Courses in CBS / Jenna

Hallo!

In this post I'm going to tell you something about all the courses that I am taking here at Cologne Business School this semester. I'm just going to introduce them shortly and tell my opinion of them.

All together I have 9 courses this fall. At CBS almost all of the courses belong to a module of two courses. In order to get a grade for the module, we need to pass both of the courses in it. And we cannot choose only one course from a module, it is mandatory to choose both of them! And inside the module, the other course has an exam and the other a coursework.

Organizational Behavior

The name of this course didn't really imply to me at all in the beginning of what the course is about. So I didn't really expect anything, when going to the first class. Luckily it turned out to be really nice! The course is about organizational behavior, so basically it is all about the people inside an organization. The course is kind of a combination of psychology and management. I find the course very interesting! The subject itself is interesting and also the teacher is very good, so I like this course a lot! And this is something that I haven't studied before, so I have learned a lot of new things! Luckily the course is good, because it is held on the worst possible time, Monday mornings at 8.45 :D This course belongs to the same module with Consulting Process -course, which I will tell about next.

Consulting Process

This course as the name suggests is about consulting and actually I chose the module because of this course. I found consulting interesting and have even considered it as a future profession, so I really wanted to take part in this course to learn more about it! During the course we are doing a huge coursework which is a lot of work! The project's aim is to create a strategy to better attract international students to CBS. In the project we are divided into smaller groups that will research different areas in order to create the strategy. I am in the competition group and our task is to research the competitors of CBS and to compare them to find out how CBS could improve it's competitive advantage.  We are doing the coursework like it was an actual project of a consulting agency. We are really learning what it is going to be like to work as a consultant. 

Ar first I thought that this is really interesting and that this really might be my thing, but as we went forward with the work, I started to doubt the idea of being an consultant. The work that I am doing now is basically just research and that is definitely something that I don't want to do in my future. Of course the position that you have in the company has an effect on the work you will do. So for example being a project manager would be totally different than working as a "junior consultant".  But still I know that just doing research is definitely not my thing! Still I do like the course and I feel that I am learning a lot! The teacher of the course is expecting a lot from the students and she is also really precise about the results of our work. 

Tourism Geography

Tourism Geography -course belongs to the same module with Event Management and I chose this module basically because of the Event Management -course. So this course really wasn't the one that interested me, but I still had to take it. I wasn't really expecting anything from the course, but I went there with a positive attitude, thinking it might be good. At first I thought that I had gone back to elementary school's geography class....:D In the beginning the teacher was telling us about the time zones, the continents and that when it is winter in Germany it is summer in Australia......It was hilarious, like don't they learn this stuff in the elementary school like we do....:D:D

Yeah, but after that we actually have talked about some real stuff related to tourism. For example how the climate change affects tourism and the other way around, and now we are looking at tourism in each of the continents one at a time. First this course felt like it was just waste of my time, but now I feel like it will get more interesting all the time. The subject itself isn't that challenging, but it is quite nice to have at least one course you don't have to worry about :D We are going to have an exam about this course at the end of the semester. 

Event Management

Event Management -course is the one that I was interested about and it definitely has reached my expectations. I really wanted to learn about event management, since we can't study it at my own school in Oulu. I have always been interested about event management so this was the perfect opportunity for me to learn about it. I have also considered event management as a future profession and this course has given me plenty of new information related to that! And after learning this info I am still considering it.. :)

The course has been really good and I have learnt a lot! The teacher of the course is also good and I like her teaching methods. She always gives us print outs and we have to write some stuff of the slides to the print out during the class, this way it is easier to stay focused. We are going to do a coursework of some kind during the course.

International Marketing

I had some doubts about taking the international marketing -course, since I feel like marketing is the only thing that we have been studying in Finland. We have had like 4 different courses about marketing and I really didn't want to hear the same things all over again...and why I chose this course if I don't want to hear the same stuff again, is that it belongs to the same module with International Human Resource Management and I needed to take that course. Luckily it turned out that I don't have  to hear the same stuff again.

