us at the Council Meetings, where we also tend to show up to help finishing the last drops of beer. If you want to know more about ESTIEM Alumni, check out www.alumni.estiem. org or contact us at board.alumni@estiem.org. If you are almost graduated, you are very welcome to attend our activities; they can be found on our webpage. There are also groups on LinkedIn, XING, Facebook and Skype to name a few, so we have various ways to keep in contact and get to know to see what is going on, from wherever you are.

Enjoy your studies and rest assured, ESTIEM does not have to end after graduation! 

In high ESTIEM, René, Bart, Anton & Karin - Your ESTIEM Alumni Board 2009/2010

René Heunen Anton Golubev

which is called studying, is getting further and further behind you. Would it not be nice to be able to jump back in time just once a year to relive this period and party and drink until dawn just to wake up one hour later to attend a General Assembly?

Inside estiem

18

Mark Koster

There they finally are. In a lecture room at the Eindhoven University, all 40 of the participants, waiting for the official kickoff of an unforgettable week as I was standing before them to give them their first presentation about what they were going to do these coming days. And what a nice but exhausting program it was. 20 of the 40 participants were totally new to ESTIEM which is one of the interesting aspects of a Europe3D. Half of the places are open for any student from any university from any country. These students in particular were about to experience what it is like to join an ESTIEM activity.

Traditionally in ESTIEM, the program was filled with all kinds of activities tailored to one of ESTIEM’s most famous mottos: Work Hard, Play Hard! And so the week started off with a general presentation about The Netherlands, giving the participants a solid base to found their developing knowledge about this country. The rest of the day was devoted to getting to know each other as almost nobody knew each other.

Really fun Dutch games, which for example made participants throw potatoes on the street in the city centre of Eindhoven with blindfolds.

The next day the participants started to explore the three dimensions (Politics, Economics and Culture) of The Netherlands starting with a visit to a typical company for the Eindhoven region, namely a high-tech company producing roll-up displays. Can you imagine that within five years you will roll out your huge display on your phone to

watch the latest movie? Next was a political lecture about Holland’s different political parties and the ‘Work hard’ part ended with an international debate with interesting propositions from, for example, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP)! In the evening it was time to visit Europe’s longest bar street for the precious ‘Play Hard’ part where we all had a great time.

Up next was our travelling day where you could see some interesting parts of the Netherlands. First stop was the ‘Maeslantkering’ which is a moveable dam to protect the Netherlands from floods. It was an incredible piece of engineering with the size of two Eiffel towers! Following this we visited the largest port of Europe (Rotterdam) and explored the harbour by means of a boat tour. The final stop before going to the city of Enschede was the city of The Hague. This city is the seat of the Dutch government where the participants could for instance visit the House of Parliament.

19

Finally arrived in Enschede working was over and playing hard started again.

Next morning, where everybody had a hard time getting up it was time for some presentations by professor Dr A.J Goren and J.JH Meijer at the University of Twente, Enschede. The day continued with a bus trip to TenCate, a world leading multinational company within the textile technology, who’s products you find in everything from of synthetic grass on football fields, to armour and

aerospace composites, and in the uniforms of fire fighters. That night ‘Club Lunatic’ was the place to be, with even a suitable name for us.

It was time to head towards our final destination, Groningen. But first we made a stop at Philips shaver factory in Drachten. It’s incredible that it takes about 100 robots and hundreds of employees to manufacture such a little thing.

Friday came, and the schedule said Ice-skating, city game and Gala dinner. For some the skating was a totally new experience but everyone had a lot of fun. The city game was one of a kind; only with our cameras could we fulfil different tasks which meant that everybody had to take “crazy” pictures, while at the same time we explored the city of Groningen.

The Gala took place in a local restaurant with our own live band. The gala was the end of a great event, and I hope everybody enjoyed it as much as I did! 

Inside ESTIEM

Inside estiem

20

My Summer Academy Story Starting in 2001, the Summer Academy project is the project ,with the longest, the most educationrelated events, and perhaps even the most special one. But what can be done as well?

JoÃo Barata

My story begins in May 2008. By that time, I was organizing a Board Meeting in my home city, Lisbon. As the good ESTIEMer I am, I have searched more about Board Meetings at the Best Practice Document that is avaliable on the ESTIEM Portal. There it was written that the Boardies would require a quiet place, a very calm one, where they could work at maximum while still being relaxed. So, I found the perfect place for it in Mafra, a small town close to Lisbon.

During that Board Meeting, I had the chance of knowing the 2008 Vice President of Public Relations, David Berg. He saw great potential in the Board Meeting house, and asked me if I could organize a Summer Academy in there. My answer, my dear ESTIEMers, was,... “A Summer WHAT?”.

So, here I am, currently writing this article, in the same house in Mafra, hosting fourteen ESTIEMers, and thanking David for his idea!

After this conversation we had, I applied for Summer Academy Hungary 2008, got accepted, and had the two best weeks of my life! Currently, as a Local Project Leader (for Summer Academy Portugal 2009), I am, of course, quite involved in the entire Summer Academy Project, and am

one of the best people possible to inform you all, ESTIEMers, on what is going on with our project.

Besides the regular work, concerning budgets, finding central and local sponsors, sending the applications to Academic Leaders, informing selected participants, taking care of visas, and so on, Summer Academy will have its 10th birthday next year. So, ever since our Coordination Meeting in Cambridge, the United Kingdom, we have started preparing something special! An Alumni-workshop scheduled for next Spring, so that the people who got to know each other on this very special event can socialize, not only by keeping the spirit alive, but also their professional connections.

However, to make that possible, we must know how to contact every Summer Academy participant that has ever existed. That is basically what Miroslav Ferencak, the Summer Academy 2009 Project Leader, is doing as we speak.

So, dear reader, I have to inform you, that the long-term strategy for the Summer Academy is to make an Alumni Network, that can help Summer Academy participants to keep in touch, and hear the news about the others. Because a Summer Academy participant is not a normal friend. It is a friend for life! (Or, “kanka”! as I have learned from my “kanka” (Berç Çubukçiyan) during Summer Academy Hungary 2008. 

21

Inside ESTIEM

Put yourself in “the shoes” of a

Council Meeting Grenoble ’09 organizer

When Adrien had to buy new shoes, he thought just like everybody he was overwhelmed by choices; but it’s just an illusion. Indeed, there are always problems of size, out of stock, heel and so on. Finally you can’t turn your nose up much longer and content yourself with anything which doesn’t make you look like a member of Tokio Hotel (no offence Germany). That’s completely the same with fundraising. Yeah thanks to a crazy little thing called the “crisis” less than 10% of our funds came from companies (Becton Dickinson and Schneider Electric), and it wasn’t the lack of phone harassment! Our University, the city of Grenoble and a bank (BNP Paribas) enabled us to overcome this economic situation which almost made us give up hope to find the “shoes” we needed...

Adrien finally succeeded in finding his brand new shoes, but the hardest part was yet to come.

It’s well known that with great shoes comes great responsibility. First, the feet have to be up to the job. Council Meetingly speaking, feet correspond to the organisation team. No need to be numer-

Secondly, you have the responsibility of what you do with these shoes on. For us, the point was to make sure all the expectations (even those of Adrien) will be met while the event schedule is getting filled. We proposed different types of City Tours to meet all the interest of the participants: shopping, cultural, sportive… Some ESTIEMers visited Grenoble museum, others preferred the beautiful view you have when you bravely climb, climb the sunshine mountain – I mean the Bastille. Some not so brave tried the cable-car, emblematic of Grenoble city…

Before getting lost, Adrien’s shoes also participated in the first national night ever organised in a Council Meeting. For once, the organisers were provided in food by the participants! Thanks to the Members Committee, we discovered specialities from each Local Group and had a really unforgettable party.

During the whole week, the job was to get rid of any thought about sleeping to make sure everything is going smoothly, impossible without using the best incentive ever: ESTIEM spirit.

On the 27th of April 2009, the event reached its end, the job was done, the participants were gone, letting behind them an inspiring pair of shoes, and a rest-deserving and surprisingly nostalgic organisation team. On behalf of this one, I want to thank all the participants, because in spite of any effort of organisation, the participants are those who build the success of an event. And from my organizer point of view, this one was especially successful. True story. 

Bertrand Laborde

On the 27th of April 2009, a young man named Adrien was leaving Grenoble, lacking of, apart from a piece of liver, the shoes which carried him there 5 days earlier. No eyewitness, no clue, no ask for ransom: the disappearance of Adrien’s shoes remains a mystery. But, what an irony of fate, the lifetime steps of these shoes turn out to be close to those of the organization of the shoe-heartbreaker event, I mean Council Meeting Grenoble ’09.

ous, the most important is that you can always rely on any teammate. So we were about ten ESTIEMers taking care of the event, ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove by Anne-Laure Ladier, the big toe of this organisation team.

Anne - Laure Ladir

Organizing a Council Meeting turns your brain upside down and doesn’t put it into order once it’s over. You need a very long period of time to recover and when it’s done, unfortunately only few memories remain. In my case, there’s something I can’t forget: the fantastic loss of Adrien’s shoes. Curiously, it helped me to remember the different steps of Council Meeting Grenoble organisation...

Inside estiem

22

I don’t know but I’ve been told…

Miroslav Ferencak

Ever wondered where your limits are? How much of the wilderness, knowledge and fun (in one mix) you can handle? Some of the ESTIEMers did, and this is their story from the Roche Survival Camp in Karlsruhe (casual ties not included :)

I was among the first group of “rookies” to arrive in Karlsruhe, usual thing for me and the crew from Novi Sad. Among the first ones that greeted us was our “Drill Instructor”- well known Max Steinmetz, together with a part of his “Drill Team”.

The first official day passed by in a relaxed atmosphere of palace gardens. An excellent place if you are looking to have some fun with your friends or just chill out on your own.

However, the programme in the next five days was that action-packed part that everybody wanted to be a part-of. The “Drill Team” organised for us three very interesting company tours. The first company tour was one given by the main sponsor of the event, medical giant “Roche”. For one day spent in their ultra-mega-giga plant site we found out all there is to know about Roche, from field of operations to IT systems they are using, logistic concepts and cutting-edge hi-tech production systems. The dozen-stories high warehouse, where we realized how they can manage to deliver all their products on such a short notice, left the biggest impression on the ESTIEMers.

