One highlight has been the planning of the trip of my Dad and my aunt Beth and uncle Jim in the first week in December. They will arrive two days after my last class and we'll do the fun things in Monterrey and then we'll fly back to Nebraska on December 9th. I would be happy to host anyone else out there who wants to visit Monterrey. CJ and I are flying here the first week of January, but my classes don't start until March 1st, so I have all of that time to catch up on Rotary, meetings, traveling, and helping CJ get acclimated to Monterrey, and hosting YOU!
Speaking of Rotary, I attended a very interesting meeting at a beautiful building on a mountain overlooking the city, called Club Industrial. From this building you can see Monterrey stretching to the right and San Pedro and it's tall buildings to the left. The Rotary group was an extremely nice group of all women. I had a fun time chatting and I even got to give a little presentation about myself, Nebraska, and my time here, (they couldn't believe my town has only 1 stoplight). Rotary meetings are a great way to work on Spanish as we spend the entire time communicating and having fun, and then we eat!
On Tuesday, we had our final class of consulting. In this class a group of my classmates and I worked with a Pharmacy here in Monterrey that wanted to be able to franchise their business and expand, while maintaining some control over the new franchises. It was very interesting meeting with the daughter of the owner and discussing the options. We got to travel to the Farmacias and it was quite the cultural experience. Doctors consults cost 30 pesos, or less than 3 dollars, what do you think about that Dad? We did a lot of research and work, and gave a nice presentation.
Our marketing class has been underwhelming (with a teacher that will do anything to not teach about marketing), but we did have two cool projects. Markstrat is an online business simulation that we have to segment, target, and position products that we design and modify over 10 decisions. It is fun to compete against the other students in the program, but this simulation has a lot of information but no definitive product, all we know is that it is electronics, but we have no idea if bigger is better or worse for example.
Another cool project was from Nokia. It was a mix of 3 different classes so we had 2 guys from Mexico, one boy from Finland, and a girl from Germany. It was interesting gaining the perspectives from the other people in the group and putting together a Marketing plan with a message, copy and images for a Nokia product for a segment that we chose.
One theme from this semester has been presentations. I don't know if the teachers are told that the students must give a lot of presentations or if they don't want to give lectures for 4 hours, but one week, I had 3 presentations in 2 days. (And my brain was dead after that) But seriously, it is useful to practice giving presentations in Spanish. I did a really good job with one group presentation about decision making. After I finished, the teacher stopped everything and asked the class, "How many of you could go to a University in the United States, and give a presentation in English with 98 or 99 percent clarity like that?" I was like whoa, what a nice compliment.
So as hard as it is sometimes, I know my Spanish is improving and I feel like I am on my way toward reaching my goal of being perfectly fluent by the end of the program in July 2010. I miss lots of things from home, CJ, family, friends, and food, and I'm looking forward to coming home for Christmas. I'll be home from December 9th to the first week in January.
Thanks for reading!
