Sleeping Juergen

I thought I'd share this with you...

Some of my friends over here have a lot of fun taking pictures of me sleeping (preferably at the business school and sometimes even during lectures). They actually have a folder on their laptops dedicated just to pictures of me sleeping...here are some of them.
As you can see I work so hard in Oxford that I hardly get any sleep and have to take a nap during every break. (Or is it because of all the parties? mmmmhhh????)

Trip to London

Yesterday I went to London to meet my friend Joanna..she offered to give me a special tour of London.

It was awesome...we had a great time. As she is a history student in Oxford and has lived in London all her life, she knows quite a lot of stuff about London. She showed me all the really cool places (not the standard stuff)...and we had excellent food.
We went to Soho, Downing Street, the OXO tower and tons of other places. Surprisingly, the city reminds me a lot of Frankfurt...I think I could live here for a couple of years.


Here is the amazing view from the OXO tower at night.

Post Exams BBQ

since MBAs can never party enough, we got up "early" (1 PM) yesterday to head over to Andrew McInerney's house to have a BBQ in the cold...and believe me, it was soooo cold (not North Dakota cold, but still very cold).

The food (there was everything: american dessert, bulgarian salad, israeli meatballs, etc.) was great and once everybody was fed, the whole thing of course turned into a party...even Andrew's dog enjoyed itself.

Hilary - Mission Accomplished?

EXAMS ARE OVER!!! YYEEEEHHHAAAA

Last day of exams...6 in one week! I think/hope I passed all of them. Surprisingly, the "easy" ones were the ones I thought would be the toughest.

Right after the last exam we went to the Turf Tavern...Oxford tradition for post-exam drinks.

As you can probably imagine the party later that night was AWESOME. First we treated us with a nice steak at the Brown's restaurant and then we went to Maxwell's, which was almost entirely packed with MBAs...WOW!!!

First day of exams...

Today was the first day of exams for Hilary term.

Financial Management was way harder than expected and I only managed to answer 8 out of 10 questions. But everyone else that I have talked to so far have answered only 6 or 7, so I should be fine.
IBGG was OK...just use the buzzwords and everything is fine ;o)
But the best thing was that we take our exams in the "examination schools". One of those really really old buildings where people have taken exams for hundreds of years...the thought of that is just amazing.

Just came home from the pub...went there with Diliana, Daniel and Barry for post-exam drinks and food. Now I'm back to the books...tomorrow's exam is Marketing.

As you can see on the picks, Oxford students have this weird tradition of letting facial hair grow during exams week. Some MBA students almost make a competition out of this as you can see.

Freaking out!!!

I'm about to freak out...

I just realized that I started studying way too late!
There is no way that I'll be able to cram all the stuff for next week's exams into my head - unless I chain myself to my desk and don't sleep until monday (the value of sleep is overrated anyways).

Monday - Financial Management (easy), IBGG (I'll just bullshit my way around this subject, I should be fine)
Tuesday - Marketing (another blablabla subject, no problem here)
Wednesday - Finance (doable if I had more time), Operations Management (I look at last year's exam and my notes and I have no clue what this is about- DAMN!!!)
Friday - Macroeconomics (haven't even looked at it, but it scares the hell out of me)

We'll see...this term I'll have to aim for the simple "Pass" instead of going for the "distinction"!

What am I doing here, wasting time writing my blog?! I better get back to work!

The beautiful wheather doesn't help either...everybody is outside, except the poor MBA students.

Cologne Stopover

On our way back to Oxford we stopped in Cologne for a couple of hours and met Nora (friend & former co-worker) and her friend Nadja. They showed us around a little bit, answered questions about Cologne (although one still remains open: what are those blue pipes???) and we went to the Rhine, the Cologne cathedral and had some Koelsch beer and food at the Frueh. The food was good, the weather was great and I got to hang out with to beautiful ladies...what more could you wish for?!
















I LOVE this picture...guess why ;o)

After a 3hour delay we finally left Cologne airport. Due to the delay we missed our bus in London and had to wait forever for the next one. Now I'm finally back in Oxford and am about to fall dead asleep.