“Girsberger”…does this name seem familiar?

No? That means that you do not know anything about the chair business, like I had no clue before that company visit. In “Girsberger” you can see how Rolls-Royce is produced… in the chairs category, of course. The whole tour was very interesting as you could see the production line and afterwards try out those products in a comfy expo-room.

The third company visit… I will just say: “Europapark”. The adrenaline. The excitement.

Simply, it is the place after which you will have sore cheeks from a continuous smile that you cannot get off your lips. The Mack family built the biggest theme-park in Europe with so much love and attention that you can actually feel coming from every detail. Just for show-off: Silver Star is the biggest and tallest roller-coaster in Europe; Blue Fire is the fastest roller-coaster in Europe and has the biggest loop in Europe; Europapark has the most attractions in Europe…what is Disneyland, again?

To rest ourselves from that “all intensive” company tour, the “Drill Team” prepared some interesting activities for the “Rookies”, just to keep the action-pack day. The “Survival rally” (ESTIEM style), delicious wine-tasting (Yup, Germans can make nice wines), BBQ and camping were just some things that we did in the surroundings of our base, the gym hall in the place called Endingen.

This calm place is located in the most famous wineproducing region in Germany, at the slopes of the Kaiserstuhl. We also visited the most south-western town in Germany, Freiburg. In that medieval city we had some nice clubbing experience and perfect cocktails.

The finish of the Survival Camp was epic. I think you would know what I mean if I just say: “TRAM PARTYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!” Crazy, wild, sexy… just like KARLSRUHEEEEEEEEE 

23

Inside ESTIEM

Brain Trainer - The Kick Off This summer, there was a concept that was brought to life, there were people who sacrificed their free time and there was a team that did a great job!

This event was designed to develop leadership skills of the participants through trainings lasting from one to two days. It was targeted at all students from ESTIEM. Its aim was to coach and develop the participants to become more professional and successful in the organisation as well as their own future career. The one-week series of trainings contained three to four trainings focusing on the following skills: communication, presentation, negotiation and self-management. Apart from the theoretical knowledge another focus lays on learning by doing, which is facilitated by implementation hours where the participants can apply their knowledge. The trainings were led by professional trainers or Alumni already in the business field.

The participants were given the chance to choose the most appropriate trainings for themselves. At the end of the camp the results of the trainings were noticeable. Everybody made friends among the participants and gained improvement in presentation and leadership skills and, last but not least, all of us took part in memorable moments.

We held an introduction and an international night, both of which occurred better than we expected. The participants were offered to taste the special meals and drinks of each country. During the following days, we spent afternoons at the beach, played Pin-pong and took part in a funny game in the night. At the end of the last training session, the program changed and we travelled to Tihany to visit the old monastery and after it to try out some characteristic Hungarian wines.

It always makes me sad to say goodbye after an unforgettable event, but we, the organizers, had to do it. Although friends went away, the friendships stay treasured in our spirits.. 

Csaba Hartmann

Yes, it was the BrainTrainer event in Hungary organised by Local Group Budapest. Thirty participants and eight organisers spent six days near the famous Lake Balaton. The programs varied from trainings to parties, and in between all that, we had the chance to do traditional wine-tasting and tried to eat watermelons with our bear hands.

I think that after the first night’s party nobody expected to have a unique wake-up call every morning. Although it was a pity from us to wake participants up, nobody could leave their bed in time, so sometimes some people missed the breakfast. This meant occasional funny noise, but on the other hand it was necessary, because you were more hungry to ,,stuff ” knowledge. During the breaks, we were offered fine pieces of the Hungarian cuisine (or, as it was known, the school canteen).

After lunchtime the participants were sent back to trainings to continue the progress. The signs of exhaustion were noticeable on everybody in the late afternoon, but our instinct kept us awake. All in all it wasn’t so bad, because we could spare energy for the free time evening activities.

Inside estiem

24

From Ex-

Moritz Wilke, Student Guide Why did you decide to become a Project Leader?

Moritz Wilke

Actually the Council decided that I should be one. I was quite active on a local level before, but after attending more ESTIEM events and getting involved with the Student Guide Project, I wanted to have the experience to work in an international team. I was attracted by that special part of the “job“ as a Project Leader, to deal with people from different cultural backgrounds and therewith, different ways to think and work.

What was your job about?

When I took over the Project a lot of people from the former team went abroad or were not involved anymore. So, main part of the job was to find people for a new Student Guide team. Another thing of course was to figure out the direction in which we wanted to develop the Project.

What did you gain from being a Project Leader and what did you add to your Project?

I learned to work under difficult circumstances, with others, hundreds of kilometers away and still getting results. I learned what it means to lead a team and I met great people and made a lot of really good friends.

In the Project we made a lot of big changes during the year. We changed the concept of Student Guide from providing general information on countries, cities and universities, to providing specific information for exchange students. I think the Student Guide database will be one of the most valuable sources of information for exchanges students once it is completed.

What was your favorite activity or unforgettable experience in ESTIEM?

There was a time in the beginning when we haven’t had anybody with the IT skills to make changes to the database. So the most frustrating was to come up with new and nice ideas, but without any chance to implement them.

There were so many great activities! But because it is fresh on my mind and somehow outstanding, I would say this year’s ESTIEM College and especially the trip there over the Balkans.

Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul, Izmir by train and bus within 4 days, just an awesome trip. I bet you will hear some nice stories about it.

“Thank god, I became the Project Leader!” What was your best experience during your term?

Anyone you want to thank for their support during your time as Project Leader?

Oh, hard question, there really were many and it is hard to pick one. A great thing to experience was meeting so many active people from all over Europe during the ESTIEM College. That special magic that occurs when you bring active ESTIEMers together is really one of my greatest experiences. It is unbelievable what great ideas come up there. You don’t have to do much, just put the right people together in the right spot. It is hard to explain, you should experience it. It really is magic.

All the people who worked on the Project with me during the year, believed in me and in the Project, thank you! It was great fun working with you. Especially I want to thank my predecessor Kartal, my successor Berna, Harald for working on the website and my board responsibles Jan and Luis for believing in the Project. 

“Oh, damn. Why did I become a Project Leader?”

Your worst experience, please.

25

Inside ESTIEM

Project Leaders Sezen Sayoglu, ESTIEM Magazine

Why did you decide to become a Project Leader?

What was your job about?

Deciding the content, creating the time line for the project, organising and motivating people who work in the team and, since it was my expertise, I designed the issues.

“Oh, damn. Why did I become a Project Leader?”

Your worst experience, please.

After tough and long discussions, we have learnt that we can never ever name the magazine Scope.

At that point, all the work we have done during the 3 days during the Coordination Meeting was gone...

“Thank god, I became the Project Leader!” What was your best experience during your term?

When magazines were distributed in Council Meeting Famagusta, many people came to me and said: “This is really the best magazine I have ever seen, congratulations!”. From that moment on I forgot about all the sleepless nights and problems I had, and instead I just had a big smile on my face.

What did you gain from being a Project Leader and what did you add to your Project?

Hmm... I cannot name specific things like time management and professionalism since the answer would be quite long then. I will just say a lot and a lot. To see what I added to the project check history pages, it cannot fit here.

What was your favourite activity or unforgettable experience in ESTIEM?

Summer Academy is always the best for many people so the same goes for me, the atmosphere and friendship we had in Summer Academy Hungary 2008 was amazing. However, I have to add that ESTIEM College in Izmir organised by Local Group Ankara-Bilkent (yup, it is my local group) was AWESOME. Define your Project with a colour and a fruit?

Orange as the colour and pineapple as the fruit.

Why? They are delicious like a magazine should be.

Anyone you want to thank for their support during your time as Project Leader?

Our current PL Isidora Strboja for never leaving a work undone, Markus Schoppmann for his great contribution in short time, Thibault Maffei for his never ending energy and motivation, David Berg from whom I learnt how to work in a very German way, for his support and the desire to make things done, Andrea Sabo for being ready to help any time, ex-Project Leader Katarina Gavric for creating a very lovely working atmosphere which motivated me to become a Project Leader, and finally my family for standing by my side anytime.

What would be your second choice, if you would run again for the position of a project leader in ESTIEM?

Europe 3D. I feel very fond of the project, probably because of Europe3D Turkey which I really enjoyed, as a part of the organisation team in Ankara and a participant in Istanbul. 

Sezen Sayoglu

After working as a designer in the ESTIEM Magazine team and getting into the job I realized there are lots of things to do. Then I decided to become a Project Leader, to do the things that I had in my mind.

Inside estiem

26

What’s happening in Sofia

Sofia is back on the road again!

Tamara Dzabrailova marıa Dureva

If less than two years ago when I saw the abbreviation “ESTIEM” in Facebook for the first time, somebody had told me that I would write an article for ESTIEM Magazine, I would not have believed him. Back then when I was only reading for ESTIEM it was making me smile. And I believe that something that makes you smile is worth fighting for.

So, without knowing for what exactly we are fighting for, we started forming Local Group Sofia all over again; first surrounded only by my friends.

When we were travelling to Hamburg for our first event, we did not know what to expect at all. A lot of things made an impression on us – of course the ESTIEM Song was one of them –, but what you cannot see is the most essential part: the ESTIEM Spirit. We took that Spirit with us to Sofia with the help of Momcilo Radovanovic and all the wonderful Serbian guys who visited us for a day. Afterwards Tobias Hemmerlein offered us to organize a Knowledge Management Committee Coordination Meetitng. We gave our best for one good event and hope it was one. We started the year with a lot of ESTIEM Spirit. ESTIEMers from our Local Group started travelling all around Europe. However, as often happens in life the Spirit was not enough; there were many obstacles which we had to overcome. It took us a lot of effort. We wanted to be heard. Our aim was to make as many people as pos-

sible to understand what ESTIEM is and what makes it so special. After a lof of discussions and also the passion of one of our ESTIEMers we came up with an idea: Aviation Days.