The course is really interesting, especially the teacher is very good! He has his own way of teaching which is so good! He explains things by giving very simple examples and telling stories about normal life. He really knows how to teach. And also the course has a totally different perspective to international marketing than we have learned before. We are looking at marketing as a way of engaging people and trying to fulfill the expectations and needs of the customers not just trying to sell as much as possible. We are taking the customer side and really taking into consideration the customer. During the course we are doing a group work, which is to create a market entry strategy for a chosen company to entry a whole new market. Our group chose the grocery store Aldi and we want to create it a market entry plan for Finland. 

International Human Resource Management

This was the course that I should take now, so then I don't have to take it in Finland in the spring term. The course itself turned out to be okay. We have two teachers in the course which makes it a bit more difficult to learn. You can imagine having exam questions from two different teachers, you really don't know what to expect..:D

In my opinion the course is poorly planned. In each of the weekly classes there is so much theory that you really cannot handle that much information at once. The other teacher is pretty good, the only problem is that she speaks so fast and with all the information you just feel overwhelmed after the class. To be fair, I think she has good teaching methods. In the beginning of the class she always tells the learning objectives for the session and then in the end she also has few main question we should now how to answer based on the lecture. I find this a really good way of learning, but I wish there wouldn't be that much information stuffed in one class.

The other teacher of the course has a totally different way of teaching. She doesn't seem that comfortable teaching and she only reads all the information straight from the slides and doesn't explain anything. Unfortunately this makes it quite difficult to learn. We are having an exam of this course and there is going to be a lot of reading since we have 3 course books (not the whole book, but specific chapters) for it! :D

International Procurement

This course was also one that we were going to have after christmas in Finland, so we decided to choose it now that we don't have to take in the spring. I have already had a course in Finland called Purchasing and Procurement, so I had an idea what the course is about. The course has been solely about theory and just listening to the teacher. All of the classes are just theory and examples by the teacher and it isn't at all interactive. Because it is only about the teacher speaking, you really need to concentrate to learn something. I was hoping it to be more interactive, since it makes the learning more easy.

Comparative International Management

Comparative International Management is a course that I already have told you about briefly in the Trivago visit post. In this course we have learned about different management theories and we also have 3 company visits planned. One of the visits was the Trivago which I told about and then we are also going to visit the Köln-Bonn airport and Ford. In my opinion these company visits are a very good idea to help students learn the theory in practice. We actually have to write reports of all the visits and reflect the theory we have learned in class to the practice we see in the visits.

I think this course is really interesting and I am happy that I "had" to go to it. I actually did not choose this course but another management course, I didn't fit to the course I originally chose so then the school put me on this course! :D I very much wanted to learn about management since in Finland we don't have any management classes and I am interested in it a lot. 

German as a Foreign Language B1+

An important part of coming to Germany for an exchange period for me is to learn to speak German. So of course I chose the German course! In the beginning of the semester we had a placement test to see at what level we are in the German language. Based on the test (written and oral) we were divided into small groups. Me and Maiju ended up in the same group B1+, to get an idea what that means all the levels are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 ,C2. So basically we are in the middle. The classes have been okay, we have focused on speaking the language and also we have looked at some grammar. But mainly we are trying to improve our speaking, which is just what I want to do! 

So there they were all my courses here in Köln! Hopefully some of you could finish reading all that text :D As a summary, I am actually very happy with my courses. They all are quite different, so I am learning things from different areas which is always good for the future! I also find most of the course interesting and want to learn more about the issues. Of course there is a lot of work, but I guess there needs to be in order to learn! 

In the next post we are telling about when we went to the movies here in Köln!

Bis bald!

Jenna

Courses in CBS / Maiju

Hallo!

In this post I (Maiju) am going to tell about my courses here in Cologne Business School. I am going to tell you what the course is about, how I like it and how useful I find it.

Some courses are made into a module: this means you need to take part of the both courses in the module and you need to pass both of them in order to get a grade from both of the courses.
One class lasts 90 minutes and we have every course once in a week.
I am going to study 30 credits during the stay here in Köln. Here are the courses I am having!


