Strategy and Business Systems
Student comments
Below are comments made by a current student, Deike Diers, who is due to graduate this summer.
My time in the EBP has been a great experience and it helped me a lot in preparing for working life. In addition to improving business knowledge and language skills, you benefit from living in a different country for one and a half years and studying with different nationalities. You are able to adapt to unknown situations more easily and appreciate the different ways of living.
The integrated placements help you further to put your theoretical knowledge into practice. Most students in the EBP are very ambitious and their accomplishments motivate you to try something different or to apply for jobs you might have not dared to or have not thought of before.
Fellow students did their work experience amongst others at BMW, Lufthansa, Daimler, L’Oréal, KPMG and Porsche. I did my last placement at JP Morgan in their London office, which was an awesome experience in itself. The EBP network does not get you placements right away, but it does help you to prepare for interviews and gives you advice.
It was definitely the right decision to take the challenge and go for a different business programme!
Below are comments made by a former student, Jan Binke, in relation to the course. Jan was enrolled on the UK-Germany link and graduated in July 2006.
When I decided to enrol on the European Business Programme back in 2002, I did have some concerns. Not about the quality of the program - I had learned that the EBP had proven itself as one of the most recognised international business programs throughout its participating countries.
- But who will be my fellow students?
- Will I be able to handle the work load?
- And will it be difficult to change locations during the programme?
In the course of the next few weeks it turned out that almost all of us had the same concerns. And since our concerns were so similar, we found out that we had a lot of similarities. Those similarities proved to be very helpful in succeeding on the EBP.
We all liked to travel, to meet new people and most importantly to get to know different cultures and mentalities and learn from them. And those qualities helped us to overcome our concerns. We were all in the same situation and soon grew to be friends and members of the “EBP family”.
The EBP and its 25 years of experience with partners at excellent universities in France, Spain, the UK and Germany gives every student a unique opportunity to learn the tools of international business. This program does even more - it teaches something, which is not written in a text book: cultural competencies, diversity and the ability to become fluent in a second or third language.
Learning together in a different culture with students from different backgrounds is a great experience, which gives one a head start in the world of international business.
The EBP offers its students more then the average university course. The program takes four years, which breaks down to eight semesters. Those eight semesters are divided into three semesters in two of the participating EBP countries. Also there are two semesters of international internships. Those internships teach you to apply theory into practice and help to make sense of how business works. Every student can choose their country and company for the internship, whether it is North or South America, Europe or even Asia. Students can explore different cultures, while working and living there. And this concept works!
The EBP gives you a general understanding of the business environment, teaching and focusing on subjects like: Human Resource Management, Finance and Control, Marketing and European Studies. Once you graduate, you will receive two degrees from two different universities of two different countries. Those degrees will allow you to work in different countries with an extended business knowledge which gives you a huge advantage over other graduates from regular business degrees.
The EBP was one of the best choices I ever made and it gave me over the past four years the wonderful experiences of traveling, learning, working on three continents and making new friends scattered around the globe.
Jan Binke Class of 2006