That is the name of our first public appearance in the last couple of years. The theme: “Technologies and business solutions in the modern Bulgarian aviation”. This event was aimed to provide something useful for everyone, because as we all know technology and business go hand in hand nowadays. So, we went for it. We met the most important companies dealing with aviation in Bulgaria and introduced them to our colleagues: the undergraduates from the Technical University of Sofia. Eleven presentations were given during the two days of the event with a wide range of topics, starting with purely economical and managerial oriented subjects and ending with specific engineering problems. The full halls made us believe that our work generated wonderful results. Looking at it from today’s point of view we achieved the desired tasks. For two days the university was under the sign of ESTIEM Local Group Sofia’s Aviation Days. Posters, flyers and small advertising paper planes invaded the rooms, the halls and the park. We even surprised a significant part of the university management staff with the essence of the project – to build and develop strong companyuniversity relations oriented to the practical experience and knowledge of the future engineers. We were able to do this with the Students Council of our university and the Dean of the English Language Faculty of Engineering.

As the moto of ‘Aviation Days’ is ”Everyone of us has once dreamt of flying”, we can undoubtedly say that we spread our wings and hope that soon we will be flying!

We are looking forward to the next event: the TIMES Semi Final Sofia. We are looking forward to receiving our guests in Sofia and already started preparing their wonderful stay here. 

New dimensions of outsourcing

Virtual Business

28 Focus Just a Bunch of Contracts

Intoduction to Virtual Business

Ágnes Isza

The world is changing faster than ever. As anywhere else, also in the world of business this creates the need to be able to react on new challenges faster than ever. What better way to do this than bringing together the best specialists for each task? If we take this idea to the extreme, we have a fully outsourced company – also called a virtual business.

Creating a virtual business basically means building a network of outsourcing partners. But what’s new about it? Companies have been outsourcing production, they have outsourced their marketing etc. – virtual companies, however, are designed from the grounds as a network of inde-

pendent entities linked only by a common goal: to provide a certain service or good.

Building such a network involves a great deal of communication. That is why it has for long not been possible to put this idea into practice: information and communication technologies just now became able to offer the tools for running virtual companies.

These tools reduce the necessity of being physically present while doing business: a company can be geographically dispersed; locations are no longer of significance. We can choose our partners mainly by their core competencies and resources.

– And these partners can be part of larger projects than they could take on by themselves.

If we do not think of virtuality as an all or nothing property but as a dimension, any kind of a shared task or a partnership is a realisation of this idea. We can classify any company to a greater or lesser degree by it and see working examples everywhere in business life. The highest extreme of this scale is a virtual company that only consists of outsourcing contracts and yet manages to deliver value to its customers.

Would that be the best and most efficient way to go? Does the company of the future not produce anything itself? – Co-operation is clearly the only chance of small companies to live up to the market demand. But what about the large ones: shall they split up to fit in this new structure of doing business?

29

Focus

Virtual Business: Built to Last “A virtual business employs electronic means to transact business.” 1

1. create new markets (as MastersPortal did by creating its database),

The Internet is a good tool to enable businessto-business interaction. Nowadays a lot of virtual business communities have already been established; be it on a social level (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.), or by having online market places where people trade and sell their own goods (eBay, Amazon, etc.).2

2. offer new products (adding value), and

Besides the obvious examples, there are also those virtual businesses that specialise in their respective areas. A more known example within ESTIEM, MastersPortal (www.mastersportal.eu), founded by three ESTIEM Alumni, has specialised in providing a service aimed at both students and universities. MastersPortal is an online database for internationally oriented students all over the world to find and compare Master’s Programmes on a pan-European level. Universities all over Europe thus have a chance to gain exposure, resulting in students finding the programmes in any country in Europe that fits to their taste (based on study discipline, tuition fee, and foci of the study among other criteria). It now lists over 12,000 programmes of more than 600 universities in 33 European countries and recently won the new venture award in the Netherlands.

Putting together already existing services, MastersPortal provides a service to students and universities, and in this way brings them closer together: adding value to the sum of the parts.2 Virtual business gives the opportunity – also for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) – to

3. a ssure flexibility in responding to new market requirements.

The third possibility mentioned is necessary to achieve the (virtual) size needed to enlarge the accessible resources without being subject to inflexibility.3 These factors can be seen in MastersPortal’s future: universities’ need to be more visible over a broadened horizon for instance, has caused MastersPortal to work on BachelorsPortal.eu, PhDPortal.eu, and ScholarshipPortal.eu (airing in the next several months).

Conventional ways of informing students about several Master’s Programmes, such as printed media, can therefore be less competitive than using online media. ESTIEM (where MastersPortal’s roots lie) – through working in virtual organizations – also creates new possibilities, new ideas, and is always flexible enough to adapt to new environments: built to last. 

References: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_business 2. Service Provision and Composition in Virtual Business Communities Alexander Marton, Giacomo Piccinelli and Chris Turfin, p3, p6 3. book, Pascal Sieber and Joachim Griese (Eds.) Organizational Virtualness, april 1998 paper: Organizational Virtualness in Business and Legal Reality Andreas Pletsch p86-91

Focus

30

The next revolution in interactions

NOVEMBER 2005 • Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee

For the past 30 years, companies have boosted their labour productivity by reengineering, automating, or outsourcing production and clerical jobs. But any advantage in costs or distinctiveness that companies gained in this way was usually short lived, for their rivals adopted similar technologies and process improvements and thus quickly matched the leaders.

But advantages that companies gain by raising the productivity of their most valuable workers may well be more enduring, for their rivals will find these improvements much harder to copy.

This kind of work is undertaken by, for example, managers, salespeople, and customer service reps, whose tasks are anything but routine. Such employees interact with other employees, customers, and suppliers and make complex decisions based on knowledge, judgment, experience, and instinct.

New McKinsey research reveals that these high-value decision makers are growing in number and importance throughout many companies. As businesses come to have more problem solvers and fewer doers in their ranks, the way they organize for business changes. So does the economics of labour: workers who undertake complex, interactive jobs typically command higher salaries, and their actions have a disproportionate impact on the ability of companies to woo customers,

to compete, and to earn profits. Thus, the potential gains to be realized by making these employees more effective at what they do and by helping them to do it more cost effectively are huge—as is the downside of ignoring this trend.

But to improve these employees’ labor performance, executives must put aside much of what they know about reengineering—and about managing technology, organizations, and talent to boost productivity. Technology can replace a checkout clerk at a supermarket but not a marketing manager.

Machines can log deposits and dispense cash, but they can’t choose an advertising campaign. Process cookbooks can show how to operate a modern warehouse but not what happens when managers band together to solve a crisis.

Machines can help managers make more decisions more effectively and quickly. The use of technology to complement and enhance what talented decision makers do rather than to replace them calls for a very different kind of thinking about the organizational structures that best facilitate their work, the mix of skills companies need, hiring and developing talent, and the way technology supports high-value labour. Technology and organizational strategies are inextricably conjoined in this new world of performance improvement.1 Raising the labour performance of professionals won’t be easy, and it is uncertain whether any of the

Mapping interactions by industry

31

innovations and experiments that some pioneering companies are now undertaking will prove to be winning formulas. As in the early days of the Internet revolution, the direction is clear but the path isn’t. That’s the bad news—or, rather, the challenge (and opportunity) for innovators.

The good news concerns competitive advantage.

As companies figure out how to raise the performance of their most valuable employees in a range of business activities, they will build distinctive capabilities based on a mix of talent and technology.

Reducing these capabilities to a checklist of procedures and IT systems (which rivals would be able to copy) isn’t going to be easy. Best practice thus won’t become everyday practice quite as quickly as it has in recent years. Building sustainable advantages will again be possible—and, of course, worthwhile.

The interactions revolution

Today’s most valuable workers undertake business activities that economists call “interactions”: in the broadest sense, the searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange goods or services. Recent studies—including landmark research McKinsey conducted in 19972—show that specialization, globalization, and technology are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. As Adam Smith predicted, specialization tends to atomize work and to increase the need to interact. Outsourcing, like the boom in global operations and marketing, has dramatically increased the need to interact with vendors and partners. And communications technologies such as e-mail and instant messaging have made interaction easier and far less expensive.

The growth of interactions represents a broad shift in the nature of economic activity. At the turn of the last century, most nonagricultural labor in business involved extracting raw materials or converting them into finished goods. We call these activities transformational because they involve

more than just jobs in production.3 By the turn of the 21st century, however, only 15 percent of US employees undertook transformational work such as mining coal, running heavy machinery, or operating production lines—in part because in a globalizing economy many such jobs are shifting from developed to developing nations. The rest of the workforce now consists of people who largely or wholly spend their time interacting.

Within the realm of interactions, another shift is in full swing as well, and it has dramatic implications for the way companies organize and compete. Eight years after McKinsey’s 1997 study, the firm’s new research on job trends in a number of sectors finds that companies are hiring more workers for complex than for less complex interactions. Recording a shipment of parts to a warehouse, for example, is a routine interaction; managing a supply chain is a complex one.

Complex interactions typically require people to deal with ambiguity—there are no rule books to follow—and to exercise high levels of judgment. These men and women (such as managers, salespeople, nurses, lawyers, judges, and mediators) must often draw on deep experience, which economists call “tacit knowledge.” For the sake of clarity, we will therefore refer to the more complex interactions as tacit and to the more routine ones as transactional. Transactional interactions include not just clerical and accounting work, which companies have long been automating or eliminating, but also most of what IT specialists, auditors, biochemists, and many others do.

Most jobs mix both kinds of activities—when managers fill out their expense reports, that’s a transaction; leading workshops on corporate strategy with their direct reports is tacit work. But what counts in a job are its predominant and necessary activities, which determine its value added and compensation.

Focus

Focus

32

During the past six years, the number of US jobs that include tacit interactions as an essential component has been growing two and a half times faster than the number of transactional jobs and three times faster than employment in the entire national economy. To put it another way, 70 percent of all US jobs created since 1998—4.5 million, or roughly the combined US workforce of the 56 largest public companies by market capitalization—require judgment and experience. These jobs now make up 41 percent of the labour market in the United States . Indeed, most developed nations are experiencing this trend.

ers. Manufacturers too have eliminated transactional jobs.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs involving more complex interactions among skilled and educated workers who make decisions is growing at a phenomenal rate. Salaries reflect the value that companies place on these jobs, which pay 55 and 75 percent more, respectively, than those of employees who undertake routine transactions and transformations.

Demand for tacit workers varies among sectors, of course. The jobs of most employees in air transportation, retailing, utilities, and recreation are transactional. Tacit jobs dominate fields such as health care and many financial-services and software segments. But all sectors employ tacit workers, and demand for them is growing; most companies, for example, have an acute need for savvy frontline managers.

