ESSCA Spring Program

I’m having some free time here so I decided to write something about the program we’re attending. ESSCA has its primary campus in Angers, France, and 2 side campuses in Budapest and here in Shanghai. This Shanghai campus was founded in 2007 so it’s still pretty new and quite small. The participant amount has increased annually and this year we are in total 45 students all around the world. The most part is still coming from France but the share of international students has been increasing from year to year. From these 45 students I think 25 are coming from France, all from Angers or Paris, so many of them did know each other already before coming here. From us international students me and Ville are from Finland and then there are 3 Swedish, 3 German, 2 British, 2 Canadian, 1 Mexican, 1 Guatemalan, 5 Filipinos, 1 Australian and 3 Moroccan. So it’s quite an international group which is awesome. 

This program focuses on marketing in Asia and especially in business-to-consumer (B2C) environment. In Finland my major is focusing more on B2B-marketing so it’s a nice new aspect for me. Before coming here we thought we would have also some courses focusing on supply chain but apparently here aren’t any of them.  But I’m not complaining. We are also having a Chinese course. I did back in Finland the Chinese 1 course already so hopefully after this semester I’m able to communicate some simple conversations in Chinese :) 

Normally, our school days start at 9.30am with a 3-hour lecture, after that we have a on hour lunch break and the day ends with another 3-hour lecture. Thus, we don’t have two lectures each day, depending on the courses we’ve selected. We were told to have quite many company visits too, which I’m looking forward to. We already visited the Shanghai Volkswagen (SVW) factory in the first week. The factory is located just outside Shanghai’s centrum in the automobile district. The factory was huge and it’s manufacturing VW-cars for the whole Asia being the biggest car manufacturing plant in Asia. It was very interesting to see the compound lines working and in what stages the car production in done. Hopefully we have a lot of company visits in the coming months!