Program Wrap-Up

The last week has been very hectic. We had our paper and presentation due yesterday, but most of us had traveled during the weekend so it put some pressure on us to work through the assignment. We also had our lectures of course, to include doing business in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and finance as well. The lectures about doing business in the CEE region were interesting largely due to our professor. Her nationality is Slovak, but in her lifetime she has lived in three ‘states’ due to the changing landscape of Europe. Further, she had experienced a Socialist governing for the majority of her life and had both positive and negative things to say about the experience. She did allude to the fact that Obama was giving us a “small taste of Socialism” and implied that we were headed in that direction. None of us have ever had a professor mix political views with lecture, so it was interesting to watch her take on our politics and economy versus her own. She finished by saying “good luck in all you do, be successful, make a lot of money, and then bring some of that money to Slovakia for business.” The CSR lecture was very similar to that of lectures found in the United States. We had two guest speakers for the day that worked for a non-profit research firm. We worked a short case that day in which we had two hours to come up with a CSR initiative for a firm, to include research, feasibility, justification, and then presentation to the class. My group chose to build affordable housing for residents of Allendale, SC, where nearly 40% of the population is below the poverty line. Finally, our finance professor spoke primarily about the differences between investing in the United States and investing in Europe. The bottom line is Americans enjoy risk more than Germans, who require insurance on virtually any investment they make. Our professor may have been the exception, as he stated “no risk, no fun.” We did get into a discussion about what exactly went wrong during the financial discussion, and it was interesting to hear the variety of opinions from people in the summer program as well as the professor himself.

We completed our papers and presentations yesterday. The papers were to be 8-10 pages single space and the presentations were required to be 20 minutes in length. There were five groups, and each had to choose a premium consumer good to introduce in the European Union. The goods selected were Whole Foods, Kindle, Victoria’s Secret, Leapfrog, and Crest White Strips. The presentations were very diverse in nature, as each product appealed to a different customer base in different countries, and also required very different manufacturing and distribution networks. My group presented the idea of the Kindle, the electronic reading device provided by Amazon and saw our major challenge being that it was currently incompatible with European wireless providers. Overall, everyone’s presentation was thorough and with sound justification.

Today we are taking our final exam, followed shortly thereafter by a wine-tasting of Rhein region wines and dinner. This program has been an enjoyable learning experience attributable to the diverse students participating as well as the selection of topics and professors.