Case Competition Part II

To make things short: We did not win! The jury loved our analysis, but our presentation was a desaster. Maybe we should have stayed in on Friday night just like all the other teams to practice the presentation instead of going out...at least we had fun. I'm especially satisfied, since I built the financial model for our analysis and a senior manager from Goldman Sachs pointed out that only two groups built good financial models, one was ours!
The winner was a team with a girl from a university in Norway, one from Warsaw Business School, one from a university in Milan and a guy from Spain...so it was either female power or their short skirts ;o)

Saturday afternoon was fun as well. We had an outdoor event which involved climbing trees, jumping from platforms, walking over rope bridges and sliding down from a tree while hanging on a cable...cool stuff!









Afterwards, we had a nice dinner in Koblenz where they announced the winners and went to a club. The party at the club was great, we had a good time celebrating the winning team.

Case Competition Part I

At 2 in the morning, Kislaya, Barry and I left Oxford for a case study competition in Vallendar (close to Koblenz), Germany.
We spent about 4 hrs waiting at London Gatwick Airport consuming tons of coffee to keep us awake...what a waste of time!









We arrived in Vallendar just in time for lunch, so I took my two team members to a typical German Restaurant, where we had Schnitzel, Schweinebraten and German beer.
Before the case event started, John our 4th team member joined us (he took the train through France and Belgium). Here we are:









The other teams came mainly from German universities, but some others were present as well.
Today, at 9 in the morning, we finally got the case study...the main question was: Should Metro Group expand into the Baltic states?
After going out last night and showing my other team members some German bars, the first hour of work was not easy as you can imagine. But by 10:30 and some breakfast finally everyone was fully awake and up to 100% power again. The room in which we work looks like a mess...we work REALLY hard!!!
We just decided to make up for the lost time by having a working lunch, so I guess we will just grab a Doner Kebap.

Summer Project secured!!!

Good news!!!
I've secured a summer project...with the Australian Investmentbank Macquarie.
I will work with them in London for 9 weeks.
My task will be to make an industry analysis of a business sector (sorry, can't tell you which one) in Germany to identify possible takeover targets.
Unfortunately the business school doesn't accept individual projects (we're supposed to do them in groups) and Macquarie wanted to have only me, so it looks like I will have t write a theses...NO! This is the one thing I did NOT want to do again.
And to make things even worse, it looks like I'll have to write it during the next term while taking 6 courses...oh my god!

Today is the Indian holiday "HOLI"! Interesting stuff! People throw color and paint at each other and it gets pretty messy...but it's raining in Oxford, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to see any of that here or even participate (I would love to!).
Here is a little bit of background reading and a video a friend sent to me...this is what they do on HOLI...looks like fun!

http://www.holifestival.org/

Peace in the Middle East? NO!

I think I already told you before, that every week on Friday (right before Happy Hour) one nation of the MBA class gives a 30 min presentation on "How to do Business in..."; it is usually a little bit about the country, the political system, major industries, but most importantly about business culture (dress codes, small talk, talk business first or leisure first, etc.)
So far we have had presentations from:
-India
-USA
-Israel

Today the presentation was about Israel...really interesting stuff! Sascha (the guy from Israel) talked very openly about the stuff that is going on there and he encouraged us to ask whatever we wanted to know. So, one guy asked whether he thinks that there will ever be peace between Israel and the other middle eastern countries - Sascha looked at him with a stone-cold face and said "NO, not during my lifetime and not during the lifetime of my kids!" The whole room was filled with silence for a couple of seconds...
WOW what a statement!!! This quite struck me...especially, because Sascha is usually an extremely optimistic guy.


Yesterday I also had dinner with some people from Shell. It was quite interesting, their top man was the Head of Controlling for Shell Worldwide...a really big shot!
I was seated between two Geologists, which made it an interesting evening for me. Of course in the end came the usual recruitment talk:
-what do you want to do after your MBA?
-what do you think about Shell?
-would you consider working for Shell?
-blablabla...networking
I will definitely keep in touch with those guys...Shell is an interesting company and they were really excited about my background in energy.

Jamming away!

For this weeks Happy Hour, Ean organized some guitars and microphones...open mic night! Anybody who wanted to give it a shot could just grab a guitar and start jamming or singing. It was great, we had some good laughs!

Here are some pics...enjoy!