Tourism Geography

This course is about tourism in the world: how it was in the past, now and will be in the future, what is a tourist, what is tourism, where people go and why, how does it affect people and the world's economy... But also (what I find stupid and not relevant at all) geography: we really have been talking about time zones of the world, names of the countries and so on. In my opinion they belong to the elementary school, at least I learned them then. So when it comes to my professional knowledge, this course is not useful for me at all. We have had one assignment so far and I needed to do a country presentation about Finland. Yeah.

The teacher is nice and easy to listen. He is a real professional: knows a lot and also is having an ongoing discussion with us students all the time. Such a harm that he does not teach any other courses for me :D

Event Management

Like the name says, this course is about how to manage events. At first we talked about events generally: what is an event, what kind of events are there, why people make events, what can you achieve by having an event.. Now we have moved into more specific information, such as what do you need to consider when arranging an event. We have also had one small assignment: We were a marketing team in a brand and we would like to promote our new product in an event. We needed to represent our ideas of the event (where, when, why, budget, ways to attract people, how to market it..) to an event management team.

The course is nice, not too hard and the teacher is good. She always gives us handouts in the class and we need to make notes in them. It is good: you need to concentrate and follow the teaching all the time to catch the needed information to the papers. On the other hand now we have loooots of paper because she gives like 10 pages every time :D

Intercultural Management

This course is about cultural differences: how people from different cultures behave and how to handle with those differences when doing business together.
The whole course so far has been about Hofstede and his cultural dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance etc..). I really do find cultural differences interesting and I want to understand how people behave in a certain way. It is interesting to notice how behavior of people can be explained with some person's research.

For me unfortunately this course is nothing new. I have had two similar courses already in Finland, so everything is something I already know. And you might think now, why have I taken these courses if I already know the topic? I did not take this. I made my choices before coming to Germany but apparently I did not fit into some courses and I was just put into some other random ones in order to achieve 30 credits during the semester. Not so nice but what can you do :/

Country presentations in this course are nice! Some girl made a presentation about Finland and it was really interesting and funny to listen :) And she did it really good.

German B1+

I am taking a German language course in order to make my language skills better during the stay here :) At first we had a language test and after that  we were split into different groups depending on your level of knowledge. I was put in B1+ group, because my level is B2.

The teacher of the course is really nice and good: I am never bored at the classes and she is easy to follow. We are never speaking English and actually the teacher does not even speak it very well. Every time we do not know some word or expression in German, the teacher explains it in other words but still in German.
We speak a lot during the classes, do different speaking exercises (for example a job interview), play games (for example explain this word= Alias) but in my opinion the course book is not very good. It has just a small touch on grammar and it is not explained very well. The teacher gives us homework to do those written exercises but many times they are hard to do because we did not handle them that much at class. Furthermore the book is handling not so relevant themes for us, such as marriage, relationships and other family issues at the moment. It would be nice to know vocabulary from working life and business world: in my opinion they are more important for me to learn at the moment.
Of course the course has been helping me: I am not that afraid to speak German anymore and the words are coming out more easily than before. But when it comes to grammar and vocabulary, I have been learning more just by speaking the language and listening to each other when walking in town, grocery shopping etc.. Other students in the same course have already said to the teacher that we would like to concentrate more on business life vocabulary and grammar so we will see if there is going to be a change!

International Procurement

This course is, well, about procurement. We are talking about purchasing process and different phases of procurement in this course. The course is really intense and full of truly specific information. You can really see that the teacher is a professional and knows a lot about the topic. Nevertheless, I have had pretty similar course (purchasing and procurement) already in my home university so I really do not find this course too useful for me. Furthermore, I need to say that the teacher's style of teaching is bad. She is just talking and talking all the time without having any assignments, communication or inter-activeness with students. Also I do not have the feeling of seeing the whole picture of procurement because we are concentrating that much on small details. For the final exam it will be hard to remember everything.


International Human Resource Management

I chose this course because my home university does not offer any HR courses. The course is exactly what I expected: discussing about how to recruit, take care of the employees, about cultural differences in HRM, what difficulties might occur when working with international people, how to handle them..

