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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 »

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!

Here’s the reason why I could neither go with the InCuSo to Cork, nor to Kilkenny:

CAs. Lots of CAs. So I spent most of my time in my room writing. Grr! I left the realms of eustress far behind, but I have to admit that there were some good hours, too.

Maria, Daniel’s girlfriend visited him and we celebrated her 25th birthday on Thursday with a yummy chili con carne and Immanuel, Anna and Georg came to our house.
On Friday, Chris and I played some games of pool (even worse than the last time) and met Dr. Strangelove, Ismael and the Spanish girls at Tramway Court. In their apartment, we had a few drinks (Calimucho, börks) and played a funny Spanish party game, which involved a hooker, a killer, the killer’s colleague and a policemen before it got weird, because people started dancing and singing and Chris faked a striptease. No, it was not what you know probably think it was…
Yesterday, we met Tom and Natalie, who took the plane from Copenhagen again, and went to the cinema, where we watched Changeling, the new movie directed by Clint Eastwood. Afterwards, Chris and I went to his flat where we joined Alejandro and his girlfriend Jane (from Northern Ireland) as well as Carmen and her boyfriend Pedro (from Spain), who chilled in the living room. Jeez, Daniel was damn right when he referred to these days as „the couple days“!

Time is flying! This week will most certainly be very intensive as I not only have to prepare myself for the tests in Software Development and Innovation & Entrepreneurship, but also have to meet with my HRM group to compile a presentation on our project, practise it and finalise the project in corporate social responsibility, which became a bit chaotic due to strange requirements by a very ignorant person (not one my group members). On Friday, I’ll be through with all my CAs for this semester.

Next weekend there’ll be a day trip with the InCuSo, then my friend Flo (a.k.a. Idefix) will come over from Germany for some days, the day he leaves I’ll probably go to Galway with the InCuSo, on the 15th there’ll be a Christmas party and shortly thereafter I’ll be sitting in a RyanAir plane that is heading for Northern Germany.
In a blink of an eye my first semester at the ITT Dublin will be over. Wow!

I’d really like to take some more time to contemplate the last days as well as the coming ones and what this means for me, but I guess I should better go back to work.
In case you already forgot how I look like, because I was sitting in my cave all the time, here’s a recent (decent?) photo:

Today, we had to hand in our project in Human Resource Management, which had consumed the whole last week. I had to get up early, because I still had to go to reprographics centre in order to print it. This wasn’t too easy, because I spent all Sunday reading the MOB book to be prepared for today’s multiple choice test and stayed up late. And then there was another test in Economics.

It all went well: we were able to hand-in our HRM paper on time. Although I had only done two or three example exercises on Saturday, Economics wasn’t hard for me. Very logical stuff, I guess I’ll get about ninety percent. The MOB test was okay, too. Fifteen multiple choice questions and sixty minutes time. After about fifteen minutes I handed in my solutions and went with Immanuel to the Square where we rewarded ourselves for all the hard work with a nice Subway sandwich. Yummi! And it wasn’t even expensive, because I had some vouchers: two six inch subs and a medium Sprite for about 6,70 is a good price. Moreover, it’s tastier (and probably even healthier) than everything you can get in the ITT.
Talking about nutrition in the college: I should probably cut down my Starbuck’s cappucino consumption („A coffee a day keeps the detox away“). I currently spend way too much money in the mezz café.

So that’s three CAs, what about the half one? Tonight, I am going to meet Georg. I promised him to help him with his C++ project for his studies in Engineering. Maybe I should deny my original field of studies and tell everybody that I study Management in future… No, just kidding!

Yesterday, we had a closed-book CA in the Software Development class. The task was to implement some basic I/O and functions that did some basic calculation with arrays of doubles. Three of the functions were very similar and after half an hour I was basically done – 90 minutes before we had to hand in our source code.

The other seemed to be still working. I read the instructions and specifications on the sheet again. And again. No, everything done. I did not dare to leave that early – a dilemma. Some minutes, which I spent with code clean-up, slight refactoring, documentation, later, I still seemed to be the only one, who was finished. Okay, let’s test, monkey-test. Still about 45 minutes to kill. Hm, boring. I uploaded my work on moodle and left.

Later, I found out that Stefan and Lukas/Klaus had a similar problem. Each of them was finished and did not want to be the only one, who leaves reeeally early, as well. Wasted time. Next time we’ll probably agree on some secret code noise: Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »