Fall 2007
Victor Taylor
Our Class in London
I’ve been asked, “How is
studying in London different from studying in the States?” For me,
studying in London is much the same as studying in the States, because I’m
still under Susquehanna curriculum. The main difference is that the 5
minute walk to Apfelbaum
Hall has become a 25 minute “tube” ride plus two five minute
walks. Also, our professors have British accents.
Our
class schedule isn’t bad at all. We have class on Tuesday, Wednesday (both
days end around 5pm), and Friday (ending at 12 noon). We are all pretty
happy with the schedule because it gives us time in the week to explore
London and it means we get a 3 ½ day weekend every weekend - most students
use this time to travel and tour the European continent.
All
of our classes are in the same room and for some classes we are split up
in two groups for discussion purposes. On Tuesdays our first class is
Management and Organizational Behavior. We learn
how people in the work environment behave and how their behavior
can affect the development and productivity of the organization and its
employees. For this class, we have a lecture session with the entire
class, and then we split up into tutorial groups to further discuss the
lesson. For this class, we also learn how to think like managers. One
assignment we had was to allocate benefits to employees based on their
annual salaries. We worked in groups and had to present our proposals to
the class. It was fun because each group approached the project
differently. It’s actually a very interesting class because you can apply
some of the knowledge to everyday life and in some cases you end up
learning more about yourself.
After MOB, we have
Operations Management. This course focuses on business operations -
mainly how a company operates, what aspects can be improved, and how to
implement improvements. We don’t split for this one; instead, we have a
second session on Wednesdays. The topics are straight forward and to the
point - tools that will come in handy in the future.
For the British Theatre
class we split up and meet once a week on Wednesdays to discuss the play
we saw the previous week. I’m not a big theatre fan, but some of the plays
we see are interesting; my favorite so far has been Rafta Rafta.
The first play we saw was Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at
the Globe Theatre. The Globe is beautiful, and it is a reproduction of
Shakespeare’s original theatre, so it was nice to go there and witness it
first hand. We got to see the play as they would have in the old days, in
a ceiling-less theater exposed to elements, and having to stand up for the
entire play (standing wasn’t so nice). We have a lot more plays scheduled,
so maybe I might return to the States with a newfound passion for theatre.
Lastly, on Fridays we have our Seminar in European Business Operations. Often we have guest lecturers who are familiar with European business speak to us about the companies they work for, or sometimes they even give us a history lesson about, well, European business. Most recently, we travelled to Prague where we gave presentations for the consulting projects which we’ve been working on for weeks. Everyone worked hard and it showed in the presentations. We also travelled to cool places like the castle of Charles IV, the Rückl Crystal, and the Templar Cellar in Čejkovice. Our eight day stay was fun and Prague is a beautiful city I would like to visit again.
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