Thursday, September 29, 2005
Shanghaiist: This is why they build walls around cities
National Week in Shanghai. 83 million people. The photo is amazing.
Shanghaiist: This is why they build walls around cities
Shanghaiist: This is why they build walls around cities
Friday, September 16, 2005
Week II
Week two ended for us today, or actually yesterday for Section II since we have Friday off. Some sections have mornings off, or afternoons off, but we basically have a full day of class Mon-Thurs and all of Friday off. Except, of course, Friday morning was when my room was scheduled to be cleaned. There are maids that come around every two weeks and give the bathroom a once over. What luck I had when she came knocking at 9am this morning. I was forced to send her away in the interest of my continued sleep, which shows where my priorities are, I guess.
Business Writing and Presentations
This two week class ended for us on Tuesday when we had a 1,500 word report due on cultural differences between countries. We had four options (none including easy ones like the US or China) and had to write a recommendation to an imaginary client firm on the cultural and business differences between cultures. I chose the Sweden/Thailand option. Being Swedish, this should have been easier than the others, except for the fact that I've never actually lived there. Anyway, the purpose was not really on the content but on effective report writing. This wasn't as big a deal for me as it was the Chinese since this was probably one of the first business reports many of them have had to do.
Saturday morning we have to give a presentation on one of four topics, ours being Shanghai Tourism.
Food
The food here is fantastic, and I'm not even talking about the city of Shanghai. Next to the cafeteria there is a small restaurant which goes by many names (cafe, canteen, fandian, canting, and strangely, cafeteria). They have soda, bottled water, coffee, beer, and wine. But most importantly they have a great Chinese food menu and also a small Western food menu. The Western stuff is hamburgers, pasta, salads, etc. The usual suspects. That's good when you really get sick of cafeteria food. But the far better option is the Chinese food, and this isn't the General Tso's kind. I've basically been eating there for lunch and dinner (except for the occasions we go off campus) everyday. My current favorites are the stir fried beef with spicy green peppers, spicy chicken with nuts, and spicy tofu chili (cubes of tofu with some ground beef in a red sauce, called ma pu dou fu). Notice a theme there? We usually get a group of people together and order several dishes and the total usually comes out to about 15-20RMB, or about US$2. This is really unbeatable.
Economics
This is the one class I didn't comment on last time, and well, not much to comment on except that unlike the other classes this is your regular old microeconomics class. If you've never taken an economics class before what this entails is imagining situations that never happen in life and applying theory to understand them. What I mean by this is that you have to make assumptions like:
Group meetings
Like I said, all the international students are split up evenly among the Chinese classmates. Really, I wouldn't have it any other way, but there is some frustration here. The cultures are so different that inevitably there are difficulties. Some students have adapted better than others. One guy in particular, went into his group meetings and was direct, opinionated, lacking in compromise, and pushed really hard to do things his way. The end result was not pretty. Its much more about consensus building, which can take far longer than I'm use to doing things back at home. But that's what all us international students are in China to learn. What I have learned is how incredibly motivated and smart the Chinese students are, though. They really go out of their way. The problem is that if you can accomplish something in one hour, they say to themselves, this can't be that easy, we haven't worked hard enough, we have to keep working on it for 3 more hours. So that's the level of work ethic we're dealing with here. They do work really hard all the time but sometimes not the most efficiently. And not that I had low expectations, but they continue to impress me with the way they think and they're creativity. Once they are in small groups, they somehow become far more creative than they do when in a classroom.
Business Writing and Presentations
This two week class ended for us on Tuesday when we had a 1,500 word report due on cultural differences between countries. We had four options (none including easy ones like the US or China) and had to write a recommendation to an imaginary client firm on the cultural and business differences between cultures. I chose the Sweden/Thailand option. Being Swedish, this should have been easier than the others, except for the fact that I've never actually lived there. Anyway, the purpose was not really on the content but on effective report writing. This wasn't as big a deal for me as it was the Chinese since this was probably one of the first business reports many of them have had to do.
Saturday morning we have to give a presentation on one of four topics, ours being Shanghai Tourism.
Food
The food here is fantastic, and I'm not even talking about the city of Shanghai. Next to the cafeteria there is a small restaurant which goes by many names (cafe, canteen, fandian, canting, and strangely, cafeteria). They have soda, bottled water, coffee, beer, and wine. But most importantly they have a great Chinese food menu and also a small Western food menu. The Western stuff is hamburgers, pasta, salads, etc. The usual suspects. That's good when you really get sick of cafeteria food. But the far better option is the Chinese food, and this isn't the General Tso's kind. I've basically been eating there for lunch and dinner (except for the occasions we go off campus) everyday. My current favorites are the stir fried beef with spicy green peppers, spicy chicken with nuts, and spicy tofu chili (cubes of tofu with some ground beef in a red sauce, called ma pu dou fu). Notice a theme there? We usually get a group of people together and order several dishes and the total usually comes out to about 15-20RMB, or about US$2. This is really unbeatable.
