HOGMANAY

That's the name of the new year celebrations here in Scotland :) I hope it will be fine this evening, I already ordered the tickets 6 weeks ago, because it's very famous in Edinburgh and since they had a year with too many people at the street they limit the access ... Last year the firework at the castle was canceled because of the weather (too much wind) ... hope this year will be fine, I'm just here for a year, so it has to be good! :)

"between the years"

Here not much happen in the time we call in Germany the time "between the years" ... don't know if the British have the same way to say it, but there is no British guy on campus I could as, so I assume it's right :)

The University here is shut down, even the main hall and the shop are closed now for two weeks, the only part open is our EBS where we still can go studying! :) At the moment there is light rain and it's windy, I was studying yesterday a bit and try to learn a bit today, too ...

Leaving for Christmas

Hi folk. Tomorrow morning I'll fly out to Munich to spend the Christmas days with my family at home. Looks like there will be no snow this year again, but never mind :)

For all the German reads I found a nice word-game with the English weather forecast... even they know what "Mistwetter" is :)



And by the way, here you can see the times of sunrise and sunset and imagine, how depressing it is to stay here at the moment! But today is the 21st and so it should change now and the days soon getting longer :)

My Marketing studies continue, but it is still a bit slow, but I just do a few hours per day...
I finished reading Module 4 of 19 and with my notes I reached Module 2...

Wish you all Merry Christmas !!!

Marketing

Because I had another opinion about the content of Marketing, too, maybe I give you an idea, what I'm studying right now :) My idea of Marketing was not much more then what I saw in my last company's I worked for... The "black book" focuses on marketing decision making for us guys as future leaders and managers :-)
Part one, which I finished today is over the topic "An Overview of Marketing Management" and had the following Modules:

M1: The Marketing Management Process
M2: Corporate Strategies and Their Marketing Implications
M3: Business Strategies and Their Marketing Implications

This time it looks like the book is more up to date then Economics where we had examples with "Deutsch Mark" :) ... this time we have Topics like "What are the influences of globalisation to our marketing strategies" or "e-commerce"...


By the way, I wanted to use this place to let you know some nice theories of OB, too...

"Competitive advantage that is derived from an energized and well-trained work-force is much harder to duplicate than simple investing in capital improvements."

"The achievement-oriented employee who is not challenged by his work often feels as if his employer does not value his efforts and ideas. When such employees become 'idea champions' for innovations, and upper management places low priority on 'their' innovations, they can become disgruntled and leave. If this desgruntled employee is a competent engineer and a good salesman, watch out! You may soon see him as a competitor with your former customers beathing a path to his door!"

The dark side

I wanted to show you new pictures of my room and the ones who are following my blog since the beginning (or just use the bar on the left to look at the previous pictures) can see some differences... the dark side in form of the EBS - called back-books is spreading up and here are now the two books of Accounting and Marketing in my bookshelf ... and maybe you notice, that this two books are much thicker then the previous ones...

I didn't want to use the flash here just to show you guys, that the University is really trying hard to break us, they even don't provide us bright light in this dark times....

Picture with flash ... and now you can imagine, why everybody feels sleepy the whole day when they don't leave the room and just use the provided light! :)


My timetable just in front of my desk to remind me what I'm here for...
Or to use our OB knowledge, to provide the "line-of-sight" of my goals to keep me on track :)

Today i finished Module 2 of Marketing and started taking notes... still to slow, but my speed is finally increasing :)

Start of Marketing

Today I started the Marketing book ... this is the subject with the most content of all courses to learn, till the 22nd of January I have to read all the 1000 pages and understand most of the theories ... so today I finished the first Module which has about 30 Pages, 18 more Modules to go...

After the Studying we went to the Cinema ... "Golden Compass" ... and I have to say, that it is really a long time ago, that I payed to see such a shit movie! ... what a waste of time ... :(

Scottish Borders

Yesterday I went with the Canadian guy of my class and his cousin to visit Melrose, which is a little village south of Edinburgh. It's really nice there and we walked up to two of the three Eildon Hills.


Melrose Abbey ... we didn't went there, because they charge you 5 Pound for seeing this ruin!!!
( details to the abbey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melrose_Abbey )

Eildon North Hill

view between the two tops.