The course is interesting and totally new topic for me so I pretty much like it. There are two teachers in this course. The other one has a really structured way of teaching: in the beginning of classes she always tells the learning objectives of the class, then the actual teaching and in the end we shortly summarize everything. It helps the students to learn and also understand what the teacher is expecting from us. The other teacher does not speak that good English and she seems a bit uncomfortable talking in front of people. Unfortunately that often affects on the class: it is pretty hard to get what she means because she is just reading straight from the slides without opening and explaining the issues more.
During the classes we handle a lot real-life cases: we read them at first, then answer the questions about it and finally discuss about them together. In my opinion this is good because then you get a real touch to the topic instead of just talking about theory, and you understand how different HRM styles can be applied in real-life situations.

International Marketing

I have had many marketing courses already in Finland, but that is my main interest when it comes to studies so I wanted to learn it more and also see the German perspective to the topic! In this course we are talking about the new generation and whole new way of marketing: No more 4P's, no more advertising but ongoing communication. The teacher emphasizes the importance of people and communication with them: people trust people, not brands. You need to make people believe you, communicate with them and engage them. It is not about just increasing the sales by advertising a lot: It is done differently nowadays. Everything is online and social nowadays. We have also been discussing how to keep the old, traditional customers and get new younger ones.

We are having a course work and my group is doing an market entry plan for Aldi going to Finland. We need to use mobile social media platforms. The task is at first to analyze the market: what is the internet and social media platforms usage, how people use social media (where, when, with whom?) and then make a specific market entry plan. The teacher has told that it is important to state why the company should do this and this, not just tell the steps to entry the new market. We really need to make the research and be sure of our plan.

The teacher is really enthusiastic of marketing and he knows what he is talking about. He is running his own business and tells sometimes examples of his business life.

Applied Social Media Marketing

In this course I have the same teacher than in International Marketing. The topics are quite mixed sometimes but it does not bother me: at least I should learn something because I am hearing the same things twice :D :D The teacher's opinion is that there is no "social media marketing", but "marketing". You should not think social media as a separate or just one part of marketing. His opinion is that every kind of marketing is social nowadays and happening in social media.

So in this course we are talking some same issues than in international marketing course, but also we make some comparisons between different social media platforms and see how the usage has been growing during the years and so on.
In this course we are doing a group work about HTC to make their social media marketing behavior better. We started with comparing the company's social media activeness to other smartphone companies and after that we are making them a specific plan how to engage people more and of course increase knowledge and sales.

Supplier Relationship Management

In this course we are handling issues like negotiations, taking care of relationships between suppliers and how can you position yourself as good business partner as possible. Even though I have had two pretty similar courses already in Finland, i find this course really interesting. The teacher has told us that he does not care about books and reading theories: Basically everything he is talking about in classes, is what he has been experiencing during the years. And this is good! I already do have knowledge when it comes to theory, so it is nice to hear his stories and opinions how they really do it in business.

The teacher of course has a presentation every time with him, but mostly we just talk, discuss and maybe also debate on some issues. He gives really nice examples and challenges us by asking tricky questions. We also have been playing couple of games and discussing the results afterwards. Really nice course!
Only thing not that nice: the teacher is having his own business so he cannot teach normally. We are having classes only approximately once in a month and then they last 3-5 hours. It would be nicer to have classes every week so we could remember better what we discussed last time and it would not be so hard so sit 5 hours in the class.


My favorite courses are those marketing courses definitely. Most interesting and also in my opinion most relevant to me. A course I would rather skip is International Procurement. Unfortunately it is not possible so I just need to try to handle it :D
Now I am congratulating you if you were able to read the whole post! Ask please if you have something in your minds :)
Jenna is making a similar post, but after that next post will be about our evening at the movies! :D

Tschüss!
Maiju

Our birthday party

The 16th of October is a very special day for us! It happens to be the birthday of both of us, yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We decided to celebrate our birthdays on Wednesday the 15th, because we had other plans for the weekend! We wanted to first go to a restaurant to have dinner with all of our friends and then continue the night in some good club.

