Today, I went back to Vlerick …

I maybe should have posted more about the life as a Vlerick alumni :-) Anyway, after … ooops! already 2 years, I went back to Vlerick, in its Leuven campus, in breakout room 006, with a suit (no tie) and for an interview. But this time I had the great honor to be a jury member for the MGM.

I will not write about how to succeed in this type of test (I blogged about it before and other websites might do it better than myself). However it was interesting to see adaptations from Vlerick and the motivation of some students.

For Vlerick, a lot changed since I did my admission test in Vlerick. There is a new logo and branding, a new campus in Brussels, they reorganised the MBA program, ranking improved a bit, etc. But it was very nice to see and meet again familiar faces like Mathieu Luypaert and Marion Debruyne, to sit on chairs that prevents you from sleeping in breakout rooms – like before, to taste the (improved) food of the cafeteria, …

And, last but not least, independently of their success in this assessment, I was also impressed by the motivation of the students, the diversity of their backgrounds, their eagerness to join Vlerick. Well, for some of the students at least ;-) But if you feel the need to start/improve your business knowledge in Belgium, I would encourage you to consider joining Vlerick – and show your enthusiasm from the first to the last minute of the interview!

Some more news

It was a quiet and rainy month on May, here in Leuven. However several news are worth to be mentioned …

First the FT Executive Education rankings were out. Vlerick Business School is now #43 (up from #45 a year ago) in the customised report (the only Belgian school ranked if we except the CCL that just has a campus here). It is #41 (same as last year) in the open report (before Solay BS: #60). And everyone is happy! :-)

Then most of us defended their project – and from what I heard it was quite a successful year. Congrats for those who passed and good luck for those who will present soon!

And now Apollo students are busy with the IMEX business game. I already wrote about it earlier (here, here and here). This year we have four teams:

1. Sky Whirlies, also on Facebook and on YouTube (and another video here)
2. What’s up, also on Facebook
3. ROB-O-Toy on Facebook and on Twitter
4. TenSai Toys, aslo on Facebook and on Twitter

Visit their web/Facebook/Twitter pages and support them! More on the game in a coming post … ;-)

And last but not least, congratulations to Fabian Frola and Mark Willems for their participation in the 20km of Brussels. Both ran faster than Prince Philippe (respectively 1h35, 1h39 and 1h55).

Btw here is my certificate for 2013 ;-)

Even an MBA can do it!

If you have 5 minutes to procrastinate before the Decision Sciences exam, here are two videos for you:

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;-)

 

This is the end (1 of x)

It is with some emotion that I announce you The End. Not yet the end of the MBA. But today was the last class of the last course (Decision Sciences for Business). So I want to take the opportunity to put some light on a commodity object that was the most used object during these two years: the red Douwe-Egberts cup for coffee or tea! They were able to keep us awake for some of the boring classes and kept us involved in the most interesting classes too ;-)

Note the chocolate Easter eggs filling it: thanks Neuhaus and thanks Vesna for providing such excellent chocolate! :-p

Yet another PTMBA student in the press!

It is always a pleasure to read or watch news about PTMBA students in the press (recap of the latest so far: Bart, Peter, Sam and Tom here ; Danny here). Earlier this week it was Katrien Kimpe’s turn to be in the limelight. As coordinator of Flanders’Care it was unavoidable to end up in the press (for a good cause, of course) :-) Katrien was featured in De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad.

From the papers you can capture some key MBA words like “platform”, “innovation”, “stakeholders” (ok, my own translation of “partijen”), “leverage” (I learned a new work in Dutch: “hefboomeffect” – thanks!), “process”, etc. ;-) Teasing is easy but I think Flanders’Care is doing a very good job at making connections in the healthcare sector (alas, they can only operate in Flanders) and trying to address the challenges of an ageing Europe: chronic diseases and elderly care will indeed become more and more important health issues. You can have another glimpse at what Katrien is doing in one of her recent presentations (there are plenty of links to interesting videos on slide 12). Proficiat, Katrien!

Welcome to Daniel and Miguel in the Vlerick blogosphere!

I often ranted about the (relative) absence of Vlerick MBA students in blogs, twitter, etc. This year it seems the school did a special effort to recruit bloggers and/or that more MBA students are aware they can blog. The result is that, on top of Robert (FTMBA), Daniel (FTMBA) and Miguel (EMBA) joined the official Vlerick blog platform as well. A warm welcome to them – they  started with a bang: 3 posts already in February 2013!

Happy New Year 2013!

Happy New Year 2013! May it bring joy, happiness and success in your lives! And good luck to current Vlerick MBA student, especially those who will graduate this year: the delivery is now closer (or the beginning of a new life!) :-)

Last Vlerick Apollo CPA, Gangnam style (강남스타일)

Following some requests, here is Mark’s happy holidays card featuring Fabian, our CPA!

 

At the next party, will we risk to see the following?

Thank you, partners!

I have a confession to make: I never really believed in the MBTI profiling as a whole. Some parts of it can be very useful in order to understand some traits of personality (and act upon them). But definitely not the whole. IMHO. YMMV. But! (because there is alwaus a “but”) But I must admit that very organised people and very process-oriented people are great assets in a team. And I want to thank the very organised people I had the opportunity to work with recently for their relentless efforts to make our group papers a success. We all have strong and weak points. One of the strength very organised people bring is that they force the group to start to work early on the project, to have a clearly defined plan (even for a few pages or slides) and to stick to it. More “creative” people may find this annoying – but it works! So thanks for bringing this in the team!

A second category of people I want to thank are spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends. They first accepted we start this part-time MBA and they kept their anger quiet when they realised what meant “being absent 2 evenings a week (including Friday evening = no outings anymore) (and maybe more)”. They support us in case of doubts. For some they even support us financially (maybe not directly but 35k€ for an MBA is 35k€ you cannot spend on clothes, travels, outings, dinners, hi-tech gadgets, etc.). But they will anyway greet us with a smile when we come back after a whole evening (and part of the night) in class. And they also realise that if we started this MBA, it’s not to play the housewife/househusband after – with a fake smile they hint you they understood it will continue later. It may seems we are too preoccupied to notice but we are very well aware of all the sacrifices you are also doing and we thank you for your support and attention!

Robert Tudor now in the FTMBA blogosphere

I may be a bit blinkered on this but I really think a business school should live with the tools currently available. By 2020 who knows if you could survive with just a static website. So I am always delighted to read that new people are taking the challenge of maintaining a blog when they start a MBA.

This time, let me highlight Robert Tudor’s blog at http://on-mba.robert-tudor.com/. Robert is a Romanian FTMBA student in our beloved Vlerick Business School. On his blog you’ll be able to follow his first steps in Leuven, trying to cope with the Belgian culture and way of doing things. Very few post yet on courses, their content and his feelings about professors, etc. But one about the start of the new academic year and one about the party that accompanied it. Good luck, Robert!

P.S. you can also follow Robert on Twitter, obviously!