A new path to better performance

The demand for tacit employees and the high cost of employing them are a clear call to arms.

Companies need to make this part of the workforce more productive, just as they have already raised the productivity of transactional and manufacturing labour. Unproductive tacit employees will be an The number of jobs that involve relatively com- increasingly costly disadvantage. plex interactions is growing at a phenomenal rate.

The point isn’t how many tacit interactions occur The balance is tipping toward complexity, in in a company—what’s important is that they ought part because companies have been eliminating the to add value. This shift toward tacit interactions upleast complex jobs by streamlining processes, out- ends everything we know about organizations. Since sourcing, and automating routine tasks. From 1998 the days of Alfred Sloan, corporations have resemto 2004, for example, insurance carriers, fund- bled pyramids, with a limited number of tacit emmanagement companies, and securities firms cut ployees (managers) on top coordinating a broad span the number of transactional jobs on their books by of workers engaged in production and transactional 10 percent, 6.5 percent, and 2.7 percent a year, labour. Hierarchical structures and strict performrespectively. Likewise, a more automated check-in ance metrics that tabulate inputs and outputs thereprocess at airports makes for smaller airline check- fore lie at the heart of most organizations today. in staffs, automated replenishment systems reduce the need for supply chain bookkeepers, and outsourcing helps companies shed IT help desk work-

33

But the rise of the tacit workforce and the decline of the transformational and transactional ones demand new thinking about the organizational structures that could help companies make the best use of this shifting blend of talent. There is no road map to show them how to do so. Over time, innovations and experiments to raise the productivity of tacit employees (for instance, by helping them collaborate more effectively inside and outside their companies) and innovations involving loosely coupled teams will suggest new organizational structures.

The two critical changes that executives must take into account as they explore how to make tacit employees more productive are already clear, however. First, the way companies deploy technology to improve the performance of the tacit workforce is very different from the way they have used it to streamline transactions or improve manufacturing.

Machines can’t recognize uncodified patterns, solve novel problems, or sense emotional responses and react appropriately; that is, they can’t substitute for tacit labour as they did for transactional labour.

Instead machines will have to make tacit employees better at their jobs by complementing and extending their tacit capabilities and activities.

Second, a look back at what it took to raise labour productivity over the past ten years shows that the overall performance of sectors improves when the companies in them adopt one another’s managerial best practices, usually involving technology. In retailing, for instance, Wal-Mart Stores was a pioneer in automating a number of formerly manual transactional activities, such as tracking goods, trading information with suppliers, and forecasting demand. During the 1990s, most other general-merchandise retailers adopted Wal-Mart’s innovations, boosting labour productivity throughout the sector.4 But in the world of tacit work, it’s less likely that companies will succeed in adopting best practices quite so readily. Capabilities founded on tal-

ented people who make smarter decisions about how to deploy tangible and intangible assets can’t be coded in software and process diagrams and then disseminated throughout a sector.

Tacit technology

Companies have three ways of using technology to enhance and extend the work of tacit labor.

First, and most obviously, they can use it to eliminate low-value-added transactional activities that keep employees from undertaking higher-value work. Pharmacies, for example, are using robots to fill prescriptions in an effort to maximize the amount of time pharmacists can interact with their customers. Meanwhile, The Home Depot is trying out automated self-checkout counters in some stores. The retailer isn’t just automating and eliminating transactional tasks; its chairman and CEO, Robert Nardelli, believes that automated counters can reduce by as much as 40 percent the time customers spend waiting at cash registers.

Just as important, the new counters mean that people who used to operate the old manual ones can be deployed in store aisles as sales staff—a much higher-value use of time.

Furthermore, technology can allocate activities more efficiently between tacit and transactional workers. At some companies, for example, technology support—traditionally, tacit work undertaken by staff experts on PCs and networks— has been split into tacit and transactional roles.

Transactional workers armed with scripts and some automated tools handle the IT problems of business users; only when no easy solution can be found is a tacit employee brought in.

Second, technology makes it possible to boost the quality, speed, and scalability of the decisions employees make. IT, for instance, can give them easier access to filtered and structured information, thereby helping to prevent such time wasters as volumes of unproductive e-mail. Useful

Focus

Focus

34

databases could, say, provide details about the performance of offshore suppliers or expanded lists of experts in a given field. Technology tools can also help employees to identify key trends, such as the buying behaviour of a customer segment, quickly and accurately.

Kaiser Permanente is one of the organizations now pioneering the use of such technologies to improve the quality of complex interactions. The health care provider has developed not only unified digital records on its patients but also innovative decisionsupport tools, such as programs that track the schedules of caregivers for patients with diabetes and heart disease. Although it is hard to determine quantitatively whether physicians are making better judgments about medical care, data suggest that Kaiser has cut its patients’ mortality rate for heart disease to levels well below the US national average.

Finally, new and emerging technologies will let companies extend the breadth and impact of tacit interactions. Loosely coupled systems are more likely than hard-coded systems and connections to be adapted successfully to the highly dynamic work of tacit employees. This point will be particularly critical, since tacit interactions will occur as much within companies as across them.5 Broadband connectivity and novel applications (including collaborative software, multiple-source videoconferencing, and IP telephony) can facilitate, speed up, and progressively cut the cost of such interactions as collaboration among communities of interest and build consensus across great distances. Companies might then involve greater numbers of workers in these activities, reach rural consumers and suppliers more effectively, and connect with networks of people and specialized talent around the world.6 Competitive advantage redux

Technology itself can’t improve patient care or customer service or make better strategic decisions.

It does help talented workers to achieve these ends, but so, for example, do organizational models that motivate tacit employees and help them spot and act on ideas. These kinds of models usually involve environments that encourage tacit employees to explore new ideas, to operate in a less hierarchical (that is, more team-oriented and unstructured) way, and to organize themselves for work. Most of today’s organizational models, by contrast, aim to maximize the performance of transactional or transformational workers. Tacit models are new territory.

The rigidity of traditional organizational models too often limits innovation and learning.

As a result, it won’t be easy for companies to identify and develop distinctive new capabilities that make the best use of tacit interactions—new ways to speed innovations to market, to make sales channels more effective, or to divine customer needs, for instance. But at least such capabilities will also be difficult for competitors to duplicate.

Best practices will be hard to transplant from one company to another if they are based on talented people supported by unique organizational and leadership models and armed with a panoply of complementary technologies. If it becomes harder for performance innovations to spread through a sector and thereby to boost the performance of all players, it will once again be possible to build operating-cost advantages and distinctive capabilities sustainable for more than a brief moment.

During the past few years, advantages related to costs and distinctiveness have rarely lasted for long: they eroded quickly when companies built them from innovations in the handling of what are essentially transactional interactions. E*Trade Financial, for instance, gained tactical advantages by optimizing transactional activities to create more efficient and less expensive ways of making trades but then watched its unique position evaporate when other discount brokers and financial advisers embraced the new technology and cut their trading fees.

Cheap trades were no longer a sufficient point of differentiation.

35

By contrast, advantages built on tacit interactions might stand. A company could, for example, focus on improving the tacit interactions among its marketing and product-development staff, customers, and suppliers to better discern what customers want and then to provide them with more effective value-added products and services. That approach would create a formidable competitive capability— and it is difficult to see how any rival could easily implement the same mix of tacit interactions within its organization and throughout its value chain.

Looking forward

As companies explore how to expand the potential of their most valuable employees, they face more than a few challenges. For one thing, they will have to understand what profile of interactions—transactional and tacit—is critical to their business success and to allocate investments for improving the performance of each. Some companies will have to redeploy talent from transactional to tacit activities, as Home Depot did. Others, following the example of companies such as Toyota Motor and Cisco Systems, may find it necessary to redeploy their available tacit capacity to transformational and transactional activities, thus bringing a new level of problem solving to many kinds of transformational jobs. At the same time, it will be necessary to guard against becoming overly reliant on a few star tacit employees and to manage critical tacit or transactional activities undertaken by partners or vendors.

On the human-resources side, companies will need a better understanding of how they can hire, develop, and manage for tacit skills rather than transactional ones—something that will increasingly determine their ability to grow. Certain organizations must therefore learn to develop their tacit skills internally, perhaps through apprenticeship programs, or to provide the right set of opportunities so that their employees can become more seasoned and knowledgeable. What’s more, performance is more complex to measure and reward when tacit employees collaborate to achieve results. How, after all, do you measure the interactions of managers?7

Companies will also have to think differently about the way they prioritize their investments in technology. On the whole, such investments are now intended largely to boost the performance of transformational activities—manufacturing, construction, and so on—or of transactional ones.

Companies invest far less to support tacit tasks.

So they must shift more of their IT dollars to tacit tools, even while they still try to get whatever additional (though declining) improvements can be had, in particular, from streamlining transactions. The performance spread8 between the most and least productive manufacturing companies is relatively narrow. The spread widens in transaction-based sectors—meaning that investments to improve performance in this area still make sense.

But the variability of company-level performance is more than 50 percent greater in tacit-based sectors than in manufacturing-based ones. Tacit activities are now a green pasture for improvement.  This article has been approved from McKinsey Quarterly for reprint.

The Authors

Brad Johnson is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office James Manyika is a principal in the San Francisco office, where Lareina Yee is a consultant.

Focus

Focus

36

food is love A Virtual Business Story cemineozturk@yahoo.com

The movement towards internet based commerce has brought immense op cemine ozturk

portunities to develop new business styles. Yemeksepeti.com is one of the best examples for this kind of companies in Turkey. It is an online food delivery portal which takes customers’ orders through the website with the most accurate, rapid and easiest way and forwards to the respective restaurant immediately.

After submitting my master thesis in Germany, an entrepreneurship opportunity arose. During my studies I examined several sectors and worked on different case studies. One important developing area was the e-business sector and I have decided to establish my own business by obtaining the franchising rights of Yemeksepeti.com for the Turkish city of Bursa with a population of two million. Yemeksepeti (Food basket), an online food delivery service, is a rising trend in big cities Turkey. Yemeksepeti.com eases the lives of busy people by serving as a bridge between people and restaurants. The aim of the site is to prevent misunderstandings between consumers and suppliers. Three university friends launched the Web site in 2000 in Istanbul with $40,000 of capital and recently 20% of the company has been sold to European Founders Fund. During 2002, the service was available in Izmir and Ankara, in 2005 yemeksepeti.com was launched in Antalya and finally reached Bursa in April 2007 and nowadays operates in nine big cities in Turkey. The team which

37

recruited by myself worked for about five months before the site went online in Bursa and I coordinated all the activities during the establishment and managed the operations till 1 November 2008.

