Saturday 24 November 2018

Five Reasons to Join the Master in Management at ESSEC

Deciding to start a Master in Management at ESSEC is a big decision for aspiring managers. Is pursuing a Master in Management program offered by a top business school like ESSEC worth the time? Are the financial investment and the demanding entry requirements worth it?
If you're preparing to enter the competitive business world of today, I believe it is.

An MiM graduate degree will offer you a wealth of advantages.

Getting a high salary after graduation, landing a management position, or even becoming your own boss are just a few other advantages. 

1. Get free access to a large business network
As an ESSEC MiM student, you have great networking opportunities. You’ll get to interact with colleagues, professors and teaching staff (business people with great management experience). And this context will accentuate your business management capabilities.


Finally, you gain access to the extensive alumni network of that particular MiM programme. Your connections will give you a great overview of the business world. Be ready for a deep understanding of the slightest changes in the business environment. You can reflect on some big business issues, and make connections between various global events and world affairs.
At ESSEC, you will have access to a network of 50’000 alumni all around the world. 



2. Higher salary for working professionals
The average salary for an MiM graduate is much higher than an employee with a regular Bachelor. You can expect to earn twice as much as what you would expect from a regular university degree. The average wage after three years for ESSEC students (according to the Financial Times Ranking) was 93’461$ in 2018, growing faster on a year to year basis.


3. Start your own company from scratch

Many students choose an ESSEC MiM because they want to become entrepreneurs and learn how to run a business. They have a big dream and want to know how to turn it into reality. An ESSEC MiM will help you acquire business practices needed to start a new business or help existing ones grow. At ESSEC, you will be able to access 2 incubators that already raised 300M in Equity, financing 400 start-up with a success rate of 72% (compared with the 30% market average).



Many MiM graduates end up starting their own business. Those who don’t, land middle-level or top-level management positions within big companies. Just imagine how becoming your own boss would feel like.





4. Experience a new place and culture
By earning an MiM abroad, you will gain a new perspective on how businesses are handled and get to live in a foreign country. This will broaden your cultural horizon and your business career prospects. In case of ESSEC, you will have the opportunity to study in Paris, Singapore and Rabat or to go to hundreds of possible exchanges both at MBA and MiM level.
 

5. The Learn By Doing Approach 
At ESSEC, you will be able to choose between more than 200 courses every trimester, including many Specializations and Chairs. Those particular programs are unique partnerships with companies, and allow you to really understand how to implement what you have learnt at school. Classes and lectures are often based on real-life cases that very often are presented and discussed by ESSEC partner enterprises. In this way, you will be able to develop tangible management skills.

Sunday 11 November 2018

ESSEC Association Guide: Delta ESSEC

When I exchange, almost every single day, with students interested in the Master in Management program at ESSEC I often answer to questions related to career prospects, academics or double degree programs. However, almost everyone asks: “How is the student life at ESSEC?”.

I love to answer to this question, mainly because for me student life at ESSEC was something totally new compared to my previous university. When I arrived at ESSEC, I started to wonder how incredible is that students are so involved in initiatives that are not necessarily linked with their professional career or with their academic path. Associations at ESSEC are a big part of the whole experience and they are a great way to learn, to meet new people and, of course, to have fun. There are many associations both in ESSEC Paris and in ESSEC Singapore.

Associations at ESSEC can be divided in 5 big groups: Humanitarian Associations, Professional Associations, Sport Associations, Cultural Associations and Free-time Associations. Globally, there are more than 100 associations at ESSEC and I guess it will be a real challenge to talk of all of them in just an article. This is why, in the next months, I will write specific articles on the best associations of those 5 groups.



But I want to start with my very experience at Delta ESSEC. Delta ESSEC is a humanitarian association that collaborate with a South African NGO, called Swa Vana (“For the children”), to promote access to education and basic care for the children of a rural community in South Africa. Swa Vana is a multi-purpose centre in Huntington, 500km East of Johannesburg, where children come after school to play, eat something and learn.
 

Delta 2018 members with the NGO's permanent volunteers
The association action plan is very simple and it consists of 9 months of fundraising in France, mainly thanks to corporate partnerships & crowdfunding, followed by a 5 weeks mission in South Africa.

But what was the action plan for the 2018 mission?

First of all, we funded 2 scholarships to the 2 bests students in the Swa Vana centre to allow them to access tertiary education. Unfortunately, in the rural area where we worked, called Mpumalanga, access to quality education is extremely difficult and students tend to withdraw from school when they are still very young. 


This is why we also worked for 5 weeks in the village high school and primary school, teaching Mathematics and English in buildings that were mere containers with more than 40 children for class. Here we understood the unique challenges that the government and local NGOs have to face to guarantee a better future to the local population.

Teaching in an high school class inside a container
But we also spent our time visiting and helping local families in their daily tasks. This, in particular, was an incredible way to understand the struggle of living in such a poor village, a place where mothers, sometimes alone and abandoned, often confess you they believe there is no future for their own children. Such a sense of hopelessness really motivated us to do more and more, and this is why we worked on the improvement of the Swa Vana centre to help them meet the government requirements needed to receive public funding. This was extremely important to guarantee the future economic sustainability of the NGO.

A child playing with the threads used by his grandmother to make a living 
Finally, we partnered with a local entrepreneur to build a dormitory part of a learning centre for children with handicaps. The families of those children cannot afford the cost of sending them to special schools. For this reason the children have no opportunity to learn and they are marginalized by society. By building this facility, we granted access to basic education to 14 children with disabilities. Of course, building a 100 square meters structure in just 4 weeks was definitely a crazy project... but luckily, we were able to make it thanks to the collaboration of local workers and building experts!


The building site
Even if we made the most of our 5 weeks, a lot has still to be done! This is why Delta is already working on the general fundraising plan for the 2019 mission. The improvement of the Swa Vana library with digital resources, for example, is a real priority to guarantee better education to the local community. In addition to this, we are working on a project that involves the creation of a little task force to clean the village from all the trash and plastic that heavily pollutes the environment. 

(Are you a member of an associations at ESSEC? Would you like to help future students to find their perfect association? Contact us on the Facebook Master in Management Page!)

Written by A. Carletta, Student Ambassador for the MiM program