Diskurswelt.de

After the presentations I met Manon and Lena, because we wanted to finish our CA in Corporate Social Responsibility. While the girls added content to the conclusion and recommendations, I built the document in LaTeX, which was not too easy, because Manon used a rather complex multi-row and multi-column table. I stayed up until about four o’clock and got up pretty early in order to correct some mistakes, reword some awkward sounding lines and polish the layout. I think it was worth it. The result looks great!

On Friday at half past eleven we went to the reprographics centre to print our 33 (!) pages project on the CSR approaches of five major companies in the Irish economy and get a binding. The monotonous sound of the printer was so nice; like music in our ears!

After handing in our project, we all went to Starbuck’s in Tallaght to get a big mug of cappucino and a sweet, tasty muffin. We deserved it! Now, I’m done with all my CAs for this semester. Finally, I’m free. Whopee!

Thursday’s presentation in HRM went well: although Viorica and Oleg, who started, were a bit nervous, they could make their points and had a very good answer for the lecturer’s question afterwards. Immanuel was very confident. Before, he was a bit afraid, because of his English, but I think he did a great job.

Then it was my turn. I had rehearsed my part, the recommendations, for the whole morning and was well prepared. Although I certainly did not reach the level that I had during rehearsal, I think I presented very clearly and fluently. Thanks to Immanuel, who changed the slides for me, I could move and was able to address our audience directly, which I did with reference to the presentations of Monday and Wednesday.

Our presentation had to take no less than ten and no more than twelve minutes. How can we avoid unnecessary deductions without agreeing on some silly signal? My idea, using the timer of my mobile phone in silent mode, worked out pretty well. After about ten minutes, the vibration in my pocket reminded me that I was allowed to stop talking, but still had some time left to finish properly.

We received a lot of positive feedback from our lecturer, whom I would describe as very demanding, as well as from our fellow students. I think we might even get an A. For a group of four non-native speakers that would be a great success.

Satisfied with our performance we sat down to listen to the other presentations. I really have to tell you about the last one. In thirteen years of school and two years of university I did not came across something that even came close, but let me start telling you the story from the beginning on. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

Wednesday’s CA in Software Development was rather easy (singly-linked list) and therefore went pretty well although I lacked some hours of sleep. In the evening we celebrated Klaus‘ 21st birthday with a few pints of delicious Bulmers in Captain Americas, Tallaght (good: they had student discounts and a pint was just 3€, bad: karaoke night, which means bad singers at a way to high volume).
It was nice, but I had to leave early, because of the presentation on Thursday. Here are some photos:

By the way: that night I met Colin, a nice and friendly guy from my HRM class, and confronted him with the rumours about his (ex-)membership in an Northern Irish boyband. Although he was a bit surprised, he did not deny it. Quite the contrary: he promised me to show me some of his „cheesy, commercial“ (his own words) music someday next week. Research using Google and YouTube was so far rather… shocking!?

Although the last week was as busy as expected, it turned out to offer quite a lot of fun, too.

On Monday, Immanuel and I handed in our CA in MOB. We were a bit surprised that we were the only ones. All the others said that the due date was Thursday. Nevertheless, as it was finished there was no need to keep it a day longer than necessary.

Tuesday’s CA in Innovation was pretty bad. Cash flow statements are not too hard, but adding up hundreds of decimal numbers is boring, tedious and error-prone. After two hours of hitting the buttons of my calculator like a maniac and writing down the results on a sheet of paper, my fingers and my neck hurt like hell. This is exactly the reason why people use computers and spreadsheet software nowadays. I still cannot understand the purpose of that CA.
After these wasted two hours Immanuel and I met Oleg and Viorica in front of the campus. We picked up their son from the after-school and went to their flat near St. James‘ Gate.

There, we had Lasagne and a glass of red vine before we sat down to work on our presentation for Thursday’s HRM class. Everybody added his or her slides to the pretty slick master file that I had prepared based on the ITT’s colors. Some fine-tuning and editing as well as two ad-hoc rehearsals later we were done, but our hosts did let us go before we had emptied several glasses of whiskey.

Tuesday evening was a perfect mix of business with pleasure. Oleg, Viorica, thank you very much for your hospitality. I had a great time at your place!

Chris and I found this can in our kitchen: