My second year among International Business studies began somewhat slowly. After spending one overwhelmingly exhausting and stressing two-hour "Welcome back to school" -day in Kuopio, I took a flight to Alanya, Turkey and spent a week there. This may sound overly exaggerated but in my defense, it was Monday, and Monday's are always hard for students. Capish?
After experiencing a new culture I was more than ready for school. In the spring we had the change to decide in which direction to specialize and choose our first alternative studies. Since I managed to gain 12 credits during summer doing online courses I was a little ahead of schedule, which was good.
Our first professional studies were about the essentials of internationalization. Generally, the courses taught how to apply the basics learned in our freshmen year to the international environment. When I started my degree, I thought that International Sales could be my thing in the future. Well, Aku from the past was absolutely right, I chose International Sales as my main specialty and also selected one course from Design Business to expand my knowledge in leadership.
The autumn semester showed me the dark side of the modern learning environment. Almost half of the courses were independent courses held online, which created some difficulties. For me, keeping up with those courses was hard because I just concentrated on what was taught in school and basically forgot the existence of online courses. For example, me and my group just returned our report for Business Research a week ago and we all felt that we did really bad since we had no idea how to execute the things required in the report. When analyzing the answers from the survey, we realized that certain things should've been done so much differently to get the facts needed. This was due to the fact that we didn't pay attention to this course at all because we concentrated only on things that were taught face-to-face.
I feel like this goes off the track, but I will write it anyway.
Of course, a student is responsible for its own studies and at this level of education the teachers are not required to motivate the students anymore to learn a subject they have chosen by themselves. But, there's a but. As a student who learns by listening, attending lectures and writing notes, I don't see that as an effective way to learn when there is no actual teaching at all. I feel like in some online courses teaching is outsourced to Google and learning the required things becomes a lot harder. I personally don't feel like we are going to be professionals of our branch if the trend is moving towards this.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against online teaching. In my opinion, using web-based environments to enhance the learning effect is absolutely great - when it's done properly, as a part of the actual teaching. Online features should be used as an additional asset not as a replacement.
I don't want to get too deep into this subject, because then the whole post would lose its purpose.
The autumn semester was more than just a loose schedule. The culmination point for me was the Turku Sales Competition which was held at the end of November, surprise surprise, in Turku. Alongside with Sami, Niklas, and Henry, we formed a great team. At this point, big thanks to our guiding teacher Özerk who had faith in us and used his spare time to prep us for the competition. The experience itself was purely exceptional. I felt like I learned more about sales during that week than I ever have done in my life.
During this semester hopes and dreams about going abroad strengthened significantly. I began the process in my head and decided that I will either go on an internship or do a short, 6-month exchange next year. I haven't yet decided where I want to go, but I hope I will have a clearer view of this matter when I do a reflection of my spring semester studies.
Until then - stay awesome :)
PS. There will be an update concerning the outlook of my site. I've learned a trick or two during summer. I planned, carried out and released a functioning website to the public. (If you're interested, check www.joenkimallus.com). I don't know exactly when it's going to happen, but I'll say during spring. Stay tuned!