School Days

I mentioned before I left that I would be taking two classes: international marketing and international project management. I now have been taking the classes for a week and a half meaning that in about a week and a half we will be taking the finals. We have multiple professors teaching each class. Our marketing class for the first week was taught by a Lithuanian professor and for the second week is being taught by a professor from Germany who also actually taught a class at UNC last year. Our project management class was taught by a Lithuanian professor as well named Alfredas. We were told that he was chosen to teach this course because he is one of the most liked professors at ISM. The picture that is below is of some of us UNC students with Alfredas on his last day of class.

International Marketing: Up until today this was my morning class. Parts of this class have been very different than the Global Marketing class that I had back at UNC. One thing that was very different is that we focused very closely on pricing strategies. I know that for me it was challenging but rewarding. In my other marketing classes we had only covered the basics of pricing but had not gone in depth into actually calculating pricing. There are also parts of this class that have been very similar to my class at UNC but our professor is able to offer a differing perspective.

International Project Management: This course has also been tough as well. The first day of class we were assigned a project including a 20 minute presentation that was due the next day. Since then we have presented another two times.  The project that we are working on is planning a project that we could (theoretically) sell to an institution that would be interested in implementing our project plan. I am in a team with Denise, from UNC and two girls from Portugal, Carolina and Rita (the same girls we went to Finland with). Our project is planning a bike tour around Vilnius. It has been interesting working on this project because we are planning it in a different country. For example, when I was looking up average salaries for travel agents the only numbers that I could find were for US agents. When I told my group members how much it was in Euros they told me that the amount was far too high for what people make in Europe. There were many more things that were similar such as looking up printing services and trying how to figure out how much it was in litas as opposed to USD. I suppose that is the point of the class though because it would be completely different if I were doing it in the US. The picture that I included below is part of our project called a Work Breakdown Sheet.

I am normally not in class every day of the week so it has been hard getting used to that but at the same time it is hard to believe that, besides the day of the final, we only have three days of class left! I will continue to keep you posted!