Yes, not one field trip ... but three ... back to back!
As I've mentioned before Wednesdays are days in which there are no classes in order to plan field study trips with our classes. It is a great break in the middle of the week and typically I am free from field studies and just spend the day (sleeping in,) doing school work and meeting with group members. This week was a different story. Three of my classes planned field studies and you may be thinking, "too bad you could only fit in two at the most" ... but no, they were particularly clever and scheduled them to start one right after the other. Really impressive...
So sleeping in was out of the question but I was really glad to have made it to my early morning Business Strategy trip to the Microsoft Development campus in Copenhagen. We had a great presentation (they kept the caffeine flowing) and had a really nice walk around their beautifully green campus. There were lots of employees outside eating their lunches and enjoying the sunshine while we toured the campus and I put up a few pictures to show how beautiful the area was.
Oh, and the name badges that they passed out to us! Wow, we're there for two hours and they've made these up for us. They also had a lot of security features around the premises which our guide explained to us during the tour. Mostly because it is a development facility and the amount of money these development projects are worth are just astronomical. Unfortunately they weren't in need of any product testers, but I took note of some possible opportunities : )
My second field study was sort of a "pretend" field study ... and by that I mean that our professor kept calling it a field study when really it was an excuse to find time to give more of our class presentations for my China class. With only one more class left (!!) we had to find time to have the rest of the class give our presentations so our professor decided our "field study" would be to spend a few hours giving presentations and then a nice trip to a nearby park. Really the field study part started when the ice cream came out!
We sat around with the whole group of US and Chinese students and enjoyed chatting about our summer plans as well as playing a few group games. The majority of the Chinese students are staying in Europe after the program in order to have more time to travel (considering they've come this far) before heading home. In contrast, nearly all the US students will be home and working in just a few weeks time. Maybe we all just spent a lot more money and need to make it back sooner ... definitely true in my case!!
This picture is not of my classmates but rather of the whole mass of Danes who come to soak up the sun. Maybe it is some of those people still on strike!
To top off the day I had a trip back to the Carlsberg brewery. It was my second time but this time we had the privilege of going with our Doing Business in the EU professor Niels who is part of the Danish association of Breweries and has been working with Carlsberg for ... ever? The funny thing is that nearly every theory, strategy, mechanism ... etc. that we discuss in our class is related back to Carlsberg. The examples always exemplify the point and considering Carlsberg is one of the biggest companies in Denmark it makes sense to learn a great deal about them, it just provokes a few laughs when we consider how much we have learned about this giant brewery. So, it was quite fitting that Niels would take us to Carlsberg.
The best part was that we had no tour guide. Niels had a set of keys and (because he apparently owns the place) served as the guide on our "not for tourists" trip to Carlsberg. We were able to go to the Carlsberg family mansion that hosts a scientist (currently a Russian nuclear physicist) for four years in order to facilitate advances in science (did I mention it comes with an endless supply of beer?). This was pretty neat as we were also able to check out the family garden which has just recently been opened to employees. We also got a look into the historic brewing facilities and of course topped the whole trip off with a few rounds at the brewhouse bar. My friends Sara, Anit, Tim and I asked lots of questions and I was particularly interested because in my Marketing class we are working on a project for the specialty beer Jacobsen which is a subsidiary (of sorts) of Carlsberg.
The Budweiser Clydesdale horses have nothing on these!! How great, right??
Production as seen from the brewhouse bar.
The man. The myth. The legend.
Niels Hald ... see video
