The WHU journey begins

Blogs Harsh Modi - 05-05-10

My work experience has provided me with an excellent introduction to business, but I never had the opportunity to take courses exploring business strategy, Finance and Marketing. Taking into consideration my foundation and my intent to build future business success on the knowledge of International Business Practices, WHU’s Full time MBA was the best logical decision for me, because of WHU’s strong foundation in management research and International faculty.

This dream of doing an MBA got fulfilled when I got admitted into WHU and the journey to acquire practical knowledge in international business, global strategy, marketing and finance started on 22nd February 2010.

I arrived in Vallendar, which is a very beautiful, quite and a serene town on the Bank of River Rhine. Since the day I landed the MBA Office helped me in all possible ways to comfortably settle down, from accommodation to statutory registration with the German Authorities, which can be cumbersome and time consuming. Everything was just a breeze.

The past two and a half months have been very interesting and busy at the same time. I have classmates from diverse professional fields, different countries. Since the day we first met, my German classmates have been proactive to organize Pub Crawling, Running Dinners, Coffee and Cake get together to know each other better and become good friends.

A week before 1st March, the Official Day for start of Program, we started our prep courses with Statistics and Optimization. Yes, it was difficult for me, as I had never studied statistics in my school days. I kind of found it boring initially, but the Professor made it very simple and made it interesting when he showed us simple business application. Currently we are applying the optimization concepts, we learnt in our Core Courses of Finance, Operations, Economics. All said and done, it was hard work…..

Our core course begins and we are assigned teams , which have one person from every country. It has been quite challenging for me while working in teams with international students, something totally new to me. There have been long nights working in Groups for presentation on Case Studies and Assignments, which has given me the opportunity to learn from every group member’s experience which they bring to case study assignments. I am learning a lot from the Case Work in the group.

We started with the uphill climb of the MBA Program with the General Manager Course in Business, it’s functions, the Business Environment and it’s Strategy. This was supported with Leadership Program, adding a very essential dimension to the role of a Manager in today’s time, especially after the financial crises and the practices of the Managers who contributed to the crises.

I am in swimming in the depths of Core Courses of Managerial Finance, Managerial Finance, Financial Accounting, Operations Management, Strategic Sourcing. As I am moving through each subject, I find that the concepts learnt in the previous subject are expanding my horizons of knowledge and its applicability to take business decisions. At every step of my learning I am constantly thinking about my past business decisions and how I can now use these tools in future to reach my goal.

Next week, I have my first exams….coming up !!!! Phew !!! Getting back to exams after 13 years is a bit unnerving…Then looking forward to start with the Advanced Core Subjects….
Will write more share more after exams…..

About the author: Harsh Modi

Harsh is an MBA Candidate for 2011 at the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. He received his first degree in Commerce from the University of Calcutta and since then worked in trades and manufacturing.