Dear readers,
I hope you have a fantastic weekend! My weekend was full of train rides as I went to Amsterdam and The Hague. Nevertheless, before I write about that, let me go back to the weeks before. I must say, however, that this blog post will be without any photos as I barely made any within those weeks… And as the weather in The Hague was rainy then the photos turned out to be very grey and dark…
So, during my last blog I wrote about the preparations for the exams and am I happy that they are done. I do not know whether I passed them all as I will get my second grade tomorrow (yeah, you have to wait 15 working days but there is a slight chance you get them earlier and I did get lucky with Service Management). The whole exam process is here totally different from I what I am used to – to me it looked more like my trial state exams in Estonia. During my Bachelor all my exams took place at EBS in the classroom and we were usually 15-20 people there. At CBS I had only one written exam and that time we had to go to a specific location where about 60 (maybe more?) people gathered to do only that specific exam. Furthermore, it was all on the computer and we could use all our books/notes and even the Internet. Here however, it is some sort of a big event where everyone goes to a specific location and multiple exams are taken at one time simultaneously. It was a little bit overwhelming the first time and it made me even more nervous because it looked more as if my life really depended on that day. Basically, about 150+ people sit in one big hall and do there exams, no computers, everything must be written by hand. With this I had also a problem as after 1,5 hours my hand got stiff because I never write for this long… My first exam took place on Monday and after that one I had a serious headache because we were asked a lot of questions and all the topics got covered. And the second exam took place on Wednesday. This one was a multiple choice and open-end questions exam but still I consider this one to be easier than the first one. After that I just went back to Amsterdam but I did not do much the 3,5 days as I felt that my energy level just dropped and I just wanted to rest.
And then on the 29th the second period already started. Things went really fast. This semester I have Consumer Psychology and Organizational Learning. Both are totally different courses and I must say that they also differ from my last ones. In Organizational Learning I will not have a final written exam, instead I have two home-assignments and a group work. Furthermore, there are no facilitations and only six tutorials about the topics. All the other meetings are either guest lectures or feedback sessions (which I find pretty cool because you get feedback on your home and group assignments and here you can understand whether you are on the right track). Consumer Psychology is interesting but also a little bit hard for me as they focus more on the research methods and I thought that the focus will be more on the psychology of the consumers. As I never had statistics, sometimes reading the articles takes a lot of time. In the first 3 sessions we had lectures about the research methods and on Friday we had our first tutorial where we just did an introduction round and presented some presentations. In the next tutorials we only have facilitations. There are four teams in total and each team has to do two facilitations. And I am Team 1, so I am the lucky one 🙂 I cannot really say a lot about the courses as they still are in the beginning of the semester so I have to see how it goes further.
Other than that, I visited a fair this weekend in The Hague where I got the opportunity to talk to companies that helps expats with job search. As my plan is to stay in Amsterdam after the exchange because I will be also writing my master thesis here, then I was also thinking of getting a part-time job in the field of marketing. And of course, I also visited this time more the city center of The Hague as last time I was only at the beach. During my childhood we went often to The Hague but to be honest I could not really remember anything about the city center and it was really nice! It was raining a little bit but luckily it stopped pretty fast, yet the sky was grey throughout the whole day…
Furthermore, I totally forgot that today the carnival started and when I arrived to Maastricht in the evening I first did not really understand what was going on and why so many people were wearing costumes. As far as I know this carnival is not celebrated in the north and I have heard a lot of stories about it in Berlin but there it is also not celebrated. Yet, even though I am back here, it is only for 3,5 days as I am going for a trip to Oslo next weekend! So, next time there are definitely going to be a lot of pictures and interesting stories to tell! Stay tuned 🙂
Study abroad 