Economics
This is the one class I didn't comment on last time, and well, not much to comment on except that unlike the other classes this is your regular old microeconomics class. If you've never taken an economics class before what this entails is imagining situations that never happen in life and applying theory to understand them. What I mean by this is that you have to make assumptions like:
- Assuming nothing changes in a situation
- Assuming people are omnicient
- Everyone always acts rationally
Group meetings
Like I said, all the international students are split up evenly among the Chinese classmates. Really, I wouldn't have it any other way, but there is some frustration here. The cultures are so different that inevitably there are difficulties. Some students have adapted better than others. One guy in particular, went into his group meetings and was direct, opinionated, lacking in compromise, and pushed really hard to do things his way. The end result was not pretty. Its much more about consensus building, which can take far longer than I'm use to doing things back at home. But that's what all us international students are in China to learn. What I have learned is how incredibly motivated and smart the Chinese students are, though. They really go out of their way. The problem is that if you can accomplish something in one hour, they say to themselves, this can't be that easy, we haven't worked hard enough, we have to keep working on it for 3 more hours. So that's the level of work ethic we're dealing with here. They do work really hard all the time but sometimes not the most efficiently. And not that I had low expectations, but they continue to impress me with the way they think and they're creativity. Once they are in small groups, they somehow become far more creative than they do when in a classroom.
Friday, September 09, 2005
U.S. probes Bank of China
Another reason why Foreign banks have no idea what they're doing when it comes to buying stakes in Chinese government banks. The Royal Bank of Scotland might regret buying 10% of this bank.
CNN.com - Report: U.S. probes Bank of China - Sep 8, 2005: "t"
CNN.com - Report: U.S. probes Bank of China - Sep 8, 2005: "t"
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Secretary-General of the Council of the EU and High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy
Full press release for the visit we had today. I think the most bad-ass part of this was that, paraphrasing now, he said to us "Yeah, I was with the most powerful men in China yesterday, it was cool, now I'm here and pretty psyched, the school is not only great but also important for both the EU and China, and oh yeah, tomorrow I'm meeting with the most powerful men in India, thanks for let me stop by."
Now, since I really know nothing about the EU, here is the link to his wikipedia entry and you can click and found out precisely what a Secretary-General and a High Representative actually are: Javier Solana without me having to lie to you.
Finally, this blog has now reached more than 2000+ hits!
Now, since I really know nothing about the EU, here is the link to his wikipedia entry and you can click and found out precisely what a Secretary-General and a High Representative actually are: Javier Solana without me having to lie to you.
Shanghai, China, September 6, 2005-This morning Secretary-General of the Council of the EU and High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Mr. Javier Solana visited the Shanghai Campus of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and spoke to over 300 assembled diplomats, faculty, students, alumni and sponsors about the China-EU Strategic Partnership. This was the second visit by a senior delegate of the EU to CEIBS in less than two months, a first for any business school worldwide, after EU President Jose Manuel Barroso visited CEIBS last month.In his speech today, Mr. Solana emphasized the importance of cooperation between the EU and China in their bilateral relationship and that both are working together on the issues outlined in their strategic partnership. He cited CEIBS as an example of this cooperation and encouraged students to take advantage of their positions and opportunities, "to make the world a better place". "What has been done here is of great importance," he said of the school that is a partner between the Chinese government and the EU. "I have closely followed its development as an international centre of excellence."
This was the first visit to CEIBS by Mr. Solana, who spoke openly about his meeting in Beijing yesterday with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, saying it was a good and warm meeting with frank exchanges. Mr. Solana discussed the strategic partnership that was launched two years ago, saying the meetings held yesterday proved they, "really do have a partnership which is growing both deeper and wider".
The visit of Mr. Solana to the CEIBS campus follows the announcement that Nobel Prize Laureate, Robert M. Solow, has confirmed to teach at CEIBS next semester.
Please note that Mr. Solana's speech will be posted online shortly. To receive a fax copy, please contact tmichele@ceibs.ed.
Finally, this blog has now reached more than 2000+ hits!
Class Notes
A brief rundown of my classes, and let me emphasis brief since we've only had one class of each so far.
