June 21-22

The past couple of days have been quite strenuous. With our Oxfam project and Nielsen’s project due right around the corner, everyone has been working pretty intensely to get them perfect. On Monday, the “Oxfam Headquarters Committee” made a visit to Oxfam’s HQ’s (we are very creative when it came to naming our committees). The visit was extremely beneficial and clarified our needed-to-know questions. We wished we could have planned the meeting a few days earlier so that we would have had a little more time to analyze the answers and how it related to our ideas. However, one thing I found out about projects are that they don’t always flow in the most ideal ways. Also keep in mind that through these different experiences, if you attend a study abroad program you will learn that there is a significant difference in consulting with a company and the group projects we receive at ACU. The guidance we receive with a group is much more helpful on what specifically you need to accomplish, however, your group has to all agree on a certain goal. This project by far is the most difficult yet rewarding project I have faced so far in my college career.

Apart from working together, the feel of this international business class is much different than our marketing class. From a classroom standpoint, we gather in our own groups, on our own time, and get done what we feel is needed most. Within our groups we create the different ideas and guide ourselves. We've learned, through various interviews, how to distinguish what Headquarters has asked of us, how to determine if this is an actual problem, how to analyze data we collect to create an answer to their problem, how to research a wide variety of solutions that will benefit the company, and then finally how to narrow down the best solution and present it. Again, this has been the most challenging project I have ever encountered, but has given me amazing insight into what it is like to be part of a group of individuals that work together as real consultants to create solutions that will benefit a company. Now our trip is coming to an end, but we get to kick it off with a bang by getting to visit Lloyd’s of London tomorrow, which is one of the biggest reinsurance companies in the world, where we get to learn about having Christian ethics in the business world.