Mountain Dew, Rock Music & Group Assignments
On our first day at Seepark Thun, Ron Schmidt in his first lesson with the new class warned us that the «Rochester-Bern MBA Program is like drinking water out of a firehose». As we all found out over the following 18 months, Ron had shared his first piece of truth and wisdom right there.
At the end of this same first day in Thun, we were asked to sit down with our fellow study team members after dinner and define the goals we wanted to commonly reach as a team. In this short session we’ve learnt much about our individual motivation going into the program and we found out that most of us shared the same high expectations with respect to the academic levels we wanted to reach. After our group had been decimated from 4 to only 3 just before departure to Rochester, these high expectations helped us through the tough evening and early morning group assignment. This level of almost unconditional goal focus has stayed with me ever since.
At the time I did my MBA, we stayed 9 weeks in Rochester at the Hotel Strathallan, together with our sister Class from Nyenrode University. While the Professors kept us very busy with lots of group and individual assignments, these 9 weeks left me with many particular memories as our daily routine differed so much from what we were used to in our normal lives. I remember 4 or 5 of us visiting a local bicycle shop to buy the bikes we used to travel back and forth from the Rochester Campus. We took the 15 minute ride always in larger groups and commonly shared private stories and so got to know each other even better. I also remember my daily bike rides to Wegmans to buy groceries and lots of Mountain Dew and instant coffee to keep me awake for group assignments. I always used my Walkman listening to American rock songs. When I hear one of these songs today, I immediatly see pictures of me riding the sidewalks of East Avenue.
Pierre Philippe Kull, Executive MBA Class 3