Since management in Istanbul decided to buy all the franchises back in order to have standard services, Bursa operations have been handed over to Istanbul team at the end of October 2008.

Before Yemeksepeti.com started to operate in Bursa several steps had to be gone through. Market research was the first step and Bursa home delivery food market had been analyzed by surveying and interviewing the restaurants according to determined criteria. After market research, a detailed five-year financial plan was another important step because I was about to take a radical decision and breakeven point has to be calculated very carefully. Here I used previous cities’ data in order to estimate key parameters. Monitoring the estimated and real data and updating the financial plan according to actual data was one of the most important experiences that I gained while managing the operations.

Recruitment and training both operational and sales team were the other important steps. Because it was totally a CRM project and I needed motivated team members who are aware of and care about customer satisfaction. Team was also informed about objective goals – such as number and

variety of restaurants, order delivery time, average number of new customer, etc. I have also shared each month’s income statement and expenses with the team and each member got their own bonuses according to achieved goals. After MBA education, I had a chance to put into practice almost all the aspects of Accounting for Managers lecture while managing accounting and financial activities of Bursa operations.

After setting up the system we had to reach internet users very quickly and needed creative marketing campaigns. Local advertisement activities for each specific region were organized and national advertisement campaigns were supported. Market research data played an important role while planning region specific business development activities such as free DVD, etc.

As Peter F. Drucker has said “every decision contains risks and it pledges an uncertain future that resources are not determined”. It is this challenging environment to which I intend to contribute by evolving meaningful and optimal solutions to various problems of projects which are subject to increase the standards of service sector in Turkey and Yemeksepeti.com was a great option for this. I will be very pleased to share further information, if you are interested just drop an e-mail. 

Focus

The Author

Cemine Öztürk is an ESTIEM Alumni who graduated from Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. She got her master degree from University of Ingolstadt, Germany on International Project Management.She is currently Business Development Manager at MFC.

38 Career

Studies completed – Studies resumed

Ivana Putnik

Now that you have successfully completed your studies and proudly hold a bachelor’s degree in your hands, you are confronted with the issue of where to go from here. Starting out on your professional career or go for a master’s degree?

Every bachelor student is sooner or later faced with this choice. At the latest it will come up when working on your bachelor’s thesis, which is what also happened to me. The self-appointed goal of a Bachelor degree in Business Administration and Engineering at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany, was within reach. I was right in the throes of my final thesis in the department Sales Coordination and Sales Controlling at Bosch, Division Packaging Technology (PA) in Waiblingen when I was first brought into contact with the PreMaster Program. My superior and mentor for my final thesis referred me to it. He told me that Bosch had specifically designed a program to meet the demands of the modified study courses and degrees (bachelor/master), allowing bachelor graduates to gain practical professional experience between bachelor and master studies.

PreMaster Program – what exactly does it cover?

I browsed through the Bosch website to learn more about the program content and discovered an interesting and attractive concept, which covered all possible angles. The Bosch PreMaster Program offered me a perfect solution: a corporate phase lasting up to 12 months to gain practical experience, which was in addition very well paid, as well as deeper professional insight in form of a master study course – supported by the perspective of simultaneously working as student and a student loan.

As far as my professional specialization is concerned, I was given the choice of several sectors ranging from purchasing, finances and controlling, over mater ials ma nagement a nd log ist ics, marketing, quality management to technical sales – just to mention some of them.

I decided to go into technical sales, an area with which I have been familiar since my bachelor thesis and was accepted after having successfully completed the application process. Now a detailed structure for the time I would be spending within the company during my corporate phase was established. Together with the HR partner and my personal mentor we defined the departments in the company I would be working in as well as

39

Career

the precise content of my training: nine months in my “home department” - sales coordination and sales controlling, and three months in sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for the business unit Packaging Machines (PA-PM).

During the second stage of my corporate phase, I will learn more about operational sales as well as product management. The IT and product knowledge already acquired can now be put to good use and become more profound.

I am currently still in the first stage and look back on six months of PreMaster Program. What is my personal development over this time and what have I learned?

I am confirmed in my decision for the PreMaster Program by my fast integration in the department, the chance of independent work and the previously gathered, valuable experience in technical sales. So far, Bosch has fully kept their commitment – now it is up to me to fulfill mine in the course of acquiring my master’s degree.

First and foremost, I improved my personal and time management by executing project activities: for example, with the highly responsible task of the worldwide evaluation of dealers. It comprises the evaluation of the PA dealerships (indirect sales) by our own sales organization (direct sales). The management, i.e. establishing an evaluation concept, preparation and dispatching the questionnaires, presentation of results as well as mailing of feedback letters (in German and English) to every dealership was handled by me in individual responsibility in close contact with my mentor.

Furthermore, I was able to enlarge my IT competence in a Customer Relationship Management training and my knowledge of PA products by participating in a product training at the ACHEMA fair in Frankfurt (see picture). When visiting plants (e.g. Viersen in North Rhine-Westphalia), I learned not only about the specific performance features of individual machine components but also processes and engineering of complete packaging machine lines.

In the day-to-day business, I am in charge of evaluations, analyses, presentations and other organizational work.

For more information on the PreMaster Program please visit www.bosch-career.de. 

The Author

Ivana Putnik graduated in Business Administration and Engineering at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany and is enrolled in the PreMasters Program in technical sales.

Career

40

Working within Bosch - an intern’s point of view

  Jan Knutzen

Working for a global company like Bosch means besides doing your daily business to identify yourself with the general values of the company. The values of Bosch are among others openness and trust, reliability, credibility and legality, and cultural diversity.

After six months of working experience as an intern within Bosch I can certainly say that these values are present every day.

Working in the purchasing department and being in constant contact with suppliers, openness and trust plays an important role for both parties involved. Without a good relationship based on openness and trust makes business more difficult.

Bosch stands for quality, which requires a high level of reliability for both products and employees.

While working in the company I faced continuously the need of good quality and a high level of performance. Bosch as a global and multinational company also lives from its cultural diversity. Although the routes of the company are German it is not absolutely necessary to speak German fluent. It is certainly an advantage but not a must. While working in Belgium I experienced at least four different languages every day, which were besides German and English the local spoken languages Dutch and French. No matter which nationality you are from, you personality and diversity will surely add value to the Bosch team.

By having Bosch as a corporate partner of ESTIEM gives the students being part of the European organization a lot of advantages and possibilities. Through ESTIEM I got into the company with the help of Torben Schumacher (ESTIEM President 1995) who is working as a Purchasing Manager at Robert Bosch GmbH in Germany. Thus an open position in the purchasing department of Bosch Belgium in Tienen was offered to me. During my internship of the duration of six months I got the opportunity to be part of the Bosch team and

I worked closely with my colleagues in their daily work. Being an intern at Bosch does certainly not mean to copy thousands of documents or making coffee for your boss, it means more to show your capabilities and use your skills to do a good job.

While I was working for the purchasing department my work can roughly be divided in three parts. The first one was working with daily issues of a purchaser like preparing information documents (e.g. drawings, parts lists, norms, etc.) for potential suppliers, comparing quotations and answering questions of suppliers. Secondly I worked closely with the Purchasing Controlling responsible of the site in Belgium. The controlling part was mainly about analyzing data from different electronic based sources and preparing monthly charts for the management. The third part of my experience as an intern was in the Purchasing Quality section.

Together with the Purchasing Quality Manager I was analyzing the existing concessions (i.e. a deviation of the required and the actual values of the produced parts) of the site and defining actions in order to reduce the number of concessions.

In order not to fill this article with all the details I have worked on, I just can summarize that Bosch offers you many opportunities in any field around the globe to work for a very successful company with daily challenges. If you are part of ESTIEM use this advantage and get in contact with graduated ESTIEMers working for Bosch or contact directly any Human Resources department of Bosch. They will be more than happy to provide you with any information or help you need. Apply rather today than tomorrow and you will have a challenging experience in the field that suits you best. 

41

Career

Internship at

But maybe I should start from the beginning. Sadly enough I have not been super-active in ESTIEM. I have helped arranging a TIMES semi-final with my LG (Linköping), participated in TIMES (in Grenoble) and I participated in the ESTIEM Summer Academy in 2007 with teacher Jim Platts (something I very much can recommend by the way). I have however been a subscriber to the ESTIEM Newsletter since maybe 2005 and when I got the internship ad for “Global Benchmarking” at Oerlikon Solar it was too tempting not to apply.

Simplified, Oerlikon Solar sells solar panel factories. The daughter company of Oerlikon OC does its own research on the thin film solar panels and develops the key machines in the solar panel factories. Oerlikon Solar sells the factories “turn-key”, meaning it also takes responsibility for that the factories have a certain capacity before they “hand over the keys to the factory”. The starting price for a factory being around a 100 millon USD it is quite obvious that the economic crises have struck the company hard. Money for investments is hard to find these days. The financial hardship also threatened my internship but after having spent a couple of week in the frustrating situation of having won the application process and still maybe not getting the chance to work, I could pack my bags and head down to Switzerland.

After a couple of days in the office I quickly noticed there was something special about Oerlikon Solar, or at least the people working there. Despite being in the country side right next to Liechtenstein, a 100km from Zürich the people working there come from literally all over the world. I have met people from France (both continental France and La Réunion), Australia, Japan, South America, Jordan, India and Norway. Most of the people are of course still from Switzerland, Austria and Germany but the atmosphere is very international and very open. My second week there I got invited to the “Trainee house” (yes you guessed right, it is where the visiting Oerlikon trainees live) for beer and barbeque offered on the house.

I have studied Supply Chain Management and Purchasing and it has been great to discover I could make use,during my internship, of some of what I have learned. Despite the economic downturn, the buyers in the SCM office are quite busy with the day to day tasks. My job has often been to put the extra hours into tasks that they havenot had time for. So far I have worked with linking the strategic goals of Oerlikon Solar with a specific supplier selection strategy. When I write this I am working with two SAP tools that are used for supplier rating and supplier benchmarking respectively. In addition, I am also looking into risk management connected to OerlikonSolar’s suppliers. All in all, I have been fortunate enough to work with many of the key fields in SCM and on a quite strategic level.

