29-07-2013

Tuesday morning we had classes again. This time we had half an hour to prepare a presentation about the headhunting industry. My group did a SWOT analysis on the executive search industry. I personally found it really interesting to do this analysis. I had already done some SWOT analyses, but these were always about one company. To apply the SWOT to an entire industry was challenging, but we managed to do it and I think we gave a decent presentation.

In the afternoon my group worked on the presentation we had to give on Wednesday. We had to analyse a headhunting firm called Egon Zehnder. After dinner it was time for movie night. We had a few movie options and decided to go with ‘page 8’. Some parts of this movie were set in Cambridge, which was a nice touch.

30-07-2014

On Wednesday I got up early to get together with my group and fine-tune our presentation. We were the first group to present, which I was really happy about because I wanted to be done as soon as possible. Luckily our presentation went fairly well. In the afternoon we went to Clare’s College. This is the college where one of the RA’s studies, and she showed us the college gardens. The gardens were beautiful. There were countless different flowers and part of the garden borders on the river Cam. After we walked through the garden we sat down near the water, had a chat and watched the punters pass by. The whole atmosphere in the gardens was amazing and we could have stayed there the entire day.

After dinner we went to the park and had some drinks there, which was really nice. Afterwards we went clubbing so you could say this was a successful evening.

31-07-2014

Yesterday was another London day, which I was really excited about. We started the day at IMO, where we met our friends from Oxford. IMO stands for international maritime organisation and is an organisation of the United Nations that manages everything that has to do with transport over water. It was really interesting to see how they handle important subjects like piracy and maintaining clean oceans. It was also really impressive to be visiting the room where they have the meetings and we took some cool group pictures in there.

We then went to have lunch at a burger place and because we had some more free time we went to Oxford Street. Afterwards it was time to go to BBC. I was really looking forward to going to the BBC, and it did not disappoint. We were first taken to the newsroom, the room where the people are collecting news from all over the world. We looked down on this huge room where everyone was doing research, making phone calls and discussing with each other and it was really impressive. Fun fact, this is also the room you see on the background when you’re watching BBC news.

Then we went and did some other things like presenting the news and weather forecast and enact a radio play, which was a lot of fun! Besides that we visited a few different BBC buildings.

After the tour we said goodbye to the people going back to Oxford. I think this was literally the fifth time we said goodbye to them, and I’m going to miss them all so much. We then got on the coach and returned to Cambridge. We were back just in time for dinner, which was great because we they were having hotdogs. After dinner we hung out in the dining hall with some drinks. We also played some games, which was a lot of fun. Altogether it was an amazing day, and to be honest it might have been the best day I have had here! Love, Iris