Statistics: This is not your run of the mill college stats course, which seems to be a general theme of classes here. Instead of drilling into our heads all the fun formulas for standard deviation, chi tests, and multi-colinearity, this is more geared towards using practical statistics in business. We we'll be using Excel and other programs to do most of the calculations for use while we concentrate on figuring out what the hell the results mean rather than how to calculate them. This is really the kind of course that all colleges should teach to business students because the boredom and confusion level should be significantly less. Also, like other classes, many problems will be case based. Teacher is from Tennessee, which some of the Chinese students aren't too excited about since he does have a little bit of that drawl. For me, this isn't a problem, especially since I have to hear Australian, European, and Indian accents from my fellow students.
Marketing: This teacher came highly recommended from the 2004 class and turned out to be true. A very novel approach for this class, and especially the more fact and memorization-oriented Chinese students. There will be no memorization and doing it won't help, since this class is supposed to teach us how to THINK about marketing and learn techniques rather than having to memorize volumes of marketing jargon. Very welcome class format! Mostly case studies.
Business Communication: British professor who is here for only two weeks so this is a short class and thus intense. We have a 1500 word individual paper due next week, plus a 30 minute group presentation. The point is not to research a topic thoroughly and learn a lot but more learn how to write a proper business report and give good presentations. This one is pretty easy for international students since we've been doing this for a while.
Financial Accounting: Chinese professor, which initially worried me since I remember having foreign teachers in engineering school at Lehigh that were very difficult to understand, who is a riot. Really. Yes. Accounting class is the one I have laughed in the most. I can't say I expect this to continue, but here's hoping. Again, this is case based and not about learning how to tranlate balance sheets into income statements into cash flow statements but more about analyzing these statements and drawing conclusions, instead. This does not bode well for helping me study for the CFA since that is far more technical, but at least this class will be able to keep my interest! We will, however, be reading lots of annual reports.
Organizational Behavior: This is taught by a Spanish professor who was also part of orientation and is entertaining. This is more about how business organizations work and will require lots of reading and, yes, case studies.
Economics: First class is tomorrow.
So overall, I'm really quite impressed with the faculty as well as the class formats. I was worried this would be all brute force memorization of information but instead is much more of a thinking man's approach rather than a something that would be far more boring.
And finally, some really interesting news, next year CEIBS... well, I'll let them say it:
Statistics: This is not your run of the mill college stats course, which seems to be a general theme of classes here. Instead of drilling into our heads all the fun formulas for standard deviation, chi tests, and multi-colinearity, this is more geared towards using practical statistics in business. We we'll be using Excel and other programs to do most of the calculations for use while we concentrate on figuring out what the hell the results mean rather than how to calculate them. This is really the kind of course that all colleges should teach to business students because the boredom and confusion level should be significantly less. Also, like other classes, many problems will be case based. Teacher is from Tennessee, which some of the Chinese students aren't too excited about since he does have a little bit of that drawl. For me, this isn't a problem, especially since I have to hear Australian, European, and Indian accents from my fellow students.
Marketing: This teacher came highly recommended from the 2004 class and turned out to be true. A very novel approach for this class, and especially the more fact and memorization-oriented Chinese students. There will be no memorization and doing it won't help, since this class is supposed to teach us how to THINK about marketing and learn techniques rather than having to memorize volumes of marketing jargon. Very welcome class format! Mostly case studies.
Business Communication: British professor who is here for only two weeks so this is a short class and thus intense. We have a 1500 word individual paper due next week, plus a 30 minute group presentation. The point is not to research a topic thoroughly and learn a lot but more learn how to write a proper business report and give good presentations. This one is pretty easy for international students since we've been doing this for a while.
Financial Accounting: Chinese professor, which initially worried me since I remember having foreign teachers in engineering school at Lehigh that were very difficult to understand, who is a riot. Really. Yes. Accounting class is the one I have laughed in the most. I can't say I expect this to continue, but here's hoping. Again, this is case based and not about learning how to tranlate balance sheets into income statements into cash flow statements but more about analyzing these statements and drawing conclusions, instead. This does not bode well for helping me study for the CFA since that is far more technical, but at least this class will be able to keep my interest! We will, however, be reading lots of annual reports.
Organizational Behavior: This is taught by a Spanish professor who was also part of orientation and is entertaining. This is more about how business organizations work and will require lots of reading and, yes, case studies.
Economics: First class is tomorrow.
So overall, I'm really quite impressed with the faculty as well as the class formats. I was worried this would be all brute force memorization of information but instead is much more of a thinking man's approach rather than a something that would be far more boring.
And finally, some really interesting news, next year CEIBS... well, I'll let them say it:
The visit of Mr. Solana to the CEIBS campus follows the announcement that Nobel Prize Laureate, Robert M. Solow, has confirmed to teach at CEIBS next semester. Nobel prize, bitches!Ok, I added that last sentence in.