I would recommend anyone interested in a future career in SCM/Purchasing to do an internship at Oerlikon Solar. 

Erik Werner

If somebody would have told me that 3 hours into my internship at Oerlikon Solar I would start drawing up supplier selection strategies for one of their more advanced machines, I would have just laughed.

I had always heard that interns get to start slowly with the mundane tasks like doing research on the internet, prepare PowerPoint slides and crunch numbers in Excel. Nevertheless that is how my internship at the Supply Chain Management office at Oerlikon Solar started.

Career

42

My start @ oerlikon Nina Werner

As probably in any Industrial Engineering and Management program in Europe, an industrial internship is mandatory before graduating. After applying for internships in different places and companies in Europe I got lucky and got the spot at ESTIEM’s partner, OC Oerlikon.

As you can read in the previous ESTIEM Magazine, I’m not the f irst ESTIEMer to work for Oerlikon.

Ignacio Perez Prat, former Vice-President of Public Relations, Board 2007, was also an intern at Oerlikon in Corporate Investor Relations.

me another project that I had to be done with by the end of my internship. As in most companies, there is an intranet. Honestly, few people only use the one at Oerlikon, so my task was to create and implement a whole new Investor Relations section within the global intranet. By the end of my internship, I had created over twenty new pages ready to be launched. It was a great chance to work on my own project and collaborate with several colleagues and an external service provider. And this is just a glimpse of what I have been doing at Oerlikon.

A couple of days before my start, I spent one day at Oerlikon in Pfäffikon for a handover with Ignacio. It was great to know what my main tasks would be and get some tips and tricks even before I started! I do not know what I would have done without this handover since I was alone in Investor Relations for my first day. Both my supervisor, Roland Bischofberger, Manager Investor Relations, and Frank Heffter, Head of Corporate Investor Relations and ESTIEM Alumnus (Board 1993), were out of the office on business trips so I kept myself busy with the incoming emails and the various information Roland and Frank needed for their meetings. I also had to write a report on a customer that was sent to the CEO a couple of days later.

For the three months of my internship, I was fully integrated in the team and also in the whole company. I attended a few company events and it was a great opportunity to get to know better my colleagues from other departments. When you meet a colleague in a corridor or in the elevator, you say “Hi!” and have some small talk just to be polite because you actually don’t know the person.

But once you have shared something with these colleagues, you don’t say “Hi!” really the same way and you are always happy to see them. Therefore I believe it is important to make some efforts to get integrated in the company you work for. I have to say that I was much sadder than I expected when I left and I guess this is a good sign.

And all this just happened the very first day!

I can say that I was kept pretty busy during my whole stay and it was great. I guess not all internships are as interesting and I can imagine that you do not always feel like a regular employee, but that’s actually how I felt. I was mainly working on Competitive Intelligence, keeping track of what our competitors and customers were doing. In addition to the daily business, my supervisor assigned

For me, this was my first internship. I have been working in cafeterias, restaurants and clothing shops when I was a teenager to earn some money during the summer, but I cannot say it was the most exciting experience ever. After learning so much theory on the school benches, it’s great to finally understand why we have studied all these years, at least partly... 

Engineering

43

Career

A skills shortage ensures demand for engineers across Europe.

Skills recruiters look for

Engineering is one of the most international professions you can enter and Europe is host to some of the world’s top engineering organisations. All sectors of industry are present, from aerospace and automotive through construction, chemicals and energy to manufacturing, transport and utilities. Some of the well known European players include EADS, Siemens, Philips, Bayer, DaimlerChrysler, Vodafone, L’Oréal and Shell. The engineering profession offers you the opportunity to travel, work on exciting and innovative projects and get your hands dirty with practical work and responsibility early on in your career.

Cross-border qualifications

At present, there is no automatic recognition of any particular engineering qualification when an engineer leaves their country of qualification to work in another European country. European countries are divided into those that regulate access to the profession (more or less strongly) and those that do not. In the former case, an engineer who wants to use the professional title ‘engineer’ in the country where they wish to work must approach the relevant authorities in that country with a request for recognition.

The European Union countries have agreed on a process called ‘the formation’ of a professional engineer, which takes seven years and includes education, initial training and competence gained through experience, and this forms the basis of the Fédération Européenne d’Associations Nationales d’Ingénieurs (FEANI)’s EUR ING qualification.

This qualification is recognised in 26 European countries; the MEng degree studied in the UK is also widely accepted as a strong educational foundation for engineering professionals. Some countries, such as France, place an emphasis on students completing industrial training during their degree, while it is usual for students in the UK to gain most of their industrial experience after the completion of a degree. However, it is becoming increasingly important for students to have gained some practi-

cal experience in the workplace prior to graduation to demonstrate to employers that they can put theory into practice.

• Commitment, enthusiasm and motivation are essential for success in engineering.

• Engineers rarely work in isolation, so being able to work well in a team, support

Graduate opportunities

others and share knowledge is essential.

A shortage of engineering skills across Europe is good news for graduates, who can market their skills to a larger number of employers in an increasing number of countries. The UK in particular is facing a shortage of civil engineers, a shortage that the government is trying to fill by relaxing work permit rules to allow overseas graduates to take up positions. It is also expected that there will be a future shortage of engineers in the telecommunications and automotive industries, while Hungary and Slovakia are fast becoming centres of excellence for assembly and research and development, opening up the engineering economy in eastern and central Europe.

• Taking the initiative and exhibiting a strong work ethic will get you noticed.

• As international projects become more complex and demanding great project management skills are key. You must also be able to motivate teams to achieve goals and adapt to meet the needs of the customer while remaining focused on the overall goal of making a profit.

• Effective communication is crucial for engineering businesses to operate productively.

• Engineers need to produce solutions to meet a commercial need, so knowledge of what is going on in the market is as

Engineering the future

important as keeping up to date with the

The need to guard the environment for the sake of both the planet and society is by far the most important issue facing the European engineering sector. Engineers are actively involved in developing technology and processes to support sustainable development aims, such as the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions through the research and development of alternative power sources and fuels. Environmental engineering is a relatively new profession but one that will increase in importance in the future. There are opportunities in this area for engineers across the spread of disciplines: for example, electrical and electronic engineers are needed to design the instrumentation used to monitor and control the release of pollutants. There are also more specialised requirements for land remediation, energy management and the development of cleaner technologies. Renewable energy technology is receiving a lot of attention and presents interesting challenges for engineers. 

latest technology developments.

In the news • The military and government technology industry has remained stable in the economic downturn and this stability may provide opportunities for strong engineering candidates.

• The UK Innovation Investment Fund has proposed the creation of a Europe-wide technology fund.

If implemented, this could lead to strong European technology links, and opportunities for graduates to work throughout Europe.

• A number of large European engineering companies have signed

This article first appeared in TARGETjobs Europe 2010

.com

up to a transcontinental renewableenergy project which will harvest wind and solar energy from the Sahara desert. This massive project may provide work opportunities for European companies both in Europe and abroad.

Career

44

Chatting your way to a successful career start – a sample case

“…So what exactly is it that you do for living? What is your area of work and which responsibilities do you bear?”

Christian Seyfarth

These or similar, are predominantly the questions that I am confronted with in either private or business life. The answer is both simple and difficult: I work in project management, as everybody does, more or less…More precisely, I support one of the major German industrial manufacturing companies, ThyssenKrupp in their endeavor to plan, build, and ramp-up a multi-billion dollar production facility in the United States. As if this would not be challenging enough by its nature, current economic conditions made it even more demanding; not allowing a big-spender-mentality and crying for flexible, customer oriented solutions more than ever before.

I officially graduated in early spring 2008 from the Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany.

After pretty much focusing on the straight path through studies for the first two years, I started peeking beyond my own nose by being sent to an ESTIEM Council Meeting in Istanbul (Local Group ITU) in autumn 2004. As it happens, this was triggered mainly by external influence than own impetus. Over the years, I tried myself in different areas, from Vision to Summer Academy, contributing here and there, to eventually become Committee Leader for TIMES in 2007, a position I held until just before graduation. Parallel to my studies, I worked for a green field project in Germany within project and process management and got to know many people to further increase my network. The contacts I made there, eventually brought me to my current occupation and I was offered to move on and join the ThyssenKrupp project before the company officially started to fill positions through external sources.

“ESTIEM is an exciting network of open-minded students with a professional approach.” This has been the key-identifier for ESTIEM for many years

and so many people have used that phrase in their email signature. In my eyes, especially the openmindedness in conjunction with the networking aspect can go a long way in one’s path to success.

I could certainly dive deeply into the experience I gained from being involved in and partially being responsible for many different activities and tasks throughout my time as an active ESTIEMer. However, the more important factor to me is the subliminal lesson I learned from simply “mingling” with others. Contributing to or even managing projects successfully (within ESTIEM) is one thing but getting along with people on a beyond-work level, is the cherry on top of the cake.

Collaborating with others and working in teams is not easy. One has to share responsibilities, rely on others and often yield to someone’s arguments.

When group work in addition crosses linguistic, cultural, and educational thresholds, it becomes more nerve-wracking and complexity increases.

Coming full circle, this is what I now experience every single day in my job as a “Program Advisor”.

It is my task to gather different people around one table, mediate between them, moderate. The variety of topics can be vast and time pressure often varies. Having experienced these situations before and being able to communicate outside the theater of war has helped me a lot in this regard. I am by far not perfect in controlling my temper, staying neutral in some discussions and how could I, with just a couple of years on the record? However, the experience of four years within ESTIEM might have left me with some scars but it certainly endowed me with a solid basis for what I do today. Therefore, I can only advise anybody who made it all the way to the very bottom of this article: go out, practice networking and mingle with others. Cross the borders of your natural habitat and use the ESTIEM playground to develop yourself towards a successful start into a professional career! 

45

Career

Successful ESTIEMers What makes people successful? Is it the money, the fame or the opportunities they never missed?

