Life on exchange at IE Business School

Me in Spain isn’t all just fun times; I AM here for school after all! I am studying at Instituto de Empresa (loosely translated as “Business Institute”). According to the rankings in Financial Times, Business Week, etc. it is one of the best MBA schools in the world so I was pretty excited for the opportunity to be in it.

The student body here is similar to that of our exchange group in that it is a very, very diverse group of people. Like with the exchange group, no one region of the world dominates the student population. In fact, even though this is a school in Madrid, maybe only like 10% of the class is actually spanish!

Something else I found pretty interesting was the IE curriculum. It is almost the exact same as ours at Rotman! In 1^st year they learned basically the same stuff we did, were subjected to the same ridiculous quantity of work, etc. I guess that is a testament to both IE and Rotman’s calibre of MBA schools (although why Rotman is ranked so differently than IE in global MBA rankings is beyond me…).

Also, IE’s careers/networking portal is the exact same tool that we use in Rotman. Good MBA schools clearly think alike…

At Rotman our class schedule ran like clockwork in that the class schedule was the same every week for the length of the quarter (as you may remember from my earlier posts, the Rotman first year was split into quarters, not semesters). At IE, the class schedule is super random. I might have a specific class 3 days in a row and then not again for like a week. Or one day I might have a class for 3 hours and then the next day, only for 1.5. It was a bit weird but once I got my schedule on my iphone, I could follow what was going to be happening when so I am pretty fine with it now. (especially because it also results in me having long weekends several times a month!).

Finally, it’s pretty cool to be learning from the profs I have. The profs at IE are obviously experts in their fields as would be expected in any solid MBA program but my profs this term teach but also work in the fields they teach. In fact, my Emerging Media class is taught by a guy who manages and marketing agency and created one of the most successful iphone apps ever (here: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2010/07/02/ikea-takes-its-product-catalog-mobile-with-augmented-reality-app).

So that life here at IE!