Tuesday 14 February 2017

The last milestone of the MSc in Management Junior Consultant Experience.

 By Manon Cohendy, 1st year MSc in Management student

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!