On Tuesday we walked around Rudolfplatz looking for a nice and big enough place to have dinner. Eventually we found this great, a bit different restaurant just near our apartment! It is called Marilyn and in the same space with the restaurant there is an arcade hall.

We made the reservation for 8 pm and of course we were there on time. BUT the others weren't....In total we were supposed to be 30 people, but at first we were only 6..:D The rest of us arrived just before 9......and then we were probably a bit over 30 people. It was so nice that everybody wanted to join us and celebrate our birthday!

We really enjoyed the place and the prices were pretty cheap. We both ate hamburgers with pommes and drank couple of cocktails. The hamburgers were the best we have ever eaten!!! After eating some of us wanted to go home already, but most of us headed to a club!

Happy hour: all cocktails 4,50€

We had planned to go to a new place for a change and after some google research we found a place called Loom. During the dinner we were talking about the club and somebody found out that it was actually a gay club! :D soo we decided not to go there...since it was Wednesday we didn't have that many choices of clubs, so we agreed to go to Flamingo.

We walked to Flamingo and luckily there was no line unlike usual! At the door we told that it was our birthday so the lady gave us cards for a free drink! 

The free "drink" was a popsicle that contained about 6% alcohol

We were enjoying our free drinks, when Abdullah came to us and asked whether we wanted a table from the lounge or dance floor side of the club! We were a bit amazed, but told that of course the dance floor! :D He arranged us the table and when we went to sit there, suddenly the waitress brought us a huge dish full of alcohol :D It contained 1,5 l Grey goose vodka, 1,5 l Moët champagne, juice and redbull. We have no idea how much everything cost, but we checked the price list and it stated that the vodka bottle was 350€ and the champagne 260€........huge thanks to Adbullah for making this possible! :)

Martyna, Jenna and Erna

We were of course waiting for the clock to hit midnight so it is officially our birthday and when it happened the DJ played us a happy birthday song!! It was so cool! We were again amazed but so happy!  

Birthday girls!

Last but not least, thank you everybody for making our birthday party so great! We had so much fun with you guys and we bet we will never forget it :)

By the way, this was our third birthday party together in a row.. Oulu, Oulu, Köln. Which city next year? We'll see :)

Next post will be something about our studies here in Köln!

Bis später!

Jenna&Maiju

Berlin, part 2

Hallo!

On Saturday we had a city sightseeing tour in Berlin.
We met each other at 2 in the hostel's lobby in order to catch the bus. Yeah, the plan was to do the city tour by bus.. Then we found out that the bus won't start (broken bus? heard before? check our Oktoberfest post) and we need to do it by walking :D We walked to the Alexanderplatz U-bahn station planning to take a metro to Potsdamer Platz, where the guide would be waiting for us. Here in Germany nobody really ever checks tickets in the public transportation so we did not buy them. Of course (!!!!!!) the ticket inspector came right away to check our tickets, which we didn't have... Luckily he was pretty nice and gave us only one fine of 40 € when he could have given it to all 25 of us..  After that we bought tickets: a 5-person group ticket for one day cost 16,20 €.

We made it to Potsdamer Platz and found our guide. We started our tour by walking to the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe through Tiergarten (a huge park).

On our way to the Holocaust memorial we stopped by a smaller memorial to the murdered homosexuals during the holocaust. The memorial was a big "stone" and inside it was a video of kissing homosexuals.

Then we arrived to the Holocaust memorial! It was huge! The guide told us that it is bigger than two soccer fields together. And even though the designer of the memorial didn't want to have any symbolism in the memorial and there were no signs or anything telling it is a memorial, it was impressive. When we were walking in the middle of the concrete cubes the feeling was a bit distressing. Definitely worth seeing!

After that we walked to the Brandenburger Tor. The guide told us about the history of the monument and also something about the surroundings. There we took also a group picture!

Then we walked to the Rathaus, meaning the parliament house. In our eyes it looked more like a church or a castle :D We wouldn't mind working there..