Whatever your definition might be, some stories help you to become as successful as you can be whatever you choose. As we all work towards creating our best future, the example of others can inspire us. Martin Schimpke is 41 years old and has been working for almost 15 years in consultancy. What made his life a success? We invite you to find out in the following interview.

Interview with

Martin Schimpke

What impact did ESTIEM have on your student life and on you as a person?

What was the influence that you had on ESTIEM in the very beginning?

By coincidence I took part in the very first ESTIEM international meeting in 1990, when a

You were the president of ESTIEM in the board 1992! Do you remember what pushed you towards this decision? And how was it being the President of ESTIEM?

There is a huge difference between watching and playing football or being part of a student organisation for that matter. You get the real learning

  Dana Nastase   Melania Mateias

One could say that the impact has been substantial: I met my Spanish wife at a conference in Madrid that I attended on behalf of ESTIEM. And today I run the consulting company Arkwright together with Ingolf Putzbach who was ESTIEM president in 1993, making Arkwright probably the company with the highest ESTIEM president density there is.

couple of IEM students from Europe met in the Interviewed by youth hostel in Darmstadt to discuss the possibility of starting a European network. As I was still in the early days of my studies, this enabled me to participate actively in the first 10 council meetings of ESTIEM and to visit nearly all member universities.

Career

46

experience by taking an active role in ESTIEM. At the ESTIEM Council Meeting in Helsinki in autumn 1991, we managed to put together a great board, so the choice to run for president was quite simple.

Since I was the only candidate, I also felt quite comfortable about my chances of winning.

where I am still today.

ESTIEMers need to hear about success stories! You seem to have one! You are now a senior professional at Arkwright! Could you tell us a bit more about this company?

It is always fun participating at international events, but through ESTIEM you can get hands-on experience at organising (and, often just as important, financing) these activities. For example, for me it proved quite a challenge giving a presentation on the benefits of international student organisations in front of 400 EU delegates, or being part of the organising committee preparing the TQM vision which entailed putting together a study tour on quality management to Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan and the US.

Arkwright was founded in 1987 by four individuals working for Bain & Company, all of them with a Scandinavian background. We focus on giving companies strategic advice, i.e. to help them make the right long-term oriented decisions. To me, Arkwright is the perfect combination of a relatively small company (where everyone knows everyone and there are few bureaucratic hassles), a sound professional environment (great colleagues from across Europe, outstanding customers) and the chance of not merely being an employee but also an active shareholder.

How did your life after ESTIEM look like?

Why Arkwright?

I worked on a regular basis for one of the larger consulting companies during my studies already. I decided, however, that I would prefer to start my career within an old-fashioned industrial company.

There I realised that consulting is my real passion.

For quite some time I then worked as a “one-man consulting show” in the field of quality management which is highly interesting and also financially rewarding (when you have the right customers). I did feel, however, that I was too young and inexperienced not to work together with other outstanding individuals so I joined Arkwright in 1997 and that is

Again, ESTIEM played a role: I came to Hamburg for a job interview at another company and stayed at Ingolf’s place. So kind of by accident, I got to know more about Arkwright and decided that this is the company I want to work for!

Are there any other ESTIEMers working for Arkwright Group? At least some that you are aware of?

After having grown quite strongly since 2002, we now have more than 20 consultants in our Hamburg and Zürich offices. Nearly two-thirds of our consultants have an IEM background, and many

47

of them have been very active ESTIEMers. It is great to see several generations of ESTIEMers reunited within one company.

The active ESTIEMers are always afraid that time and age would kill the ESTIEM Spirit! Tell us a bit about the ESTIEM Alumni Network! Does it impact your life?

There is no doubt that time is a limiting factor and the urge to constantly meet new people does decrease when you get older. The basic spirit, however, is still there. Just this year I attended the ESTIEM Alumni Meeting in Zürich and it felt great having to perform “Climb, climb up sunshine mountain” for having arrived late for the morning session.

Martin Schimpke was the President of ESTIEM Board 1992.

He joined Arkwright 10 years ago after having gained both consulting and industrial experience.

As Managing Director for Arkwright’s Hamburg and Swiss offices, Martin’s professional focus lies within the Media industry. He has also worked extensively in the Financial Services, IT/ Telecom, Manufacturing, and Process industries.

Martin holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technical University Darmstadt. He also studied in the Netherlands in Delft and Eindhoven.

What three important pieces of advice would you give to ESTIEMers?

Do not just study to get a degree, enjoy what you do, this will make your life much

easier! Being actively involved in something like ESTIEM means both fun and opportunity

When choosing your first post-graduate job, take the one where you can learn the

most in an area that you are really interested in

Don´t listen to advice from older ESTIEM graduates 

Career

48 Student Guide Featured Story:

Experiences from the “Playa de Postiguet”,

Alicante, Spain

Henning Böge

You decided to go abroad for one semester?

- Great idea!

You want to go to Spain?

- Even better!

You chose Alicante?

- You hit the bull’s-eye!!!

language skills were very limited when I got there it would have been really hard to pass exams with a good score after just 5 months of Spanish anyway. I was glad that I could now focus more on language classes, traveling around in the country and getting to know many different students, not only Spaniards but also many other internationals.

It is always easy to decide to spend a semester abroad but the first problem that you will come across is: “Where should I go?”

Now that I described the background of my semester abroad, I will discuss the reasons which, in my point of view, make Alicante unique. The first thing that comes to my mind is the beaches. On the one hand the “Playa de Postiguet” is an amazing beach with white sand, a wonderful blue sea and what makes it even better, it is nearly impossible to have an apartment more than 15 min away from it, by foot of course. On the other hand it is not as crowded as expected. Most of the tourists who spend their holidays at the Costa Blanca are in the hotels outside of Alicante and not inside the city.

If you want it to be quieter there is an even more beautiful beach right outside the city and it is very easy to reach by metro.

I made up my mind and due to the comfort of the ERAMUS program I decided to stay in Europe for my semester abroad. As I am from the north of Germany I thought about going somewhere south, and ended up choosing Spain as my preferred country.

When you break it down to a country, you normally do not have that many choices left due to the limited partner programs of the universities. I hope those great guys from Seville do not take it personal but I could not resist the beautiful beaches of the Costa Blanca. So I was on my way to Alicante and stayed there from January ’07 till July.

My home university in Braunschweig gave me the opportunity to take exams in Germany after coming back in the summer, which took a lot of pressure off of me to pass many exams in Spain without risking to lose a semester. As my Spanish

Another point which makes it unique and a perfect place to meet and stay in contact with many students from other countries is the barrio. This is the old part of Alicante with small lanes and packed with bars and cafés. During the day you can sit outside having a coffee or a caña (a small drafted beer) and at night it turns to the hot spot of nightlife in Alicante. So, if you want to meet friends from

49

the university it is sometimes easier to just go to the barrio than call them because after a couple of minutes you would have met at least ten people you know anyway.

Every time you think about Alicante, the Castillo has to come to your mind. The castle has its origins in the 9th century and was built on a hill directly in the center of Alicante. The bad part about it is that you have to climb it every time you have visitors coming but whenever you pass it, which happens a couple of times every day, you feel like it makes your day a little bit better.

As life is not just holiday and party I have to drop you a few lines about the University of Alicante or Universitat d’Alacant (in Catalan).

First of all: I have never seen a campus like this.

The buildings are very new and in good condition and the campus just exists out of green parks, orange and palm trees, cacti, to sum it up, it is amazing. If you think you will not make it to university because the weather is very nice and you want to go to the beach, I promise you that you will be torn between going to university or to the beach. Having some classes and meeting some friends is not too bad and afterwards just sitting under a palm tree in the shadow and doing homework could even be fun under those circumstances.

Of course after all these great things about Alicante there are other things which are not bad but what you should be aware of. First thing is: Do not think that you will ever get along with just English somewhere. Just because somebody works in the international office or at a tourist information office does not mean that he speaks more than just a few words of English. But the good thing about Spain is that somehow everything works out in the end. There is never a “cannot be done”. Also do not think that you will sign a rental agreement.

As I am from Germany where everything has to be in order and on time I got a very different focus on how daily life could be without all those rules.

Sometimes it is hard when you’re not used with it all, but it is always a good experience.

So after each time that somebody asks me about going abroad, I tell him to go to Alicante. Go there, broaden your horizon! ESTIEM taught me that life is too short to waste with sitting at home studying/ working all the time, and Alicante taught me those same things! 

STUDent Guide

Student Guide

50

Education System in Portugal

Joao Barata

This article aims at giving its reader some impressions about Lisbon and its ESTIEM-member university, the Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (Technical Superior Institute of TU Lisbon), and how the proximity to the shoreline affects its students.

However, be careful! Although you might feel like you are on holidays due to the temperature, you still have lectures and exams to attend. All these reasons justify the well-known fact that autumn semester has higher approval rates than the spring one.

The Técnico has two campuses: one in the heart of Lisbon named Alameda campus. The other one, where Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) lectures are given, is located outside of Lisbon, fifteen kilometers westwards on a science and enterprise park called Taguspark, something like the Portuguese Silicon Valley.

IST is the most renowned Portuguese faculty, being a part of CLUSTER (Consortium Linking Universities of Science, Technology and Research).

We have successfully implemented the Bologna Treaty, offering now an Undergraduate course on IEM studies with the length of 3 years, course given in Portuguese. This course has about 45 students per year. On this Undergraduate Course, you will have the basics of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) studies, both on the Engineering part (Mathematics, Physics and Engineering Elements) and the Management part (Financial, Accounting, Decision Analysis and more). And you do not have to attend internships in order to conclude the 180 ECTS Credits Bachelor on IEM, like in some other European Universities.

Some might say that our IEM course has been marginalized by being placed outside the vibrant and quite beautiful Lisbon. And we might even feel that on those windy winters. However, when spring comes, we are just 10 minutes away from the twenty-five kilometers wide of ‘Linha de Cascais’ (Cascais Shoreline).

But how does exactly the proximity of the shoreline affects us, students? A lot! We are much happier on the spring term. If we end our lectures by the end of the morning, we have lunch and go studying to an esplanade. As long as you are catching some of the luminous Portuguese sun, you enjoy it; even if you are studying on the beach (a lot of people do so). This is what is happening with all of us students right now, by the end of March (In fact, this article has been written on the beach. I got to work on my sun tan…).

