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!) :-)

Chinese New Year 2012: January 23

Like in many Asian countries, the Lunar New Year in China will be on January 23, 2012 (in our Gregorian calendar). The Chinese New Year (aka the “Spring Festival” or 春节) is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. According to the Chinese calendar, this year is the year of the water dragon (龙). I thought it would have been interesting to know for the lucky ones who are going to China this year :)

There are usually many celebrations with many customs and traditions. I guess there will be also celebrations in Belgium but as it’s not very easy to find them (except maybe at your local Sino-Vietnamese restaurant), here are three activities found for you:

• Jan. 21 at Salle Cadol, Brussels: Tết Nguyên Đán (Vietnamese New Year)
• Jan. 23 at Viage Casino, Brussels: Chinese New Year
• Jan. 28 at Théâtre Marni, Brussels: Asian New Year (Vietnamese Tết, read their newsletter on page 12)
• Jan. 28: Maasmechelen Village celebrates the Chinese New Year (week 19-31 in fact, see details in link)
• Jan. 29 at Salle de l’Orangerie, Brussels: Tết Nguyên Đán (Vietnamese New Year)
• Feb. 9 in Leuven: Chinese New Year Gala organised by the Confucius Institute at Group T (more info)
• Feb. 12 at Athénée Royal d’Etterbeek, Brussels: Tết Nguyên Đán (Vietnamese New Year)

If you know any other celebrations, feel free to post them in comments below!

Photo credit: Smiling dragon in the Forbidden City, Huế, Vietnam (from my photos on Flickr, licence CC-by-sa)
Edited on Jan. 10 to add Maasmechelen Village celebrations. Edited on Jan. 20 to add the three celebrations from belvietnam.

Happy New Year 2012!

I wish you a very Happy New Year 2012. May you succeed in everything you start (and especially your MBA at Vlerick!).

If I look back on this year blogging about my PTMBA at Vlerick, there are nice things to see …

For instance, here are the top 5 posts (exception made of the home page and the about page):

1. An Overview of the Euro Crisis (NYT), a small post linking to a visualization of the Euro crisis in the New York Times
2. Vlerick MBA 2011 planet, a post about what are the other students blogging around ; I’m still wondering why so few students are blogging about their experience at Vlerick. When you look at other schools, many students are blogging every year. Although Vlerick has a blogging platform it is currently not used by any MBA students (only Masters students ; maybe it will change with the new website) (*). Gleana Albritton used to blog as a FT MBA student at Vlerick in the FT blog area (wow!). Are studies too time consuming in Vlerick? Or life in Leuven not interesting enough? Is it not “Belgian” to blog? Almost everyone is on Twitter ; maybe blogs are so passé?
3. Don’t shoot the red monkey, a post about Jef Staes‘ guest lecture
4. Applied microeconomics, a small joke about graphs in microeconomics
5. 1st MBA exam: done!, a post about my 1st exam taken at Vlerick

Of course, older posts have a slight advantage. One day I should maybe compute the exact hits per day each post received. One day, maybe.

If one looks at search terms for this year leading to this blog this year, here is the top 5 search terms (exception made of “jep does vlerick” which is quite obvious):

1. euro crisis
2. vlerick admission test
3. movie maker logo
4. microeconomics
5. vlerick mba

Here again, older keywoards may have a slight advantage. I am amazed at the number of people visiting the blog regarding the admission test ; maybe because there isn’t much other information about that on the web.

Btw, Vlerick is also wishing you a happy 2012 :)

See you next year!

(*) Previous year full time MBA students used to officially blog from here but it seems that it is not used this academic year (and it is not linked anymore from the official Vlerick blogging platform). To reiterate my disappointment (as previously mentioned), part-time MBA students seem to be considered as less important: there is no part-time blogging platform (I tried http://ptmbablog.vlerick.com/). However, the number of PTMBA students are 2 – 3 times the number of FTMBA students, their fees are approximately the same and they stay longer. But I didn’t start this post to rant about that. Happy New Year to everyone! :)