After a bit more then a week of pleasure it's time to slowly grab the books and start to study again... My plan is to start Marketing tomorrow and study the week till Friday before I go home to Bavaria for a short Christmas break.

Funny note

I forgot to tell you guys a funny part of my journey to London... when you drive from Scotland to England, there are two motorways... which are not connected :) ... Ok, they just build on the last missing part, but it was funny to notice, that even now the two parts of this country are still not properly connected :) ... reminded me to our projects in Germany called "Projekt Deutsche Einheit" which have been many projects to connect the west German roads and railway tracks with the east German parts after the reunion ...

Time out in London

Hi all together!

I'm back from a few days "holiday" in London :)


It was really great, I could sleep in a proper bed, enjoyed to sleep long without slamming doors and we did lot's of stuff to use the time... I've been shopping at Oxford street, have been at Harrods, visited the Westminster abbey and walked a lot around to find nice spots to take pictures :)


St.Paul and millenium bridge.


Telephone cell


Buckingham palace, view from St.James park.

E-day

Today ... or to be exact, in 1h and 42 minutes start my OB exam and I'm really nervous ... I thought I shouldn't be, because I had my first exam behind me, but at Economics it is different. When you understand how macro- and micro- economies are running, then you can be relaxed... but at OB are soooooo many theories and methods to know... I tried really hard to know as much as possible, but I couldn't cover all stuff and so I hope, that I will perform well without knowing all the theories... By the way, I'm just practicing one of the theories of handling Stress :) -> opening up -> diary ... :) ... and when I look at the model of the "General Adaption Syndrom" I think I'm in the state of exhaustion ;)

Economics Exam

Now it is over, Economics exam is behind me, OB ahead...
It was really strange to sit there and take my first exam, hope the next times I'm not so excited... First I didn't know how to start and was steering 5 minutes at the first two multiple choice questions and didn't know what to answer, but then I started doing the test really quickly and then it was fine... in the middle of the Essay 1 I started to worry that I answered the questions wrong and changed some stuff, but finally I think I wrote a lot on each point and hope to get many marks... I think I could have scored higher if I would have been faster, but finally it is over now and I will know how good I was when I get the results in 6 weeks!

I just opened the next tin of RedBull ... and now I go back to study OB ...

E-Day ahead

OK, guys, now I'm getting more and more excited when the hours running away... in less then 15hours I'll sit in the exam room and try to do a good job and answer all the questions as good as possible... hopefully this will be good enough to get high marks!! :)

Today I took it a bit more easy to relax a bit... I got up at 11:30, had a little breakfast and then have been at EBS at about 1pm... stayed there till 7pm to review all the points I marked in my notes as important and that's it... Today before I go to sleep I'll review all the stuff once again for one hour and then tomorrow morning one more time... that's it! I think what I didn't get till now is too late now :)

My biggest fear is not to know the answer, but to understand the questions properly! I checked the past papers of the last year and in many of them I found a few word's I didn't know... but till now I was right most of the time in imaging what it might be :) ... so wish me luck ... hopefully I won't need it... :)

Food on campus

Hi guys,

I forgot to let you know about the circumstances under which I have to survive here on campus!

On Friday I thought I deserved to eat a proper meal and decided to go to the cafeteria of the Business School, which is a bit more expensive then the food in the main hall or the student union.
I spotted "Ravioli with mushroom sauce" and in my mind was a nice plate full of nice ravioli... but I forgot about my location where I'm staying right now!!! I got a plate half of ravioli and half with ... FRENCH FRIES !!!! What a idiot serves pasta with fries!?!?!? ... But to be honest, I should have known it, because I saw it before at the main hall, that they use to do this here in Scotland! A guy of my group wanted to have his meat with pasta... and the girl said to him: "Yeah, that's possible, but you have to pay for 2 main courses." !!! Then he just left his meat there and we decided to leave this sad place ... The food here on campus is really sad if you know, how real food tastes... because of this reason today we used my car and drove to the next place we found and there we got a nice meal at a nice pub :)

My studies are going to an end, I just hope to keep all the stuff in my mind what I learned the last weeks... today was not too productive, but we had a power-day yesterday in OB which started at 11am till 4am this night... at the moment I have a better feeling for Economics then OB, we will see...