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!

First feelings of Shanghai

We’ve been in Shanghai now for just over 3 days and a lot has happened so far.. We arrived on Wednesday evening and Christophe came to the airport to pick us up. He’s a French guy working at ESSCA and organizing several things here. After the very long 14-hour flight we both were extremely tired as we didn’t get any sleep on the plane. Luckily there were personal entertainment sets for each passenger so we could watch some movies during the flight. On Thursday we had scheduled a meeting with Linda who has organized quite many apartment showings with us and 9 other students. We started at 1pm and came back to the hotel at 10pm so the day was quite long but we had the chance to see 18 apartments to choose our favorites. We picked 3 2-bedroom apts. Our number one choice didn’t go that good because as Linda called the owner that two boys would like to rent it, the owner just said ‘no boys’ and the conversation was over :) The second call went much better and we agreed on a meeting for the next afternoon. The owners couldn’t speak any English so Linda helped us a lot again and we ended up making a lease contract on a almost 100m² flat in 18^th floor with a pretty nice view. I’ll post some pictures of the flat later..

On Saturday me and Ville had to visit the local police station and the household registration authorities. There was the first Chinese person so far who could actually speak English! Luckily she wasn’t the only English speaking person as later that day we also went to the China Mobile store to get us Chinese numbers. The salesman there was speaking surprisingly good English and was all in all very helpful. Because we didn’t have any blankets, pillows or sheets in our apt, we had to take a taxi to IKEA in the evening to buy those.

We haven’t had the chance to see that much of Shanghai yet, but we’ve liked it a lot so far from what we’ve seen. There are many very tall and new buildings everywhere. Yesterday we shortly visited the biggest shopping street called Nanjing road and it is full of western stores. It can be seen here really well that especially the younger population wants to live like in the western world.. The biggest difference though is that everybody pays everything with cash. I haven’t seen any bankcards yet. For example we had to pay the deposit for our apt in cash. As the biggest bill is 100yuan (around 12€) and the deposit is several thousands, the stack of the bills was quite big :) The traffic is also extreme compared to Finland for example. As a pedestrian you have to watch out the whole time for cars and mopeds because the people here don’t really care if there’s a red light or not. Especially the scooters and mopeds drive whenever and wherever they want and don’t look for pedestrians crossing the street. The car drivers aren’t much better. Sometimes in the taxi it feels a bit scary as there are cars and mopeds coming from everywhere and many close situation happen here all the time. But besides that, I really like the taxi. The first 3 kilometers cost 14yuan (under 2€) and neither is it expensive after that. Yesterday as we came back to our apt from IKEA which was about 16 kilometers, it did cost about 5€.