First Days of Class and I Remember Why I Preferred the Working World
First two days of class have now come and gone. The schedule of classes seems to be a bit random, though, and I'm not quite sure how long it will take to get used to. Monday and Thursday are the same, but that's it, and only so for the first couple of weeks. The entire 180 person class is divided into groups of about 60 and we all will be in the same classes with that section. First up for Section II on Monday was Statistics (what a way to start a monday morning!), Marketing, lunch, then an afternoon of Business Communications (writing reports, doing presentations, etc, this one is only 2 weeks long and pretty intense as a result). So this is 6 hours of class plus 1.5 hours of Chinese after that. Today was even worse, 8:40 start and an 9PM finish. The Secretary General of the EU equivalent to Condelezza Rice, apparently) came to school today and that just extended the whole day to be way too long.
And I remembered why I preferred the working world to school, I can stop for dinner when I need it at work! It is now 10PM and I just got back from having dinner after a 6 hour marathon afternoon/dinner session. Literally, Financial Accounting from 1:30 to 4:50, then Chinese class from 5 to 6:30, then Organizational Behavior from 6:40 to 8:30. THEN, group meetings!! And its only the second day!
And I remembered why I preferred the working world to school, I can stop for dinner when I need it at work! It is now 10PM and I just got back from having dinner after a 6 hour marathon afternoon/dinner session. Literally, Financial Accounting from 1:30 to 4:50, then Chinese class from 5 to 6:30, then Organizational Behavior from 6:40 to 8:30. THEN, group meetings!! And its only the second day!
Monday, September 05, 2005
El Dorado
The final day of orientation ended with a game called El Dorado. The idea was for the professors to trick us into thinking that we should be competitive but the reality was, they wanted, and we needed, to work together. The game was to find a treasure and each team had different information that we needed to trade with each other. I was volunteered to do the negotiating and after about 45 minutes, I had gather a bunch of info but the more we gathered the more I realized how much we were missing. Eventually, we managed to pull all 10 groups together to solve the problem and this was by far the most stressful of the "tests." However, we did manage to not fail!
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Orientation Day 1-3
The majority of Orientation was based on team building and a concerted effort to "break" our competitive spirit but using very effective, if devious, methods. Everyone at this school and all top MBA business schools has gotten there by being competitive and especially for Westerners its been part of our lives since pretty much the beginning. So the school realizes this is a problem since, at least during the program, they want us to work together and not against each other and the result is this Orientation.
Day 1 was simply, basically identifying your personality and putting it together with your group members (which are assigned, one International student for every group).
Day 2 was more interesting. There were 3 games, Win As Much As You Can, Cave Rescue, and 5 Tricks.
Day 1 was simply, basically identifying your personality and putting it together with your group members (which are assigned, one International student for every group).
Day 2 was more interesting. There were 3 games, Win As Much As You Can, Cave Rescue, and 5 Tricks.
- 5 Tricks: You all sit in your new group and are given a sheet of paper with instructions for a card game, a little like Hearts but much simpler. So you have 10 minutes to learn and practice it, then the real game starts and the twist is there is NO talking. So you play for 10 minutes and the 2 winners go one table forward and the 2 losers go backwards to another table. The rest stay put. So effectively, the next round has 6 people from 3 different groups. You start playing and you quickly realize that some people didn't really understand the rules and the result is general, albeit silent, chaos. Tempers flared, people threw up their hands in frustration, and some laughed. Afterwards, it was revealed that every table had been given a slightly different set of rules for the game and the morale of the story was that in International business, everyone comes to the table with a different set of cultural rules and expectations.
- Cave Rescue: Here you are given the profiles of six people stuck in a cave and you have to evaluate who to rescue first, one at a time. All different nationalities, race, sex, and age. Some were outstanding citizens, some were "losers" and some had great social benefits to society but weren't necessarily good people. The idea here was that different people set different priorities for who they would rescue first, the Chinese generally preferring the rescue the old, then women, then men. I finished my individual rankings in 5 minutes but it was funny watching the Chinese really trying hard for the full 20 minutes looking for the "right" answer.
- Win As Much As You Can: Basically a game theory excersize. You picked an X or a Y and what the four partners at each table collectively picked (without talking to each other) determined the pay-out of money. YYYY meant $1 for everyone while XXXX meant -$1 for everyone. The trick is that if you're selfish, you pick X but if everyone can pick Y you get a good payout. However, all it takes is one person to pick X and they get $3 while all the Y's then lose $1. So its based on trust and all that. The group I was in quickly resorted to backstabbing and dishonesty!
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Crab season under way
I'm looking forward to trying this if I can justify spending US$50 on two crabs...
Crab season under way
Crab season under way
