The last phase of the Junior Consulting Experience for the MSc in
Management students in Singapore took place during the week of 12 December
2016.
During that week,
they focused on the BYOP, also known as “Build Your Own Project”, with an
objective of enriching the student life on campus and for students to partake
in their first ever (for most) entrepreneurial project.
The students were divided into 4 different groups and carried out the
following projects:
Monday: The Pioneer’s Club introduced their first
event called «Entrepreneurship: The Untold Story». For this event,
ESSEC invited 4 different entrepreneurs who shared their views and experience:
Markus Gnirck (TrybCapital), Anna Vanessa
Haotanto (The
New Savvy), Danielle Warner (ExpatInsurance) and Denis
Branthonne (Novade).
Danielle Warner is an active member
in the entrepreneurial community and is driven by and connected to building a
culture of trust. To her, entrepreneurship it’s not a problem of timing but of
taking actions or not. She told us that the primary question that drives her
is: “Why? Why am I doing this? Why should I take that action?”. She then
elaborated that these questions are “never answered by money”. Danielle feels
that entrepreneurship stems from one thing: unrivalled and unwavering
commitment to the answer of your question, “Why?”.
Denis Branthonne, on the other hand,
explained that he is not a born entrepreneur. He used to work in a big company,
and his start-up is 3 years old. He started up by doing what consumers asked
him to do that he could not do in his previous company. He believes an
entrepreneur is someone with a big self-confidence: he thinks it “helps to be
older” and not being young is definitely not bad.
Markus Gnirck, instead, is a born
entrepreneur. The start-up he’s involved in now is not his first. He is
convinced that the key is to have passion and to be naive. To him
entrepreneurship is about: “Learning to work with people better than yourself.”
Anna Vanessa Haotanto is a Singaporean,
half Indonesian woman whose mission can be described as helping women. She had
a long career in finance and it was not easy for her to turn into
entrepreneurship. Anna decided to set up “The New Savvy” to educate women on
being prudent and savvy with their finances. “When I started I only knew money
on the screen,” she said “Every single mistake an entrepreneur can make, I made
them at least twice.”
On Tuesday was the evening of
«Let’s Debate at Singap’».
The second team put together a very interactive evening and the first
ever ESSEC debate in Singapore. They combined talks with innovative
leaders and an eloquence contest between students of all programs. They
explained it as follows: “Whether you prefer the views of Peter Thiel,
Stephen Hawking, George Orwell or Elon Musk, you will have the opportunity to
talk, debate and share your views, your conspiracy fears and your great utopias
about artificial intelligence, fintech, the digital economy, driverless cars,
virtual reality and so on…!”
The evening started off with a discussion about new technologies with
the two guests-of-honor Annette Lim from Growth Hacking Asia and Benjamin
Moris from Google. The discussion was handled as a Q&A in a very
innovative way. Indeed, they used the tool Sli.do which allowed the
audience to participate by asking questions anonymously or answering polls in
real time.
The second part of the evening was dedicated to the debate itself. 8
students coming from different ESSEC programs were recruited for this, and were
divided into 2 teams. These two teams were each supporting an answer to the
question, “Do you consider Artificial Intelligence as a threat for
humanity?” It was more casual than the day before, but still very
interesting.
Wednesday: The last event was
“Discover Singapore Through Different Lenses”. This was a more traditional
event in a way that it was a 2-hour series of talks by distinguished guests to
help students understand Singapore through its Religion, Startup, Music,
Theatre, Medicine and food scenes.
Ela Kapla Marquezin explained the dynamics
of the different religions side, the way the different religions cohabit in
harmony in Singapore, and showed students many places to visit that they had
never heard of. Arnaud Bonzom dwelled on the question: “How to get
funded in Singapore?” Siok Khoon presented the changing face of
healthcare. Cuifen Pui shared her thoughts on the changing food
landscape in the city. Marc Goldberg, who has been involved in French theatre
for over twenty years before moving to Singapore in 2013, talked to students
about theatre. ESSEC also invited an exceptionally versatile pianist, Tze
Toh. The Strait Times described him as “an extraordinary musician whose
idiom straddles comfortably between genres of classical, jazz, world and film
music... possesses an original voice”.
The last group of students did something very different and innovative.
They launched the great MYMINIESSEC, which is the first online
collaborative platform dedicated to ESSEC Students in Singapore! They invited
everyone to connect to MYMINIESSEC to learn about student life
in Singapore, travel episodes in Asia and the hottest tips in town. Every
ESSEC student is invited to join as a contributor and can share his or her
experiences. All of this is to help the future students arriving in Singapore.
The platform already has a lot of articles but there is more to come!
To conclude, we lived
an eventful week before the Christmas break and we Built Our Own Project and by
extension Campus!