On our way there..

After that we took a bus to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and then a train to see the Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall). We went to see the longest piece left from the wall. It is over 1 kilometer long and full of different paintings and graffiti.

The wall was impressive, but lower than we expected. Someone skilled would easily climb over it. The guide told us that yeah, you could have climbed it but then you would have been shot because the "no-mans-land" in between the walls was all the time guarded.

Picture from Hélèna

Most popular painting, made from a picture so this really happened

Then we took again the tram and went to Kreuzberg, which is a urban area filled with different restaurants and boutiques. The guide recommended us to go and have dinner there and named some specific places :) We decided to go to Kreuzburger, which reputedly has the best burgers in town. And yeah, they were good and really cheap! You got the burger, fries and a drink for 7 €.

The last sightseeing we wanted to see was Checkpoint Charlie. It used to be the entrance for important and popular people to go from west to east side of Berlin. There were two "soldiers" standing and having pictures with tourists. It cost 2 € to take one picture with them. We were just thinking that the guys must have been models instead of soldiers :D

Overall, Berlin was great! It was a huge city and unfortunately we didn't have enough time to see everything we would have wanted to. We need to visit it again sometimes :)
The atmosphere in Berlin was totally different than in Köln. Of course Berlin was bigger, the buildings were higher, streets wider and so on, but all in all people too were different from Köln. In our opinion Berlin had more young people, urban atmosphere and it didn't feel that safe (even though nothing bad happened). Köln feels more traditional and maybe also richer. Köln is just perfect size and cozy. And the architecture is more beautiful here! At least in the old eastern side of Berlin some houses were quite horrible. Like in Tuira (a stadtmittel=area in Oulu) :D :D

Next post will be about our birthday party!

Bis später!
Maiju&Jenna

Berlin, part 1

Hallo!

Last weekend we traveled to Berlin with a group of 23 people from our school. The trip was organized by our school's Corporate Identity Team. The trip cost 120€ and it included bus transfer, accommodation and a city tour.

We were supposed to leave on Friday morning at 7, but of course there was some difficulties...everybody else was on time ready to leave except our trip organizer, it turned out that he had overslept :D Eventually we left for Berlin 45 minutes later than scheduled. The journey to Berlin took about 9 hours instead of the normal 8 hours because of traffic jam near Berlin. Luckily we got some sleep so it wasn't so bad!

We arrived to our hostel which was very centrally located at Alexanderplatz in the city center. The hostel was called One80° and it was actually really nice, better than we expected. Our rooms were for 4 people and each of them had own toilet and shower.

Our room from the door

Lobby, reception, bar and restaurant :D

Everybody waiting for the city tour to start

First thing after arriving to Berlin was to get food! Some of us decided to go to a restaurant. We had no idea where we were, so we just wandered around and found a nice pizzeria near the hostel. By the way eating in a restaurant here in Germany is much cheaper than in Finland. We ordered six meals and drinks and it all cost 66€. The pizza and pasta were really good!

Jenna, Maiju, Marion, Hélèna, Omar and Pim

After eating we headed back to the hostel, since we had a pub crawl planned for us at 8. We walked to the first bar where the whole thing started. Of course we made a little circle walking there, because why not...:D Levent didn't want to admit that he was lost, but of course we figured it out! Eventually we found the bar and then we needed to pay 12€ to participate in the crawl. The twelve euros included a free beer, free shots and entrance to a club. We thought that it was only going to be our group for the pub crawl but actually there was a lot of people! In our opinion it wasn't that awesome...we didn't get the free shots in every bar, we don't drink beer (:D), when we got the shots they weren't that good, there were so many of us that the pubs were crowded and hot...just a little bit of complaining :D nevertheless we had a good time and it was something different to a normal night! Our night ended to a club called Matrix. It was huge and nicely decorated. There were three different areas with specific music genres. We really liked the place, too bad that we were too tired to stay there long. We left the club around 2 and went to sleep. 