When summer approaches, it is just impossible not to feel the proximity of the beach even in your classroom, where you see everyone using swimwear instead of normal clothing. (You do not exactly attend lectures on beach shorts, or with bikinis, but almost!). Nevertheless, it is rare and very uncommon to see people wearing formal clothing. Even some professors lighten up their formal dressing style!

The Masters’ Course is given 100% in English, and it counts about 100 students. The Thesis introduction is probably what differentiates this course from the others: you will have to work on the Introduction of your thesis on the autumn semester of the 2nd year. Also, you can choose some subjects from a list of available ones during the Masters.

Tuition fees are approximately 900€ per school year, both for the BSc and the MSc. Another piece of advice if you are considering studying in IST: there are no student residences outside Lisbon, and I would not recommend you to live inside Lisbon. Try getting a house near Oeiras or São Marcos: Near the beach, and 20 minutes by train from Lisbon. You can have the best of Portugal by doing this!

And we really hope that you do!

51

STUDent Guide

Featured University Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta Island in the Mediterranean… That’s where Famagusta is located, in the northern part of the island. It hosts the biggest university called “Eastern Mediterranean University” with students coming from 68 countries and highly qualified faculty members from 35 different nations.

Our University owns unique campus facilities, and creates a great multicultural environment. With the modern understanding of education shared by all, we are trained as individuals thoroughly learned. Thanks to the high support for acquiring excellent research skills, one can generate new knowledge, be aware of and meticulous about environmental issues, and be creative, confident and ready to compete with the world youth.

The Department of Industrial Engineering

The Industrial Engineering Department was founded in the Academic Year 1994-95 as a branch of the faculty of Engineering. Our department is a close follower of all the innovations and developments in the fields of technology and science.

The most important aspect in our department at Eastern Mediterranean University, is the perfect harmony and dialog between the students and the faculty. We have a close contact with the faculty members. Hence we can easily come up with fresh ideas to solve both academic and career-related problems. Therefore, for those who wonder how it would be to study by the Mediterranean, I strongly recommend you to spend at least one semester here. And for those who never thought of this, I can just tell you that it is time to start thinking about it .

Social Life

From different activities organized by university administration to the many other activities created by us, the students, we have a lot of opportunities to enjoy our student lives. Besides specially organized activities, there are many pubs&bars near the university campus and lots of beautiful restaurants to taste various kinds of food. Also there are lost of sport facilities inside the campus. Another important aspect about the university is that you can see more than thirty nations in the campus. This makes the life around here more and more exciting and of course more enjoable. Just as we experienced in ESTIEM, multinational meetings always end with different memories, and we have the chance to experience these different memories very often here.

Studying in here is joyful in both fall and spring semesters! However, we prefer the spring semester because the whole campus is very green and you can see students lying on the grasses and having fun so often…Unfortunately the weather tempts you to skip some classes :). From the beginning of May, the campus moves to the beaches.

The time we spend in this splendid Mediterranean sea is delightful and one of the main satisfactions to be on the Island.

As a result we could suggest you to come to study as an exchange student or visit Famagusta in spring. As the university’s teaching language is English, it won’t be a problem for you! 

Selda Yildirim

Established in 1979, the Eastern Mediterranean University offers education to more than 15.000 students from 68 different countries, with around 1000 faculty members who have joined EMU from 35 different countries and who are professionals in their fields. It is a global university through the 7 Faculties, 2 Schools and the English Preparatory School.

Student Guide

52

Cultural

- on Finns

COLD - SAUNA - VODKA - SILENCE

Alexander Hornung

“Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream?

Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, the land of dreams. Some dreams come true; some don’t, but keep on dreamin’. This is Hollywood.Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin’.” (Pretty Woman – 1990)

Oh my God! I am in Finland! No dreams anymore! – Actually I was not thinking that.

But an exchange year is kind of a dream for most students. So, can you, as a foreigner, achieve your dream in Finland? You never know…

Hello, people call me Alex and in the rest of this article you will read about some of my “fieldresearch” about Finnish people. Originally from a small town in the heart of Bavaria, Germany, I found my way during my studies to Finland for the International Business Linkage Program (IBLP) at the Helsinki University of Technology.

Finland is not just the nice old city of Helsinki and the tourism-glorified Mökki-idyll. Sometimes there are really weird things going on. Genders are equal – not just in daily life, but also in the language, which by the way is just used to process only the essential part of information. Why should you talk when you can enjoy the silence? Most foreigners have huge problems when experiencing this culture shock and they might even think the whole country is rude and unfriendly. Foreign

people’s understanding of “politeness” might also sometimes tremble when hearing the news that there is no word for “please” in the whole Finnish language.

Finns are playing all sorts of crazy sports. They are carrying their wives around, throwing rubber boots and are playing kyykkä (a karelian team sport). But enough moaning. A Finn would never do that. Finns have “Sisu” (and they are proud of that). Their “Sisu” let them dive in an ice hole at -20°C. You should never compete against Finns in a sauna; their “Sisu” will always make them stay longer than you.

One cannot talk of the “level” of crime in Finland, as there is almost no such thing as crime.

Of course you can leave your laptop, keys, etc. at a seminar room and go for lunch, come back and everything will be there just as you left it. This

53

Prejudice is also proven with Transparency International, ranking Finland on a shared 1st place in its annual report of 2007. Corruption and such things are a thing of the past in Finland. They are having what I call Corruption 2.0, which is Networking!

Everybody knows each other. The university is highly connected with all kinds of businesses, so it happens quite often that your assignments have some real business background.

But back to my initial topic. I did not like preconceived opinions. Both exchange and Finnish students had prejudices towards each other.

Together with my colleagues from the IBLP we experienced that a cultural prejudice can fit to a crowd of people, but usually not to individuals as their characters are based on personal behavior.

One lesson I took from the program was that prejudices are not necessarily a bad thing. Being aware of them simply helps to understand your counterpart better.

Was it a dream? I experienced that it is actually quite possible to adopt Finnish behavior a little, so I can honestly say I loved it. To rephrase the proverb of my home-university: Finland is what YOU make out of it! 

STUDent Guide

AGENDA

Check the latest updated event information at www.estiem.org and register for your favourite events through the ESTIEM portal. See you somewhere in Europe!

NOVEMBER

10 – 15 Nov Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Belgrade “Communication for the Future”

16 – 21 Nov Activity Week | Brussels

25 – 29 Nov Regional Coordination Meeting | Seville 29 Nov – 5 Dec Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Kaiserslautern to Karlsruhe “Me, You and the Machine”

JANUARY

9 –12 Jan Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Lappeenranta “Communication over Boarders”

13 – 17 Jan TIMES Semi Final | Braunschweig

MARCH

9 – 14 Mar Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Vaasa “Developing Communication Skills between Business Partners”

14 – 18 Mar Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Hamburg “Catchy Advertising - Get your Massage across”

17 – 21 Mar Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Novi Sad “Any Time. Any Place. Do it Wireless”

22 – 28 Mar Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Linköping “Presentation Skills in Focus”

22 – 26 Mar TIMES Final | Ilmenau 31 Mar – 4 Apr Vision - Efficiency in Communication | St. Petersburg “International Communication. Lost in Translation” 30 Mar – 4 Apr Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Eindhoven Final Conference

DECEMBER

5 –13 Dez Handover Board Meeting | Seville

FEBRUARY

1 – 6 Feb Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Lyon “Convincing People”

2 – 6 Feb TIMES Semi Final | Gothenburg

4 – 7 Feb Activity Week | Lund “Convincing People”

10 – 14 Feb TIMES Semi Final | Eindhoven

12 – 16 Feb TIMES Semi Final | Sofia

15 – 19 Feb TIMES Semi Final | Lisbon

16 – 21 Feb Vision - Efficiency in Communication | Trondheim “Communication Solutions of Tomorrow”

19 – 22 Feb TIMES Semi Final | Ankara-Bilkent

APRIL

27 Apr – 2 May XXXX Council Meeting | Porto

MAY

17 – 22 May Local Responsible Forum | Groningen 23 – 26 May Activity Week | Bremen

Master’s Programme in Service Management and Engineering In modern economies, services are becoming increasingly important. Service elements are added to products, service–based business models are adopted by manufacturers, and new innovative service concepts and systems are emerging and developing rapidly. The Master’s Degree Programme in Service Management and Engineering aims at providing the participants with a solid basic knowledge on the key issues of the field. It focuses on service design and production with the help of information and communication technologies. The programme places emphasis on customer involvement and productive assets; its lectures, design and implementation are designed to promote a systemic and interactive view of services.

http://serveng.tkk.fi/

INTERNATIONAL MASTER’S PROGRAMME IN BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY

markets. Multinational companies and innovative

Would you like to be one of them?

Come and study in Tampere Finland!

start-ups around the world require talented

Yearly application period: December 1st-March 31st.

Today’s business world demands engineers capable of managing businesses in global

business graduates with an intercultural mindset and understanding of new technologies.

Find out more at:

www.tut.fi/tsbt

Kn\\^ll8lmhkb^l8]hgÁm8cnlm8aZii^g La^r8Zk^8fZ]^

:Z\a^ehkÁl8]^`k^^8ng]^k8rhnk8[^em8¨8 EZlm^kÁl8]^`k^^8bg8fbg] Obma8 hnk8 Hk^EZlm^k8 Hkh`kZf8 p^8 Z\mbo^er8 lniihkm8 rhn8 phkdbg`8 mhpZk]8 rhnk8 EZlm^kÁl8 ]^`k^^ 8La^8\hf[bgZmbhg8h_8ikZ\mb\Ze8^qi^kb^g\^8Zg]8ma^hk^mb\Ze8dghpe^]`^8bl8hg^8h_8 ma^8 ln\\^ll8 _Z\mhkl8 _hk8 rhnk8 _nkma^k8 ]^o^ehif^gm 8 Zl8 p^ee8 Zl8 i^klhgZe8 f^gmhkbg`8 Zg]8 \Zk^^k8g^mphkdbg` 8<h8rhn8Z\\^im8ma^8\aZee^g`^ 8@^k^8bl8rhnk8\aZg\^ EZd^8bm8aZii^g 8Obma8nl >bg]8ma^8\hfie^m^8bg_hkfZmbhg8hg8Hk^EZlm^k8Hkh`kZf8hg8ma^8p^[lbm^ ppp [hl\a¦\Zk^^k ]^88