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