Our stay at the hostel included a breakfast. We decided to go and have breakfast together at 10. The food was okay, nothing that special. Then we had some free time before the city tour at 2. We wanted to go shopping so we had an efficient 30 minutes of shopping. Jenna found two knits from Mango and Maiju found jeans and earrings from Tally Weijl. Then we had the city tour, but we are gonna tell more about that in a separate post!

In the evening we gathered together in one room at our hostel. We drank a couple of drinks there, even though it wasn't allowed...:D Around 10 we left to find a club which some people walking in the street recommended us. Eventually when we got there after taking two metros and walking a lot, it turned out that there was a beatboxing competition going on.. So we didn't go in. :D At that point one of us had drank a bit too much alcohol so we needed to take that person back to the hostel.. When we left the hostel again we had been walking over two hours. It really didn't go like in the movies :D So we just decided to walk to a nearest bar and stay there. We found one from Alexanderplatz! It wasn't a club, actually it was built in a tent but we had fun there. Again around 2 we decided to go to sleep. 

Pim the captain!

Martyna, Pim, Jenna, Maiju and Hélèna

On Sunday morning we had breakfast already at 9, we struggled a bit waking up but we had to eat :D The checkout from the hostel was already at 10 which we found a bit weird. We left back to Köln after 10 and arrived here after 6. The journey again wasn't that bad, we got some sleep and it went quickly. 

The next post is about our sightseeing tour in Berlin, generally about Berlin and the atmosphere there!

Tschüss!

Jenna&Maiju

Trivago visit

Hallo!

For a change something about our school and not about all the partying and traveling :D

I (Jenna) have a course called Comparative International Management. The course is surprisingly about management, basically we have talked about the general theories of management. But in addition to the classes once a week, we also have 3 company visits. In my opinion this is really good and gives a new interesting perspective to studying. The first visit was to the Trivago headquarters in Düsseldorf!

It was actually pure luck that I could go to this trip, since there was only 4 persons from my class allowed to go to the visit. All in all we were about 30 people in the trip. The visit took place actually a while ago already on 30th of September.

Me, Andrea and Diego from my class went to Düsseldorf together by train. All of us needed to go there by ourselves, so it was really nice to go together with them and not alone. The journey took a little over 30 minutes and we found the headquarters quite easily.

Our day started at 2 pm in the huge, modern office of Trivago. The office was soo nice, I couldn't have imaged a nicer place to work. Our day was full of presentations and at the end we had some finger food and open talk.

The first presentation was about the company itself. We learned about the mission statement of Trivago, their values and a brief history. Then we were told about the job opportunities there and how it is like to work at Trivago. Trivago actually offers quite a lot of internships to students and also student jobs, nice! Next presentation was about marketing at Trivago and the last about their product development.  We had a lot of presentations but luckily they were all interesting so the day went by fast :)

The most interesting things I learned about Trivago was that first of all they offer their employees unlimited vacations! There is no predefined number of vacation days, but you can have a holiday whenever you like. But of course not all the time :D The key thing about Trivago is that they trust their employees and that is why they can offer these unlimited vacations and nobody takes advantage of them. Also the employees have flexible working hours and Trivago organizes a lot of trips and events for them.

Trivago has a flat organization and nobody really has titles in the company. Everybody talks to each other in the same way, it doesn't matter if you are the CEO or an intern. Trivago wants their employees to be friends not just colleagues, that is why normally on Friday every week the employees have few beers together at the office and relax! (yes, beer at the office!! :D) There was many kitchens at the office and in all of them there was a fridge full of beer and if you felt like it you could go and grab a beer in the middle of work :D Sounds like a great place to work!

The office as a building was amazing. The view over Düsseldorf was really something :)

Inside the office was also really nice. They had a pool table, foosball table (soccer table), a small climbing wall, meeting rooms that looked like small cozy living rooms....I could have never imagined an office like that, it was the perfect place to work!

Open talk and finger food -part of the day

Free food for us, it was delicious! 

Overall the day was very interesting and I liked it a lot. Really wish that I get to work in a place like that in my future, it sounded even too good to be true :D

Next post will be about our weekend tip to Berlin!

Bis bald!

Jenna